I both love and hate Pinterest.
On the plus side, it’s an incredible resource for worldwide inspiration in every visual art field, curated to various levels of research and granularity.
On the minus side(s), it’s a hot mess.
The app is pushy as hell, and locks down random scrolling unless you log it. Which I don’t always want to do or have time to do. No, Pinterest, you are not my go-to image search app, and the pushier you get the more resistant I get.
Even worse is the citation problem many visual artists feared from the beginning. When Pinterest started, there were few mechanisms to track the original source of an image. Pinterest addressed some of those, but it’s still not easy to tell who first came up with an image, and who merely reposted it.
I’ve been guilty of the same, I’m certain, even though I try to cite my Pinterest sources, and hope others will do the same for me.
For a cautionary story of the right and wrong ways to use Pinterest and other social media image-sharing apps, check out this tale of a mural in Chicago, two artists, and the best First Lady we’ve had in decades.
It can be pretty hard to track where an image came from in the first place, when it turns up on social media without any credits attached. I guess for many people whose interest in an image starts and finishes with sharing it on their facebook page or their pinterest account as something interesting they came across, you can understand why they don’t look too hard or too long to find the original source. Not saying that’s ok, just acknowledging that is probably how it is.
However, when you’re going to turn an image into public art, and take a grant for doing it, and put the project on your CV, I’d like to think a person would try a bit harder. Perhaps I’m wrong here, but my first reaction was that the mural artist couldn’t have looked very hard to find the original source.
Hi Marian, I couldn’t agree more. Pinterest is great for all the great uploads, but the software is really bad. Cheers