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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

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

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

October 2011

The White Review No.3 Editorial

The Editors

feature

October 2011

In the course of putting three issues of The White Review together, the editors have been presented with the...

feature

May 2011

Why I Write (Rather than Riot)

Gavin James Bower

feature

May 2011

Watching the recent public demonstrations protesting, at times violently, the Coalition government’s budgetary cuts, I was forced to revisit...

poetry

May 2017

Two Poems

Vala Thorodds

poetry

May 2017

THROUGH FLIGHT   For a moment we are borne into the air and then down.   It is there, behind...

 

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