Working behind the scenes here at Art Life Central we’ve been building a better blog. Our recently updated artist sites includes a raft of new links after our call for submissions a few weeks back. In no particular order, we direct readers attentions to new artist links including those for Yvette Coppersmith, Peter Hardman, Ella Dreyfus, Adam Norton, Natasha Johns-Messenger, John Tonkin, Halinka Orszulok, Sanne Mestrom and Rebecca Shanahan. There are many more to browse and enjoy and we particularly direct readers to the site of one Mr. Tim Storrier. It just goes to show that even a more “mature” artist can get “hip” to the information age.
Tubbyland Sunface Avatar and [background] Nemesis
Much of the art of building a blog or site is down to theft – that is, browsing through other people’s hard won efforts and stealing their links. In just such a spirit of good-natured piracy we have lifted a vast number of links to artist run galleries around the country, tested them for suitability [and if indeed they still exist] and added them to our new Galleries section below right. Here you will find all of the elusive Sydney ARIs such as the bat infested China Heights, as well as galleries further afield including Hobart’s Inflight, Central Victoria’s Allanswalk and Darwin’s Visual Arts Association.
We are also continuing to add new blogs such as the recently launched Skanky Jane’s Ruses of Pleasure and the really rather good Art Swipe.
Now is the time to once again ask our readers to support The Art Life by donating cash $$$ or by purchasing the lovely goods and services offered by the world-wide Amazon empire.
You can donate directly to us by clicking on the MAKE A DONATION button under the poll. You’ll need a credit card and you will be asked to supply your real name, which will of course be held in the strictest confidence. [We must acknowldege the recent donation of an anonymous group from Melbourne who asked not to be named despite their generosity. You know who you are, and that’s the warmest feeling of all! Thanks!].
If you don’t want to give us $$$ directly, you can take the Amazon option. We have recently added links to Amazon.co.uk since it seems our readers tastes [judging by what you have been buying]are more in line with the sort of stuff you can only buy in the UK. Click on the links at the side of the page under Artist Support, make a purchase and we get ‘store credit’ which will go to help paying our enormous monthly DVD and Books purchase debt.
We also have links to Amazon.com where despite the $1AD to US$0.75 exchange rate, books and CDs are significantly cheaper in the US than they are in either the UK or Australia. Example: Michael Light‘s 100 Suns is available for US$28.35. Double that and add post and it’s still $50 cheaper than it is in Australia. One last thing: if you do buy via Amazon, anything already in your shopping cart doesn’t get credited to us, only what you purchase after you click through from The Art Life.
Finally, we would like to mark a new milestone in this blog’s life – last week we topped 5,000 visitors in one week. We’ve been on a steady rise over the last year scoring some links from places like Artkrush, a continuing relationship with our friends at Henry Thornton and the occassional mention at Crikey.com. Despite these links and continuing traffic to the site the source of this rise remains something of a mystery. Recently we rated a slightly tangential mention on Art Forum magazine’s Diary website which was both flattering and wrong – “MacGregor’s trademark Scottish tartan shoes were on, her usual focus lost briefly as Merewether gave his next speech; her vacant moment was captured by a young art-world dude with a video-equipped mobile phone.” [We’ll have you know that was state-of-the-art 3 chip DV cam!] We also discovered from a recent web search that Sunanda Creagh at the Sydney Morning Herald had put the results of a recent Art Life poll to Charles ‘Floyd’ Merewether: “When Australia’s best-read renegade art blog, The Art Life, asked its readers to pick a theme for this year’s Biennale of Sydney, the results ranged from The Asia Pacific Region and Why They Hate Us to Identifying Identity and Identity. Chairs Are Not Just For Sitting had a good showing too. Luckily, Dr Charles Merewether, the curator of this year’s biennale, gets the joke…” We can’t be sure if these are the source of our recent surge in weekly hits but if they are, we welcome our new readers. Please enjoy.
