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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...

1   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples It includes no examples because its subject – artists’ websites, their form and function, and the possibilities they hold – is prone to constant change This text is an attempt to document a thing always fleeting – the aesthetics of the web – without fixing it, since it begins with a concern about growing uniformity and ends with a call for change   The web has redefined research in the visual arts: sifting through images online The proliferation of images on the internet has changed the way we look at art because we are exposed to an unprecedented deluge of images online The visual literacy developed as a result informs both the making and viewing of art, but it has not chipped away at the primacy of the gallery or museum as the site for encountering it The physical experience of viewing art is, nonetheless, different as a result of the way we use the internet: the body in the gallery space engages with the work by way of selfies, by way of directing a camera The result, however, is the further addition of images to an internet already full to the brim   To paraphrase Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović’s 1994 banner embroidered with the claim that ‘an artist who cannot speak English is no artist’, today one could say that a young artist who doesn’t have a website is no artist Stilinović comes to mind because his maxim is a statement about access and the prerequisites for participation in the art industry English still dominates, but today there’s also the stipulation to participate in the image culture online For an artist to have a website is almost a generational marker: many artists who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s settle for a Wikipedia entry or a page on their gallery’s website It’s not that they have no stake in how their work is presented online, simply that since they rose to prominence before having a website was the norm (not to say requirement), they never caught up

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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Interview

August 2017

Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh

Yen Pham

Interview

August 2017

Ottessa Moshfegh’s first two books are, as she tells me, very different from one another. But despite the contrast...

fiction

November 2012

Religion and the Movies

Aidan Cottrell Boyce

fiction

November 2012

When the Roman Empire ruled the world, you could make it work for you. The women, the hospitality. You...

feature

Issue No. 9

Ordinary Voids

Ed Aves

Patrick Langley

feature

Issue No. 9

I am standing in a parallelogram of shrubbery outside London City Airport. Ed is twisting a dial on his Mamiya...

 

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