I’ve recently installed the Add-Art plugin to Firefox and I’ve got to say: this tool has a lot of potential.

What Add-Art does is use an ad-blocking plugin to first block advertising on most websites, and then uses the ad space to display curated art shows that change every two weeks. While the concept is obviously an excellent one, I think for a project that utilizes the web and open source development, Add-Art could be doing a lot more than it currently is.

The first shortcoming of Add-Art is that the art banners aren’t links. To me this suggests that the art is being displayed merely to act as a more aesthetically pleasing, less distracting advertisement that is even more elusive for some than most contemporary marketing techniques. Also, it runs counterintuitive to the whole purpose of advertising art — why bother spreading artwork onto desktops if users are viewing it completely out of context? What meaning (or mere reaction) could be gleaned from that scenario?

I can only think that more function was eschewed by Add-Art because of the assumption that no one clicks on ads anyway. Well, we’ve grown accustomed to ignoring online ads because we know that nothing interesting is on the other end of them. Consciously choosing to download and install Add-Art means we’re inviting new content into ad spaces. Adding more functionality to Add-Art means more than just website beautification. It means education as well.

I’ve thought of some ways that Add-Art could be better. Here are a few options, from quickest-fix to most elaborate possibilities:

1. A hover description with the artist’s name and title of work. At the very least.

2. Users should be able to click the art and be taken to a page that displays the artwork in its entirety. If you’ve ever designed a banner ad, you know how limited you are with space. The dimensions of a banner ad are so ridiculously unnatural that few (if any) artworks from the whole history of art would ever fit into the space. This means that the majority of works that would ever be curated into Add-Art’s project would inevitably be cropped and therefore, become entirely different pieces of art. In the case of Hiroshige, he’s not around anymore to say if cropping’s cool by him. (The inclusion of Hiroshige also makes me wonder how exactly Add-Art defines ‘contemporary’, since Hiroshige is kind of pre-modern, even).

3. Expand Add-Art to be a complete and dynamic database. When you click on an artwork, not only would you see the work in its entirety, but you’d be given biographical information of the artist, a collection of other works, political, technological, social and environmental contexts that influenced the creation of the works, and recommendations (with links to their own entries) to other artists you might like if you like the artist in the show. Users should be able to register and store their favourite artists and artworks. It could be like the Music Genome Project for visual art.

I realize that its developers didn’t necessarily intend for Add-Art to be a massive project. Its mandate is, quite simply, to replace ads with art. But part of their mandate is also “to help everyday web users to discover and understand contemporary art“. I don’t think understanding is possible just by looking, particularly for people who don’t have a background in art.

Open source, add-ons, plugins, the internet in general — all of these things offer huge capacities for projects like Add-Art. Why not take advantage?

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