What Makes An Art Blog Successful?

Lead Image by Antoni Tudisco, re-posted on Hop On The Spiral Bitch.

Photo by Roxanne Lowit, posted on Dye's website.

Ryan Dye, founder and curator of art blog Hop On The Spiral Bitch, has been titillating visitors for the past eight years with his tightly edited selection of arresting imagery.

Dye, formerly the online director of V Magazine and project manager at VFiles and now the photo editor of IMG in New York, likes to think of the blog as his online exhibition space and studio (a visually surreal one, at that), with just a single image per day posted to represent the work of a specific artist.

This is quality over quantity, and the online curator strives to have Hop On The Spiral Bitch catalyze that same experience a visitor has inside a white-walled gallery space, as compared to the visual deluge nature of Tumblr or Pinterest.

Moving fluidly and embracing all artforms, Dye often collaborates with new media artists, such as Reed + Rader, providing them with a space to experiment and develop their expression.

Dye talked with The Creators Project about some of his favorite images he's picked for his blog, as well as how we can best experience art online in the modern age.

GIF by Ernesto Artillo

Ryan Dye: "If I would curate a physical show, I would make the artworks massive and all encompassing, blown up so people would stand in front of them and lose themselves in the picture, almost like the cinema. I like the immersive experience that my blog provides; a singular column without a grid, because it just becomes too much, in that way its like a gallery’s "white cube."

There’s one image until you scroll down, then the next image. That simplicity is important for me. You focus and enjoy that image and then you move on. Other sites like Tumblr and Pinterest are so overwhelming, you keep opening tabs and thumbnails but there is no evolving story behind anything.

This image [above] is by an artist called Ernest Artillo. Most of the pieces that I pick--there is nothing too crazy, the eye can focus on one thing and there is just a few details. The background is often clean, but the subject and composition is striking. She is almost portrayed as a Catholic icon, with the halo, floating above the water and those colours. This work was probably created by the artist making a GIF from the frames of video with the water and then added the other collage components on top of each frame, it gives us this interesting angle of – is it moving or not?

Many of the pictures that I choose have a dark and weird side to it. You have to look twice to really take in what is going on; there is a juxtaposition between the intricacy of each image. It demands your eye and attention.

Also, there is only one image from each artist on the blog. It’s a very tight edit, I pick the one that speak to me the most and then people can go and explore and maybe find the one that speaks to them most."

Ryan Dye: "I try to get the full scope--3D art, animated GIFs, illustration etc--I am not picky between art forms. I find something I love in all of them.

I normally don’t go for pure painting like this [above], but this one just speaks to me. The colors are so vibrant and the contrast between her put-together outfit and the jungle leaves it so ambigious.

This is where the difference between curating online and in a physical space becomes evident, with a painting you get a sense of the physical labour that goes into the work – the strokes. Online you cannot see that, and the experience is constricted to the size of the screen. It could be more immersive."

In His Hair, a collaboration with Jason Last and Saya Hughes.

Ryan Dye: "I wanted to do something for the blog and Jason was an old friend of mine. I had met Saya the hair artist through working with Reed + Rader, so I pulled them together for this stop-motion film. I'm working on doing more things like this, working closely with artists and develop new ideas in collaboration with them.

GIF by Reed + Rader

Ryan Dye: "I went to school with Reed + Rader in Pittsburgh and we have collaborated together since we all moved to Brooklyn. I moved in just across the street from them.

The internet can be a very earnest art space, like performance art, as it's not dominated by the art market. Plus, it's still just in its infancy as a medium. For example, we were experimenting with augumented reality way ahead of the time, back in 2008. Nobody was doing it then, but then nobody is doing it now because people don’t know where to take it. I want to simplify my blog even more; just have one big picture and one logo. Just one image: this is today’s curated piece. There’s so much content but very little opinion or substance online."

Dye highlighted the fallbacks of an environment where we are constantly bombarded with millions of images, pulling us in every direction politically, physically, sociologically and artistically.

Thus, it's refreshing to land on a website that is so singular in its vision. Considering that e-commerce sites like Lyst are moving is this direction with curated or recommended products by carefully chosen ambassadors, opinion and a particular point of view is a vital quality to trawl through all the information that exists on the web. For that, we will continue to get lost in the visual k-hole that is Hop On The Spiral Bitch.

See more of Dye's online curation at his blog, here.