Smithsonian art blog launches; one step closer to the Smithsonian owning everything
ABOVE: detail of the new Smithsonian blog, “Eye Level.” Blogger Kriston Capps will write about art in general with the Smithsonian’s formidable catalogue to back him up.
The Smithsonian, the voracious death-star of American cultural heritage (and we mean that in the nicest possible sense) has launched a blog to extend its brand even further online (its website, si.edu, is gargantuan). Blogger Kriston Capps will provide the trenchant insights at Eye Level, which made its hello world entry yesterday. Looking at the site’s colophon, Kriston appears to have—egad—five bosses, from the head of the Smithsonian’s New Media Initiatives all the way up to the Chief Curator. It’s like Lord of the Flies around ADD, so such chain-of-command stuff is alien to us.
The first few entries have touched on the similarities between Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the paintings of Frederic Church; a look at a stereograph image of the former Patent Office Building that houses the Nat’l Portrait Gallery; and the Native American paintings of George Catlin, and their relationship to the NCAA’s decision to shun aborigine mascots/team names. In other words, a whole lot more professional and informed than the wild slander and dilettantish nonsense we toss around here. Read. Enjoy. But please come back.
LINK: > Eye Level [via DCist]
Thanks for the mention. I hope you do frequent Eye Level.
As for Kriston having five bosses, looking at the colophon it states: “Eyelevel is written and produced by a collaborative team at SAAM…”
The process of developing this organizational blog in a non-hierarchical atomosphere is part of its success. All the people listed on our blog pages do work in a collaborative environment. Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader didn’t work so well together but we seem to.
The Smithsonian, the voracious death-star of American cultural heritage?? Really. We like to think of our place more on the lines of the Jedi Archives on Coruscant!