My engagement with the internet over the past few days has been interesting. It occurred to me to ask how easy it might be to obtain information about people or institutions I know, by putting their names into a search engine. The result surprised me.
I began with the names of three people known to me who are artists. One of them turns out to have the same name as a well-known singer-songwriter. Another has the same name as a fairly prominent American painter. The third shares a name with an eminent psychologist. Repeating the exercise with my own name yielded a comparable result. Even allowing for the fact that my name is spelled with “ll” and not just “l”, it seems that the search engines don’t distinguish the two, and in fact tend to assume that I might have mis-spelled my own name. Consequently any returns relating to me tend to get lost among the much more numerous references to Tony Alcock–a top player of crown-green bowling.
We are in the habit of thinking that our name is a unique designator of ourselves, but this is far from being the case. I remember a very funny programme done by the British comedian Dave Gorman, several years ago, in which he actually went to meet all the people he could discover who shared his name. It was an astonishingly large number.
The lesson I am inclined to take from this is that it is dangerous to be complacent about the internet as a means of distributing information about yourself. Artists tend to believe that if they have a web-site and an entry on “Linked-in” or some similar resource, then the world will know about them. Similarly, I have met colleagues who expect that by exhibiting their work in an on-line gallery they will be noticed, and will sell their work. I wonder just how many artists are signed up with the Saatchi site. I’m featured on a website entitled Not just Hockney, the purpose of which is to publicise the activity of Yorkshire artists.* There are a lot of us!
The greatest success of the internet has been to sell itself. If we really want our work as artists to become better-known there is no substitute for the historical channels of communication–personal approaches, opportunities to show in galleries, and perhaps most important of all, patronage. Talent helps too, of course. No amount of internet exposure will substitute for that.
*Check it out: www.notjusthockney.info.