The MoMA Gursky sub-mystery explained: According to MoMA tweeter Thomas Stimpson the traffic surge was due to the Tumblr Mastergram, which recently featured the Gursky (and slapped an Instagram-style filter over it). In yesterday’s comments reader KC noted that Mastergran itself took credit for the bounce, proving I’m about the least observant person ever. Fascinating the way creative folks/websites help get collections over…- The super-duper master calendar of Pacific Standard Time exhibitions.
- A lovely John La Farge drawing in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection… in a church in Buffalo?
- Karl Marx is back. Or at least his beard is.
- Greg Allen uncovers a small Dan Flavin mystery.
- This is how you re-create the living room of Charles and Ray Eames.
September 14, 2011, 8:34 am
thanks for the mention.
Mastergram certainly deserves credit [sic] for the concept, and for Instagramming the Gursky in the first place, but that photo only has 10 or so likes and reblogs, which is pretty small in terms of tumblr.
But Mastergram also got a lot of high-traffic coverage outside tumblr, from Petapixel and Kottke. So either they drove a bunch of traffic to/thru Mastergram, or maybe even the mildest attention on a Tumblr can result in [relatively] big traffic shifts on a museum site.
It’d be tricky, and the PR scamming would be intense, but it’d be interesting to track down and explain spikes of attention/interest in particular artworks at any given time. Sort of the inverse of 3rd of May.
So if you’d get right on that, I’ll go back to not finishing the work I’m supposed to be doing.