This Friday, July 1, 2016 will mark the start of the 2nd month since my new Twitter feed, THIS DATE IN ART first went live. The feed is a part of my LivingCreativeLee mantra that I'm trying to infuse into my everyday life.
On June 7, my new feed had 69 followers... hopefully there will be a day when the number of followers is greater than the people I've been following!
The idea behind the feed...
I was inspired to start the feed after stumbling onto the THIS DATE IN FILM Twitter feed, which presents tidbits about the history of cinema on a daily basis. The feed includes tweets about a number of topics, such as: the dates of famous & obscure film premieres; filmmakers and actors who were born or passed away; as well as film facts related to various holidays or other important dates in history. Seeing this feed made me wonder if there was a similar feed dedicated to art history: and while many people & organizations send out art history tweets about similar topics to those THIS DATE IN FILM covered, there didn't seem to be a feed dedicated to doing it on a regular daily basis. So, without any hesitation, I created the feed.
Constructing my tweets...
Over 125 tweets later, I've reached over 500 followers (although admittedly, probably 20-30 of those are spam followers with feeds promoting everything from porn to products I don't need). On some days I've found more to post than on others but ultimately the creative process behind the tweets is fairly simple. Currently, I start online, entering the date into Google whereby I view the Wikipedia entry for the date. This page lists events, observances as well as the births & deaths that happened on that day. From the list, it's easy to pick out the artists - architects, drawers, illustrators, painters, sculptors, photographers, etc. etc. etc.
Most of these daily lists of events, births and deaths have links to Wikipedia entries and from these I'm able to learn some basics about the event or artist and even find some links of interest. I then search Google further to find articles or videos about the event or artist which I can attach to my post, as I wanted the tweets to serve as a starting point for people to learn more about the history of art. To post the links I use Google's URL shortening service so I can have a link that won't take up too much of the limited 140 characters Twitter allows you to use. Using Google's service also lets me track analytics about which links are actually visited.
Finally, I also try to find an artistic image related to the event or artist I'm going to tweet about. Ideally, I like images from prominent museums like the Tate or the MOMA (and less prominent ones too) who are also on Twitter with feeds that I can tag when I post a tweet (I've found that sometimes the tagged museum or other organization often likes the Tweet or retweets it, which helps promote the feed).
To help sort my posts and to collect data for posts in future years, I started an excel workbook. The workbook also tracks what links I've posted.
Once I have some basic information, an article or video and an image I then start to craft a tweet about what I've discovered. Sometimes it's easy but sometimes it's hard as you try to put in basic information but sometimes I've found it's helpful to create additional tweets about the topic to present more information about the event or artist.
Moving beyond Google...
Beyond Google, I've started gathering information from books in my own art history collection. For example, I pulled information from Jens Hoffman's book SHOW TIME: 50 MOST INFLUENTIAL EXHIBITIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART as a starting point for some of my tweets.
Hoffman's book served as a starting point for some of my tweets
To find more scholarly articles as I continue this project in the future I'm going to use library databases to find peer reviewed articles and abstracts about what I post, as well as to help find articles related to more obscure topics that have resulted in little to no results on general Google searches.
I also search Twitter regularly, to learn about more obscure topics that don't show up on Wikipedia. For example, I've found a number of female artists that hasn't come up on the Wikipedia lists. When I find these tweets I usually just retweet them, and make note about them in my excel workbook. I've also used the information to update the Wikipedia lists when I have the time.
To help sort out people I've followed as well as those who follow me I've created a number of lists including: a list of artist feeds from around the world; a list of museum & gallery feeds; a writers feed that includes Twitter feeds maintained by curators, art historians and other publications; a list of educational institutions; and a list of feeds about graffiti and street artists. I'm also using an application called Crowdfire to see who follows and unfollows the feed, which also sends a short welcome message to new followers and in the future I'll use it to post tweets in advance: I can compose them in Crowdfire and it will post it when I tell it to post it (this will help for when I'm going on vacation or for times when I know I'll be too busy to attend to it daily for a bit).
Finally, the description of this new feed invites visitors to submit dates for inclusion in my curated feed. To facilitate this I created a gmail account called thisdateinarthistory@gmail.com . One thing I'd love to see is submissions from galleries and museums regarding important past shows they've held - especially from various organizations from around the world.
The future...
I'm enjoying this project as its given me an excuse to keep up with what's going on in the art world and with what has happened in the past. I'm looking forward to continuing this project, growing the number of followers and researching other possibilities for sharing the information I've gathered.
This past week also saw me change my other two Twitter feeds: steveleenow is now steveleehumour and steveleequotes is now livecreativelee. steveleehumour will continue to serve as nothing serious, simply featuring my interest in comedy and my own attempts at being funny. livecreativelee will focus on the things I do to live creatively, from posting tweets about my current artwork to tweets about gallery visits or films I'm seeing among other things.
One thing I have found is with this new project I haven't been adding to my Facebook's artist page as often - ideally I'd like to set it up soon to have my art tweets appear on my artists page, with the knowledge that at some point I'll be able to balance it all more regularly!