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Hi, Matthias Brendler here, transdisciplinary designer blogging what's interesting or significant relating to: Design, Education, Culture, Technology and Business (as well as anything that's really cool).

20 Great Art Institutions to Follow on Tumblr

Loren Munk, SOHO Map, 2005-06. Oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches. Lesley Heller Fine Art

Pace Gallery: 

Winning the award for gallery most active on social media, Pace’s frenetic Tumblr sports a solid, personal voice and a wide variety of work mostly from gallery artists, but with a few worthy outsiders as well, like Ad Reinhardt and the Simpsons (high and low!). 

Gavin Brown:
Much like the gallery’s actual Web site, Gavin Brown’s Tumblr is pretty inscrutable, but it’s also awesome. From the glaring red background to the strange title, it’s all about style. There are random photos, artworks, and dudes with green electric harps. What more could you ask for?

Nurture Art 
The art non-profit that makes its home in the basement of 56 Bogart chronicles the residents of Bushwick’s artistic hub. There are extensive interviews of space directors and the artists who make their studios there, and, of course, some shots of local graffiti.

LA Louver
The Los Angeles gallery’s Tumblr is a mixture of behind-the-scenes gallery shots and links to articles and media featuring their artists elsewhere. Of course, if something cool comes along, like a new album from the band Cowboy Junkies, they’re sure to reblog it.

Jen Bekman Projects 
The Lower East Side gallery’s Tumblr largely features prints being sold on Bekman’s 20x200, but the blog showcases the gallery’s poppy, colorful aesthetic. There are great series of photos drawn from her Hey Hot Shot! crowd-sourced photography contest as well.

Auction Houses:

Christie’s 
Likely the most active auction-house Tumblr, Christie’s rather hilarious blog highlights objects that are coming up for sale. It’s a great way to keep up with what’s going on at the auction house, though for the non-millionaire set, the visual irony of such luxury objects popping up in your feed is a little strange. 

Philips de Pury 
The contemporary-focused auction house posts a selection of works that they’ve sold, along with the sale prices and date of auction. It’s basic, but the blog’s super high-quality images make it perfect for some window shopping.

Updated: April 5

Museums

Mass MoCA
The Massachusetts museum’s blog largely focuses on what’s going on at its North Adams campus, but that’s probably a good thing — there’s a lot to cover. From concerts to exhibitions to children’s projects, the Tumblr has it all.


The Getty 
The Getty’s massive collection anchors its Tumblr, which also sports a notably nice graphic layout. It’s hard to beat the diversity on curated display here, from 2nd century marble sculpture to a selection of glam Herb Ritts photographs.   

New Museum
The New Museum’s spare blog posts a variety of content original and not relating to the museum’s current exhibitions. Catch artist interviews, like one with The Ungovernables triennial artist Hassan Khan, and series of snapshots from inside the galleries.

Museum of Modern Art Library 
MoMA’s super-accessible, fun, and insightful blog charts the acquisitions of its library. If you want to keep on the hippest of hip art books, this is the place to do it. The photos of the books’ page spreads and intermittent pieces of design criticism only sweeten the deal. 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 
The Philly museum’s constantly updated blog provides an idiosyncratic behind-the-scenes view into the museum’s environs and collection. Right now, there are lots of lovely photos of the grounds in bloom.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 
LACMA’s Tumblr highlights objects and events at the museum, but it also engages with Tumblr’s online social community, sharing viral videos and noting the news.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMoMA’s blog might be short on the original content, but they’re constantly reblogging fascinating art objects and documents highlighted by other art Tumblrs, like this viral interview of Salvador Dali. Check it out if you need your art mood board updated daily.

National Museum of Wildlife Art 
This Wyoming museum concentrates on art depicting the natural beauty of the American west, and, fittingly, its blog features a lot of pictures of animals. As Spring comes on, they’re also posting some amazing vistas from their campus. It’s enough to make any New Yorker jealous.

SculptureCenter 
New York’s SculptureCenter maintains a very active Tumblr that works toward the institution’s curatorial goal, focusing on “emerging artists and work that offers new ways of considering sculpture, or furthers the understanding of the discipline and how it can intersect with other mediums.” This one’s all sculpture all the time, so be prepared.

Updated: April 10

The New York Botanical Garden
This museum of plants has a surprisingly active Tumblr that posts plenty of photos of flowers and idyllic landscapes, some from the Garden, others submitted from elsewhere. There’s also one post about a “Moss Milkshake,” which maybe we’d rather not know about.

Other Organizations:


Creative Time
Creative Time uses their blog to publicize their projects — recently, it highlighted the organization’s collaboration with MTV to get art back on TV — but also to share awesome work and worthy causes from all around the art world, like this initiative for immigrant respect

Performa

The performance art biennale uses its Tumblr kind of like a glossy magazine, featuring long-form artist interviews, essays, and videos documenting their signature events. Look forward to this heating up as the next Performa develops.

MTA Arts for Transit 
Wondering what’s on the walls of your local subway station? MTA’s art blog provides a guided tour of the city’s underground public art projects. The non-permanent works rotate constantly, so follow or check back often.

Further Resources

— Tumblr’s Annie Werner created this excellent list of all arts-related Tumblrs
— Also valuable is Museum Nerd’s list of museums on Tumblr
— Be sure to check out Tumblr’s art tag page

So Is Path Worth $1 Billion, Too?

RRW |  By Jon Mitchell / excerpt

On February 1, at the peak of the frenzy over Facebook’s announcement that it would go public, Path announced a photo effect called Depth. It was a brash display of public relations. Not only was Path upstaging Facebook’s mobile offerings, its new feature meant that it now had Instagram’s exact feature set as well. Today, Facebook’s purchase of Instagram means those features are worth a billion dollars. What does that make Path, the mobile timeline app Facebook wished it had, worth?

Nike Opens Its Fuel Band API To Developers To Create A More Useful Product

PSFK  /Tim Ryan on April 7, 2012
In a bid to further the usefulness and value of the personal technology, Nike has also opened the beta version of its NikeFuel API to developers interested in combining music with the wristband, marking the first time Nike has released an API of any kind. Developers will be able to use the API to hack together apps, platforms, and other technologies that can work together with Nike’s fitness offerings. Though the API is only currently available in a limited beta for developers who participated in the Backplane hackathon during SXSWi in Austin, Texas, the move likely signals wider API availability in the near future.

How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber

  ERIC GARLAND  

EXCERPTS

An industry that once told hard truths to corporate and government clients now mostly just tells them what they want to hear, making it harder for us all to adapt to a changing world 

When the intelligence business works, it helps create organizational cultures where empirical evidence and concern for the long-range strategic impact of a decision trump internal politics and short-term expediency. And in the past, many such cultures have thrived in businesses and government agencies alike. But three trends are making this harder, or even leading these intelligence providers to have the opposite effect.

1. Explosion of cheap capital from Wall Street has led major industries to consolidate….Too Big to Fail… markets are thus convoluted by subsidies, special regulations, and protectionism. 

2.   Decisions are simply not in vogue right now. Industry consolidations have created gigantic bureaucracies. — massive bureaucracies are so much more common than they were even a few years ago, 

3. Most importantly, the world’s economy is today driven more by policy makers than at any time in recent history.

Brightfarms Announces Plan to Build World’s Largest Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn | Inhabitat New York City
If all goes according to BrightFarms‘ ambitious new plan, Brooklyn, New York will soon be the home to the world’s largest rooftop farm. The …

Brightfarms Announces Plan to Build World’s Largest Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn | Inhabitat New York City

If all goes according to BrightFarms‘ ambitious new plan, Brooklyn, New York will soon be the home to the world’s largest rooftop farm. The hydroponic greenhouse company announced last week that Sunset Park was chosen as the location for the future 100,000 square ft., multi-acre farm rooftop farm, which would be able to grow enough food to meet the fresh produce needs of 5,000 New Yorkers. Up until now, trying to find produce grown in Brooklyn yielded slim pickins’ (though we know a few great spots). The new facility will create 25 new full-time jobs and could change the business models of many local merchants by providing them with a producer that’s just a few miles, or even a few blocks, away.

Source: http://inhabitat.com/nyc/brightfarms-annou...

How the cloud could boost Amazon’s slow-moving margins

In the new research report published Monday morning, analysts Scott Devitt, Andrew Ruud and Nishant Verma come to a possibly disconcerting conclusion for any investors banking on Amazon for short-term returns. The report’s gist: “After analyzing Amazon.com’s cost structure in detail and by segment, we conclude that there are far more variable costs than investors believe, leading to an overly optimistic timeline for margin expansion.” But Amazon Web Services is an opportunity Amazon might be able to exploit.

The report estimates that AWS was responsible for $1.19 billion in revenue in 2011 (Ipredicted in October the business was on a billion-dollar run rate), of which $108 million (or about 9 percent) was sheer profit. It’s able to maintain this margin while constantly dropping prices on its cloud services, the report contends, because AWS uses a cost-plus pricing model. That is, it just adds a premium (about 10 percent) on top of the cost of delivering those services, which continue to drop as Amazon leverages its economies of scale to buy and operate more gear and bandwidth at lower prices.

Although AWS margins remain flat, the report notes that AWS also comprises a significant portion of Amazon’s overall technology spending, so being able to drive steady, predictable profit from it is a good thing. Non-AWS technology spending, the authors estimate, is about 4 percent of net sales — “represent[ing] the largest opportunity for operating margin expansion in the near-term.” Keeping those cost down means a greater percentage of revenue goes toward profit.

Brands See Fan Engagement Drop in First Month of Facebook Timeline

By  / April 2, 2012 1:30 PM / 4 Comments

A pair of studies out this week confirm what the anecdotal evidence and rampant speculation we’ve been collecting for the month already suggested: The introduction of Timeline for brands has actually decreased fan engagement with companies on Facebook.

Both studies seem to add more evidence to the case we have been building for most of the past month: Ultimately, Facebook users interact with brands on their own newsfeed and rarely, if ever, visit a company’s timeline. And that’s good news for Facebook which, ahead of its IPO, would much rather have companies resort to paying for ads than use free brand pages.

Facebook is in the quiet period ahead of its IPO and is declining comment on the business side of its operation.

EdgeRank Checker looked at 3,500 brand pages and found that all — whether or not they switched over to Timeline or not — lost traffic during the month of March. All brands were automatically switched to Timeline on Friday, but many started switching over just after the new feature was announced February 29th.

"Brand managers can rest assured that they are not experiencing significant losses when switching to timeline. Nearly all engagement takes place on the news feed, not on the page itself," EdgeRank said. “Regardless of how Facebook changes the appearance of a page, this should rarely have a significant impact on engagement. This also suggests that brand managers must continue to focus on optimizing engagement within the news feed as usual."

HubSpot has a more anecdotal take on the drop off of traffic, noting that content scheduled to publish automatically to Facebook in March, after the company switched to Timeline, posted a 234% decrease in user engagement. Content posted manually, however, had about the same level of pre-Timeline engagement.

"The results of our study do not indicate whether Timeline itself was the direct cause of the decrease in engagement," Anum Hussain cautions in a post on HubSpot’s blog. “However, the sharp decline occurred simultaneously with the drop, raising the potential of the two being correlated."

Both studies note slightly less of a drop-off for brands that have switched over to Timeline, but both also go on to note that this may be attributed to the media attention brand timelines received last month. There’s no way of determining if that better performance is sustainable.

We were one of the first to report on how to pimp your company’s brand page, but beyond that, the money you spend on professional designs for timeline may be better spent on targeted Facebook ads, which are poised to be the only surefire way to bolster brand recognition on the world’s biggest social network.

The Future of Photo-Sharing Apps

shutterstock_photo_app.jpg

The tiny Instagram app grew to a gigantic 27 million users during its first year in the App Store. It has inspired real-life Instameet-ups, Instagram art shows and a community based on love for the image, where users can post and receive feedback from other visual thinkers. Instagrams are not only the new Polaroids when it comes to party pics, they’ve become a way for users to communicate visually, sharing inspiration and ideas (well, iPhone users anyway - the Android app is due out soon).

But Instagram isn’t the only app capturing smartphone users’ visual imaginations. Photo-sharing apps such as EyeEmPiictu and Cinemagr.am each offer users opportunities to connect and organize visually and categorically in non-Instagram ways. The Web-based photo social network pasts of Flickr, PhotoBucket, Picasa, Shutterfly and Kodak Slideshare are over. Digital cameras are yesterday; smartphone cameras are today, and the mobile photo app is now. So what’s next for the photo-sharing app?

Instagram owns the mobile photo-sharing space, so why compete with it? As the adage goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

"A lot of our thinking starts off with the assumption that we as a platform assume that Instagram is the camera," Piictu CEO Jon Slimak tells ReadWriteWeb. “We call this photo entraction. It’s the idea that the photograph is changing through applications like Instagram, through iPhones having cameras. Photos are moving from objects of memory to objects of interaction."

With that in mind, photo apps outside of or using the existing Instagram platform aim to do one of a few things: Help you communicate visually, organize the images from your social networks, or bring some extra value out of those pre-existing images.

Piictu: Visual Communication, No Filters Allowed

Piictu.jpgPiictu does not offer the filters of Instagram, which can easily be used to one-up other users’ hipness factor. Instead, Piictu is just about talking with pictures, plain and simple. Dubbed “Twitter for pictures," Piictu challenges users to communicate only through images, making the image seem less showy and more clear cut. In that way, it’s not an Instagram-like photo sharing app at all. Like Twitter, Piictu organizes images around topics that are trending on the network; today 89 piics were posted under “Why i hate mondays :P), which is hilariously countered by the 56 piic collection titled “Pics @ work."

EyeEm: Organize by Content


Berlin-based startup EyeEm is quite literally thinking outside the square box. Shoot a EyeEm1.jpgphoto using the EyeEm app, and then choose which category you’d like to place the photo in. This makes the organization on the app more topic-focused, and less about the individual’s social media status or fame. It does, however, give users the opportunity to add an Instagram-like filter. Categories today include blackandwhite, Breakfast, self portrait and Friends. With each category, the user also is able to see how many people have uploaded photos to this category, and how many photos live in this category. If you turn on the location function, EyeEm also shows you photos around you, much like the Twitter location function.

GIF-ify an Image with Cinemagr.am

Cinegram.jpgCinemagr.am is slightly more than a hat trick. It’s less of a commitment than making a short silent film using your smartphone, yet it asks you to think about animation. The marvelous thing about this app is that you can shoot a few seconds of video using your phone, cut that down to a few images, and then turn it into a two or three-second animated GIF. What was once a boring cup of coffee becomes an endless loop of steam evaporating into the air.

Like most cinephiles IRL, Cinemagr.am isn’t exactly social. The app offers streams of popular and latest GIFs, so that you can get a better idea of the GIF. If you find an image you like, either give it a thumbs up, comment or email it to someone. The GIF works best on the Web, however, so if you decide to make one don’t expect it to end up in your family photo album.

Pixable: The Photo Inbox Future & Social Networks

Photo inbox apps such as Pixable do the job of filtering in images from your existing social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Lomography and Instagram. Pixable organizes images by trending popular and recent hashtags, and it allows you to follow your visually oriented Facebook friends. It also organizes images in categories such as “best of" and feeds like “most recent photos" and “top of the week." Pixable does all the sorting and organizing for you. The inbox aggregates all of your photos, making it less social and more customized for an individual, visually stimulating experience.

Pictarine: Your Photo Album Home on the Web

Facebook, Path, Pinterest and Tumblr all have a strong visual component, but to bring them together into one space makes for easier viewing. Services such as Pictarine make that possible. The free Web app operates similarly to Pixable, but remains on the Web only. Sign up for Pictarine and you can easily bring in images from Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Instagram, Dropbox, Shutterfly, MobyPicture and a few others. Pictarine wants to act like your Web-based photo album. Pictarine also lets users create slideshows or playlists, which replace the now old-school iPhoto slideshow days of yore.

Best Buy, the end of big box and the future of retail

Best Buy said Thursday that it would close 50 stores, while also detailing plans to expand the number of stores with a different concept where customers can go to try out devices and talk to expert staff members; it will boost worker training by 40 percent. The shift in strategy is one that will echo across much of retail in the future, as the web and mobility change how consumers want to buy goods — especially tech goods in these early days.

But as Apple or Best Buy’s smaller store concepts show, even as big box stores may suffer, brick and mortar retail can succeed. Even Amazon is purportedly thinking about a retail strategy as it expands into making tablets with its Kindle device. As is the case elsewhere, retailers are finally seeing that the disruption of the web doesn’t have to put them out of business, it just means they need to change their business. Here is how our shoppingexperience may change:

Hands on devices and smart people to tell consumers about them: For consumers, buying everything from smartphones to a mattress can be complicated and expensive, so making sure the item is there so the consumers can touch it and also ask someone questions about it is part of the new model. The Apple store does this well, but so do the mattress stores dotting our strip malls or even high-end food markets.

Square footage devoted to education, not bulky inventory and displays: Real estate is just one of the required costs of doing business in the real world, so stores need to make their square footage count. Maybe it means that all clerks have the ability to check a customer out on a portable device as opposed to making room for checkout stands. Perhaps it’s stocking fewer items and relying on a just-in time inventory management or even sending a customer to the web and delivering the item the next day. The shift will be in thinking of a store not as a repository of goods for sale, but more as a place to win buyers over to your products.

Lower margins make retail’s future murky: Mobile shoppers that do comparison pricing mean that most retailers will have to lower their prices to compete with WalMart and the web. But that could mean margins of less than 4 percent, making ideas about a better trained workforce or an Apple-like experience hard to fathom. As retailers find themselves in this spot, there are several ways things could play out. There’s the Apple example of having stores become an extension of your brand as fashion houses and mobile phone retailers do. There are ways to play with exclusivity of certain items or to control your supply chain to boost margins, but that’s where a lot of the innovation will lie in the future.

As for those empty Big Box shells dotting the landscape. Maybe we can turn them into data centers.