A few days ago, I posted a question about whether or not a commercial property (in this case, a café) that has a unique non-commercial mural could be added to SAC. The jury is still out, but a suggestion was made: add the café as a Place.
A counter-argument was made that the artist’s work wouldn’t get linked back to the artist.
Anyway, today I added a Community Hub in Nuneaton, which has the most amazing art on the walls. Two of the artists, N4T4 and Katie O, are prolific artists, and both of them have a huge number of entries on SAC.
Anyway, it got me thinking. If a Place has an artwork associated with it that is likely to be there for a while (so, not a legal graffiti wall), can we have one of those Name of Artist boxes that we can fill in, please, like what is used for regular artwork markers?
I still don’t think this is a good idea. Let’s assume this change is made and you add Sioux, Katie O and N4T4 as artist names here. Where will this appear on their page - it will appear under “Collaborations”. Is it a collaboration just because three artists have painted a mural (or murals) in the same place? It might be, but it isn’t always going to be.
To me, putting multiple artists names on the one artwork means it is a collaboration. The artists worked on the piece together, at the same time. Not just that they have all done work at the same place.
Why don’t you want to add these works as artworks? Doing so let’s you identify the artist, it let’s you specify the creation date for each artwork, it lets you describe the artwork individually.
In your suggestion of adding the artists name, what happens when one of the artworks is replaced by something else by another artist? You remove the old artist name and add the new one. How do you then retain some history of the link to the old artwork? You could leave the photo there and somehow put in the description which ones are still there and which ones are historic, but this is really messy.
The existing system capabilities provide for this situation perfectly. Just add the artworks as separate artworks, then add them as a “Related artwork” to the Place by using the Related Artwork tag on the Place. Then the artwork is linked to the artist(s) and the Place is linked to the artworks (both historic and current).
If you look at the Place for Hosier Lane in Melbourne you’ll see where I’ve used the Related Artworks tag for a couple of significant murals there.
Agreed - I think keeping that distinction between an artwork having an artist and a place not having an artist is important to clearly demarcate the difference between these two types of entities on the platform.
I’m slightly afraid things get messy once that distinction is less clear. Hope that makes sense @SAOS_Street_Art_Obse?
But indeed there’s no reason for there to not be both a place, and one or more individual artworks in this instance.
A good (albeit very different) example is @TinyTim’s Le Mur d’Anvers, which exists as both a place, and linked artworks for each ‘iteration’: