Art + Culture User Guide

Who this site is for (or, For whom this site is)

Art+Culture is for anyone who enjoys, makes, or supports art of any kind—painters, dancers, writers, museums, organizations, festivals, film lovers, gallery goers, theater dwellers, actors, musicians, composers, symphony season ticket holders, indie music junkies, djs, etc. Art+Culture joyfully mixes high and low, performer and audience, artist and viewer.

• Artists of every sort: You can create a profile, a portfolio, and place yourself in the taxonomy alongside other artists. An artist might be a chef, an architect, a visual artist, a composer, an author, a ad copy writer, a designer, someone in a band, a stylist, an actor, a weekend poet, a comedian. By placing your work in the taxonomy, that long list on the left, you will put you and your work in conversation with other artists and members across the site. At the same time, you can collect media of artists that you like, favorite artists that you enjoy. And blog, create lists of movies. books, and music that ties you into other members.


• Art Enjoyers: You can create a profile, collect media you like, declare your tastes, your passions, to the world. And blog, create lists of movies, books, and music that ties you into other members.


• Organizations, Museums, Galleries, Presses, Labels, Festivals, Venues: Announce yourself to the world—add your artists to your Cloud, profile yourself, blog, post work of your artists.

What you can do here

There are many ways into Art+Culture, a variety of ways to express yourself.

• Register and put yourself in the Cloud. All A+C members go into the Cloud—build your Cloud and see where it takes you.


• Collect and organize your media. Upload your videos, music, images, essays and use our tools to organize them—put them in folders according to theme or media type (coming soon).


• Add an artist to the system. This can be your favorite artist across time, an artist you've just seen at a gallery. It's kind of like Wikipedia, only better looking, with multimedia, and dedicated to the arts.


• Add media to artists. Got music? Clips? Links? Upload them to your favorite artists. This is a great communal curation of the best content.


• Blog about what you love, what you think.

How Art + Culture is different than artist portfolio sites

Art+Culture is much more than not just a portfolio site—it is a place to play, to sprawl across the disciplines, to discover, explore, and to express the breadth of your practice and taste. Can you have a portfolio here? Yes, by all means—and we have excellent tools to manage it, whether your portfolio consists of images, video, audio, text, or any combination thereof.

But unlike other portfolio sites, we are a platform for you to converse with other artists and enjoyers. Here's what makes our site so different:

• You can have a portfolio of your work while collecting and displaying the work of others—the music you like, other artists, dancers, writers, architects you love. Put your work in the context of others work and of your own taste.


• You put yourself in the greater context of the arts, across time and place. This allows people who may enjoy one artist to happen upon you and your work.


• You can blog—about your work, things you like, things you've seen, things you'd like to see and do.


• This is not an artist-centric site per se with artists on one side and viewers on the other. Art+Culture is as much about consumption as it is about production. In fact, we seek to make artistic creation a kind of consumption and consumption a kind of creation.

How to build your Cloud

There are two ways to do this. One, browse the site. When you come upon an artist or movement or theme you like, click on "Add/Modify Connection" above the headshot and that artist, movement, or theme will appear in your Cloud.

Or: Open your Connections tab and select "Edit connections." At that point, you can search for artists or browse movements and select them.

Connecting as an Artist versus Connecting an Enjoyer

Perhaps your poetry—or dance or pottery or painting—is like the work of another artist: in that case, you would connect as an artist. But perhaps your work is nothing like that of another artist but you enjoy that artist's work: in that case, you'd connect as an enjoyer. This allows you to inflect your relationship to other artists with a bit of nuance.

How do Connections work? I didn't choose all these artists.

Behind the scenes, the Art+Culture algorithm finds connections between you and the rest of the system. This Connections algorithm, then, exceeds your work and your taste, making connections across the system to find artists, movements, and members that are similar, in some way, to you. These Connections are what we refer to as "A+C Connections."

It is a work in progress. We are perpetually working to refine the algorithm, to make it smarter.

Why you might not see yourself in the Cloud of your favorite artists, movements, or themes

If too many names appear in a given Cloud, that Cloud is rendered illegible. There is therefore a limit of @ 32 names at any given time. Hit refresh and your name will appear at some point. And you can always find yourself in the Connections tab.

The difference between a Theme and a Tag

Themes refer to certain concepts and attributes that Art+Culture has defined. These themes help link artists to artists and movements to movements, to forge lateral connections across disciplines. While we try to keep the set of themes stable, it is nonetheless an ever growing set.

Tags are user defined. As more users join the site and more tags enter the play, tags, like themes, will begin to inflect the connections across disciplines.

After I've joined, can I put myself in as an artist by clicking "add an artist"?

There are two ways for artists to represent themselves on A+C.

• You can join, call yourself an artist, and create your portfolio.


• You can also join the site as an Enjoyer and keep your Member page for play and then create an Artist page for yourself. But do note that anyone can add media to that artist page (which they cannot do to your Member page). Why? Because an artist work page is open for all members to curate and add more and more media and content.



A+C Tips for galleries, festivals, venues, presses




How do I showcase the work of my artists?




Join as your gallery. Then, click "add artist" and you can add your artists to the system. Then, add media to that artist's portfolio. You will be the only one who can control the profile of that artist (but anyone can add media to that artist's portfolio).




How do I get the artists in my gallery into my Cloud? First, those artists need to be part of the system if they're not there already. Add them as artists by clicking on "add an artist" in the upper right corner of the page.




Once all the artists you want in your Cloud are on the site, go to those pages and "connect to" them—and they'll be in your Cloud.