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DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network Its forty million members contribute to a collection of ‘over 336 million original works of art’[1] at the site’s last count, with two million visiting the site to upload an average of 80,000 works of art each day By contrast, the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex, holds in its archives 156 million artifacts, works of art and specimens To invoke instances of the numerical sublime is as much a cliché of art writing about the internet as it is one of popular science programmes about the universe, but the comparison between the holdings of these online and IRL institutions allows us to consider how their different infrastructures of access and exchange are revolutionising the way images are read DeviantArt is, furthermore, the realm of the popular image Largely the preserve of illustrators, computer programmers and digital image-makers producing flash animations, character designs, digital renderings, and adjusted photographs, the site’s predominant style is ‘fantasy art’ —imaginary landscapes, fantastical creatures — while fan art, character design, illustration and manga are also much in evidence Its contents offer more direct access to the twenty-first-century global imagination than any contemporary museum or gallery, no matter how devoted to blurring the division between high and low art   The site is organised along lines familiar to any member of a social network After being asked whether you are primarily interested in ‘discovering’, ‘selling’ or ‘improving’ your art, and putting together a crude social profile, you are redirected to a homepage with a seemingly infinite scroll of thumbnail images These are the latest uploads by other members of the community, and clicking on one takes you to a screen where you can see more work by that particular ‘Deviant’ Clicking on ‘more work like this’ is the entrance to a labyrinth of endlessly ramifying pathways, selected either by following categories or by clicking on successive images, to lead you into the international pictorial unconscious   Illustrations of impossibly busty prepubescent girls, waiflike elves and extravagantly muscled cartoon characters are popular, and it’s hard not