The Brooklyn Museum has a Twitter Art Feed!  Every month they welcome an artist to utilize twitter as a medium for their work.  This is wrapped up as part of a benefit for their 1st fans program- where you get to go to parties and meet artists, skipping ticket lines and such.  They call it a “socially networked museum membership.”  So you get some of the benefits of being a museum member without the high price and free access to the museum.  It is $20/year to join.  I’m not sure how they handle the yearly resubscribing – do they just block people and then allow them again?

The part that seems so great to me is that people have to pay to see this twitter feed.  And that is the only way that people are going to be able to see those artworks  Now, it seems from their open call that the artists would be doing this for “exposure” which I do not like.  I could be wrong about this, but there is no mention of money on the submission form at all. However I love this idea and it is really simple.

It does seem as though they’ve gotten some backlash for charging people to see their twitter feed.  But I don’t think they are explaining it right.  If they were giving money to the artists and it was clear that the money that people would be paying was giving them access to art and not just a twitter feed, then I think people would be more open to it.  People pay $20 to get into museums all the time.

I came upon this through Maryann Devine’s smArts & Culture blog.  She did an interview with An Xiao, one of their 1st Fan twitter artists.  Xiao used the twitter space to think about the evolution of communication and the similarities between twitter and morse code.  She tweeted in morse code for a month. You can watch a short video of her explaining the project below.


Go here for more info on 1st Fans.

Go here to follow Brooklyn Museum on twitter.

Go here to follow An Xiao on twitter.