Social Networking Comes to the Art World

Video art, wood sculpture, found-item sculpture, photography, oil on canvas…. No, you're not in the Museum of Modern Art, but you're close: the Arthur M. Bergman Gallery in New York has opened its latest exhibit: "Found on Facebook."

Curator and creator of "Found on Facebook" Charles McGill has spent the past three months scouting for and collecting pieces for the exhibition.

"This idea came to me while I was surfing Facebook," McGill said. "I've always enjoyed looking through the art pages of friends, and friends of friends, who post their work. No one has done a show with this theme before, where the pieces reflect our connection through social networking."

McGill is an artist himself, is the director of the Arthur M. Bergman Gallery. He says  that our culture is interpersonal and isolated, and becoming more so everyday. Maybe so, but is devoting a gallery exhibition to our cold, harsh computer-screen culture the best way to illustrate it?

McGill explained, "I selected these pieces for their subtle representation of the human figure, in terms of isolation, or presence, or lack thereof, of personal contact and interaction."

The "Found on Facebook" works are as different as the Facebook users who admire them on the "fan page," (a bit of Facebook lingo). The artists come from all over the world; some sent their work to McGill, based in New York, from as far as Greece.

"I basically had these pieces sent to me sight unseen: all I had to go on was the jpeg pictures on the web," explained McGill. "As the work came in, I formatted the layout of the gallery, and luckily, it seemed to work out."

The "Found on Facebook" exhibition is currently open at the Arthur M. Berger Art Gallery in New York.

Krystin Barnett