Whats Deviant about Deviant Art?

It doesn’t come as a surprise that not everyone has a profile on every single social networking site, for example I don’t have a Myspace page, but Deviant Art isn’t like any other social networking site I’ve come across. Deviant Art is a way for people to share artwork, photography and literature with millions of other users and a lot of people are doing so but for other reasons.

This is purely based on observation and the people who I follow via my own Deviant Art account, but it seems there is an increasing amount of ‘random snapshots’ being displayed more and more in the daily deviants page (which thumbnails all uploads). I’m seeing an increase of self-portrait ‘Myspace-esque’ photos, photos of people’s belongings I wouldn’t consider artistically arranged. It seems to just be a personal gripe but the more I search and take an active part in the Deviant Art community the more and more I seem to want to distance myself from it.

I set my original account up in 2005 but not being very artistic just left the profile there pretty much empty. It was only towards mid 2009 that I began to use my Deviant Art account again with the purpose of social networking. Finding other likeminded individuals interested in the same projects and hobbies I was and trying to set up some sort of melding of sorts.

You see Deviant Art gives you a startlingly customizable interface for you to sink your teeth into from the get go. You can create a profile page where you can answer various questions on your preferred type of media, who your favourite artist is, who your favourite band is and so forth. You are also able to add Journal posts, Deviant Arts own blog feature where you can write about upcoming projects, or like many of the people I follow just provide sporadic updates on what you have been doing in the past 4 months. You can ask for critique on your work once uploaded, which will tell your friends and via a special gallery that you want to know their opinions on your work and you can also sell prints of your work through the website itself.

It offers digital artists the ability to get their work out there being able to categories their work into the almost bewilderingly long list that deviant art has along with image tags, which means that it’s very possible to get your work out there to the masses and possible employment. This is why I and many other media and artistic individuals maintain Deviant Art Accounts, for an online portfolio.

This brings me back to my first point. While I as previously mentioned am not an artistic individual I feel that the ability to post everything and anything the user can upload to a basic category page pushes those individuals who have actual talent out of the circle, for every Tom, Dick and Harry with a digital camera and while it would be easy to find a specific piece if you knew the name or at least some of the tags used when it was uploaded it will not get the recognition it deserves, save from those who have that user on their watch list.

Deviant Art is a powerful artistic distribution portfolio website and has an enormous community of artistic types, and sadly some of them think themselves more artistic than they actually are. Perhaps I just missed a trick.