Whoople.com is a blog-style website that features interviews with artists. Run by Anne Marie, a retired media publicist, the goal of Whopple is to shed light on currently practicing artists and to spread awareness of their work publicly. Once an artist is accepted for an interview, Marie claims that she sends out a full press release to all of her art-related connections, made during her years as a publicist. This seems like a win-win situation for both the featured artists and the website, but does the site actually accomplish what it states?
Upon first visiting the site, the lack of professional and aesthetic design skills is apparent. It uses a Wordpress blog interface, which makes the navigation and content accessible and easy to find. However, the choice of color, fonts and background image are reminiscent of build-your-own-websites of the early 2000s such as Yahoo!’s Geocities that spawned a number of hideous user-made web pages. Such small tweaks like those has a huge impact on the viewer. By merely looking at a site, a viewer can tell right away whether or not the website is trustworthy or a sham just by how cohesive the design is. Marie strives for some professionalism, but Whopple’s credibility can easily be upgraded by hiring a design pro or by using a pre-made layout offered by Wordpress.
The content is only slightly above calibur in relation to the aesthetics. The categories for types of artists are both generally and extremely specific. General categories include labels such as “Digital,” “Mixed Media,” and “Photography.” The other categories wrongfully use art historical terms such as “Impressionistic” and “Surreal.” Both of those terms refer to art movements specific to a certain time and place. Although a piece of art can appear to have the visual traits of an Impressionist work, by no means is the artist an Impressionist. The worst category of all is “Contemporary.” Since all of the featured artists work in this day and age, they are all technically “contemporary.” The array and types of categories show Marie’s thoroughly lacking education in art and art history.
Whopple’s whole shtick is artist interviews that provide a deeper insight into how the artist works and creates. However, this too falls short of any depth as you slowly realize that the same generic questions are asked of every single artist who applies to be on the site. “How long have you been an artist, do you make a living off your art, what is your inspiration, what was your first job” and so forth do not highlight the artists as Whopple states. It makes you wonder if these questions were on the application to even be considered for the website. Readers get a peek at the artist without the presence of the interviewer to further engage the interviewee’s answers.
All in all, Whopple is good if all you want is general background information for a lesser-known artist or an introduction to the art world. The immature design and content most likely do not attract dealers and galleries as the website would have one think. One of the few good things about Whopple is that it does not cater to one particular kind of art or viewer and is unbiased in the information provided. This appears to be more so of a personal project for Anna Marie than an actual place for artists to show off themselves to the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment