Image-Description

Started this blog to add to the effort of adding content descriptions. The more accessible we can make this website, the better we’ll all be. Content descriptions are useful for people with visual impairment, autism, and slow/limited internet.

[unwastelandunbaby]

#this does make me wonder what is then the appropriate way to provide alt text for art#like if the purpose of a image is the very image then are these still appropriate guidelines <- I actually have something of an answer to this! Best practice for embedded image alt text is to keep it short, 140 characters or less. (That's characters, not words.)

However! If you're providing a description of your art in the comment section of your post, you can afford to go a little longer. The key is just to think about how long someone with a screen reader is going to have to sit there listening to a robot read it. So I'd recommend distilling the essence of the art into a sentence or two, max, if you can.

Ultimately, you want to provide a general idea of the art, but you should avoid getting too lost in the details.

Great information to know! Thank you!!!

[ceevee5]

[berrycobbler]

[ID: three tweets by @/marcus_bernard. they read:

I’ve been going into prisons, running and speaking at recovery meetings, for the best part of a decade. And if you work with incarcerated people, in any capacity, and you come away from that thinking that prison is in any way, shape, or form a good thing… you’re an opp.

Just to add to this… no one ever got clean and sober thanks to the prison system. No one got educated or creative thanks to the prison system. No one finds purpose or meaning thanks to the prison system. Alla this is achieved despite the violence of the prison system.

Prison is not, in any way, there to help people. Education isn’t going to be properly funded because access to education isn’t the purpose of prison, the purpose of prisons is to punish and break people, to coerce and force conformity, to harm (by design) not to heal.

/end ID.]

[queeranarchism]

@fredericktjoseph

Welp Elon… #elon #elonmusk #twitter #twittermemes #sanfrancisco

♬ Anti-Hero - Taylor Swift

[Video description: A tiktok video by fredericktjoseph with the cover text “Twitter HQ tonight as hundreds of employees quit because of Elon”. Behind it in an office building in the dark with the twitter logo on a sign on the left. On the building itself is a projection with scrolling white letters that reads: “Elon Musk: supreme parasite, petulant pimple, petulant profiteer, dictators asskisser, lawless oligarch, insecure colonizer, cruel hoarder, space Karen, mediocre manchild, pressurized privilege, petty racist, megalomaniac”. The audio plays Taylow Swift’s antihero, the lyrics features are “Did you hear my covert narcissism, I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman. Tale as old as time. I wake up screaming from dreaming , one day I’ll watch as you’re leaving and life will lose all its meaning, for the last time. It’s me, Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”]

Tumblr seems to not display this video for everyone, if you don’t see it you can also find it here: https://www.tiktok.com/@fredericktjoseph/video/7167183175041486126

[thevelvetgoldmine]

#SpaceKaren broke me

[bisexualshakespeare]

[ID: video of the Twitter building with words projected onto it. It says Elon Musk folded by a repeating scroll of the following: bankuptcy baby, supreme parasite, petulant pimple, apartheid profitter, dictators asskisser, lawless ogliarch, insecure coloniser, cruel hoarder, space Karen, mediocre manchild, pressurised privelge, petty racist, megalomaniac, worthless billionaire.

Second image is a tweet from JoshuaPHill reading: oh shit lol. Twitter HQ in San Francisco tonight. /]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Clever billboard advertising the BBCs Dracula. (This is why you hire artists.) Follow it to the end.

Pretty clever, right?

https://www.facebook.com/KushFeed/

[bisexualshakespeare]

[ID: a billboard with stakes sticking out of it in various places on the left side with fake blood dripping down. On the right it says BBC Dracula. The post shows several pictures show the sun going down and as it gets darker, lights shine on the billboard on the stakes make a shadow in the shape of a man’s profile opening his mouth and showing fangs. /]

[genderqueerdykes]

saw this poster at my local trans resource center and cried

[tortiefrancis]

[ ID: a white poster with a figure of a person in black and white, with pink clothes and accents, wearing a short mohawk and in one side, a dress, and in the other, shirts and pants. They smile with hands on their hips. The text in the poster alternates, in each sentence, between black and pink, and reads:

For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable. For every boy who is burdened with the constant expectation of knowing everything, there is a girl tired of people not trusting her intelligence.

For every girl who is tired of being called over-sensitive, there is a boy who fears to be gentle, to weep. For every boy for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity, there is a girl who is called unfeminine when she competes.

For every girl who thows out her e-z-bake oven, there is a boy who wishes to find one. For every boy struggling not to let advertising dictate his desires, there is a girl facing the ad industry's attacks on her self-esteem. For every girl who takes a step toward her liberation, there is a boy who finds the way to freedom a little easier. /End ID ]

[hobbular]

Friend of mine was submitting a job application and discovered that they REQUIRED a photo:

We’re trying to decide which of these is a better option:

or

[nowlander]

[leftboogerarbiter]

ID: first image is a screenshot of the required photo section of the form. second image is a notepad text file titled “nachos.pic” and reads “hi this is super illegal actually. off to report you to the EEOC xoxo”. third image is a nicki minaj meme where she holds her hair back with a smile looking downwards, text reading “so there’s this labor law you’re violating”. fourth image is of tumblr user miseryxcpr’s tags on the post that read: hey guys treat this post as your reminder to go read the EEOC page because i just learned that its illegal for employers to ask if you have a disability during a job application or any point before a job offer is made (so during an interview etc). once they’ve made the job offer they can but before that they are breaking the law if they do. / end ID.

[clairebearsparkles]

I felt like the fears in this style would be cute as hell, and I was right

[benchofindigo]

[ID: Artwork of The Magnus Archives fears done in Little Miss styles.

Little Miss Buried - a yellow hand poking up from the ground holding a flower

Little Miss Corruption - an orange person with holes in them and two flies flying around them

Little Miss Dark - a completely black Miss holding a finger to their mouth

Little Miss Desolation - A red miss with a burning head and holding burning pokers smiling

Little Miss End - A purple Miss sitting on a grave stone

Little Miss Beholding - A green Miss with a big eye and a pink bow with an eye at the centre

Little Miss Flesh - A Peach Miss with their skin falling off the body

Little Miss Hunt - A wold Miss

Little Miss Lonely - A blue Miss surrounded by clouds and wearing a paper boat hat

Little Miss Slaughter - A green miss playing the flute

Little Miss Spiral - A pink Miss with scribbles as the body

Little Miss Stranger - a yellow Miss with a big scary smile

Little Miss Vast - A aqua Miss falling through the sky

Little Miss Web - A purple spider Miss with a yellow hat

Little Miss Extinction - A green Miss wearing a gas mask. End ID]

[lyricvl]

[uncomfortablyanonymous]

[ID: A picture of a black billboard showing plain white captial letters that read: “I’m not interested in competing with anyone. I hope we all make it.]

[e-the-village-cryptid]

my first reading in my African history class this year is about why using “tribe” to refer to ethnic groups stems from a racist desire to make African conflicts sound primitive or stemming from a desire to pretend that these are just ancient conflicts that have always existed. great article and I also feel like I’m vicariously experiencing the bullshittery that this author has been subjected to from people they’ve tried to talk to about this. like the article remains extremely professional but you can just hear in the tone that they’re talking through gritted teeth, you can practically see the customer service smile

[ID: a screenshot from a section of the article titled “But why not use ‘tribe’? Answers to common arguments.” Under the bullet point for the argument “Africans talk about themselves in terms of tribes” is written, “Commonly when Africans learn English they are taught that tribe is the term that English-speakers will recognize. But what underlying meaning in their own languages are Africans translating when they say tribe? Take the word isizwe in Zulu. In English, writers often refer to the Zulu tribe, whereas in Zulu the word for the Zulu as a group would be isizwe. Often Zulu-speakers will use the English word tribe because that’s what they think English speakers expect, or what they were taught in school. Yet Zulu linguists say that a better translation of isizwe is nation or people.” /end ID] 

translation: “ ‘Oh ho ho but some Africans themselves say tribe!’ You dipshit. You fucking donkey. When someone has a word that means “nation” or “people” in their own language but then when they learn English YOU TELL THEM IT TRANSLATES TO “TRIBE” then THAT WILL BE THE WORD THEY USE. Maybe if you LISTENED TO THE LINGUISTS OF THAT GROUP you’d have more accurate information. Asshole.”

each point is repeated over and over with like five different examples because you just know there are dipshits out there who will keep arguing.

to the anonymous author of this article for the Africa Policy Information Center I hope you have a good day every day and experience fewer people being assholes about this, your patience is actually legendary

[e-the-village-cryptid]

[ID: The author’s response to the argument “Avoiding the term tribe is just political correctness.” It reads “No, it isn’t. Avoiding the term tribe is saying that ideas matter. If the term tribe accurately conveyed and clarified truths better than other words, even if they were hard and unpleasant truths, we should use it. But the term tribe is vague, contradictory and confusing, not clarifying. For the most part it does not convey truths but myths, stereotypes and prejudices. When it does express truths, there are other words which express the same truths more clearly, without the additional distortions. Given a choice between words that express truths clearly and precisely, and words which convey partial truths murkily and distortedly, we should choose the former over the latter. That means choosing nation, people, community, chiefdom, kingroup, village or another appropriate word over tribe, when writing or talking about Africa. The question is not political correctness but empirical accuracy and intellectual honesty.” /end ID]

[e-the-village-cryptid]

quick note my bad the authors are not actually anonymous they were just listed in the fine print at the end of the article rather than under the title: “The main text of this paper was drafted by Chris Lowe (Boston University). The final version also reflects contributions from Tunde Brimah (University of Denver), Pearl Alice Marsh (APIC), William Minter (APIC), and Monde Muyangwa (National Summit on Africa).”

[insaneostyle]

Shocking how many people don’t know that hens lay non-fertilized eggs and think the yolk they’re eating is a baby chicken

[countess-of-edessa]

once tried desperately to make my friend understand that yolks were not, like, a liquified potentiality of chicken, and she looked at me for a while and then said, "but they’re both yellow."

[woolandflax]

Behold

A chicken

[alexseanchai]

[image: a lemon.]

[brawltogethernow]

Image descriptions that incidentally make the joke infinitely funnier.

[toastbutteregg]

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

[ID: A tweet from @mo_ranyart reading “The constant struggle between “I should probably be more informed about current events” and “I would like to be a functional human being with at least a vague will to live” //end ID]

[probablyasocialecologist]

Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing

High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.

Every year, “millions of dollars” are spent on reforesting landscapes, according to Lalisa Duguma of World Agroforestry, an international research agency in Nairobi, Kenya. Yet “there are few success stories.” Typically only a minority of seedlings survive, he says, because the wrong trees are planted in the wrong places, and many are left untended, in part because ownership and management of trees is not handed over to local communities.

Such failures often go unnoticed, believes Duguma, because performance indicators measure planting rates not survival rates, and long-term oversight is minimal because projects typically last three years or less. The result is “phantom forests.”

[…]

Too often, argues Duguma, tree planting is “greenwashing” aimed at grabbing headlines and promoting an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly. Tiina Vahanen, deputy director of forestry at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, noted recently that many projects end up being little more than “promotional events, with no follow-up action.”

Cynical PR is one thing, but phantom forests are also increasingly sabotaging efforts to rein in climate change. This happens when planters claim the presumed take-up of carbon by growing forests as carbon credits. If certified by reputable bodies, these credits can count toward governments meeting their national emissions targets or be sold to industrial polluters to offset their emissions. Many corporations plan to use their purchase of carbon credits as a means of fulfilling promises to attain “net-zero” emissions. So the stakes are rising.

[rosenkranz-does-things]

couldn't resist painting Yaz in her Dirk Gently era

[id: bright watercolor painting of Yasmin Khan, she's wearing a yellow jacket, a blue shirt and dark blue jeans. she has two french braids. she's standing in the Tardis, with neon orange lights and purple hexagons around her. second picture is the same painting next to a palette and watercolor paint tubes. /end id]

[ladyshinga]

[hoarder-of-stories-27]

[id: a red graphic with white text reading:

Stop saying: “If you don’t have a uterus, you can’t make rules about them”

And start saying: “Bodily autonomy is an inalienable right that should be guaranteed to all humans”

Amy Coney Barrett has a uterus, that still does not give her the right to make rules about other people’s

In small text at the bottom, it says “Millenial Memes for Existential Extremes”

/end id]

[naamahdarling]

Also I did not give up ANY rights when I got my hysterectomy. Don’t be creepy.

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[ukulelehitter-deactivated202603]

Transcript:

Hey, wait a minute, I recognize this painting! That’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” by Barnett Newman. It’s funny you put him in this video, because someone actually tried to recreate, or “restore”, one of his paintings and it failed miserably.

Barnett Newman is arguably one of the most well known abstract expressionist painters, and for good reason; his work made people FURIOUS. Newman was most well known for his very large paintings with stripes (or, he called them “zips”) straight down the painting. One of his most famous works is “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”, a series of four paintings, all very similar to this, with varying sizes of zips on each side, with this very overwhelming red. They were displayed in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam until 1986, a guy named Gerard Jan van Bladeren slashed them with a box cutter. And this wasn’t just one measly poke, this was like 50 feet worth of slashes in this painting. They were mortified, saying the painting was murdered, and others rejoiced, saying that Bladeren should be the head of museums across the world. Bladeren himself never even admitted guilt, he said his slashes were works of art in their own right.

Still, the Stedelijk was like, “We gotta get this painting restored!”, but no one would take them up on the job because regardless of how you feel about Barnett Newman’s work, his craft has an undeniable truth. His work is seamless. It doesn’t matter how close you get to this thing, you practically can not see brush strokes. Anyone who’s worked with paint, let alone oil paint, knows how difficult that is, but that’s particularly difficult for art restoration. Anyone who’s binged enough Baumgartner Restoration videos like I have knows two things about art restoration: “You can hide seams in detail” and “Every bit of restoration work MUST be reversible”. So as you can imagine, 50 feet worth of slashes on a piece with literally no detail to hide it in, with the entire art world looking on to make sure you did it right, was probably not the easiest job. But someone eventually did step up to the plate.

That person was Daniel Goldreyer in 1991. He was less of an art restorer and more of someone who looked at the painting and said “Hey, I could do that.”. Nearly a decade and $4000 later, he made this, which people at the Stedelijk Museum literally wrote in and said they were angry that it wasn’t the same one that made them as angry as before. Close analyzation of the restoration after the fact revealed that it was done with a paint roller and wall paint, which is not removable. He had destroyed the painting, AGAIN. The restoration even angered Bladeren, who went on to slash another painting.

Listen, you don’t have to love Barnett Newman, he’s not my favorite either, but he was a Jewish man trying to figure out what to paint after World War II, and successfully making these really large overbearing paintings with incredible technical precision at a time where you couldn’t even go to Michaels because it didn’t exist! If you really think you can do it, give it a try; worst case scenario is you gain an appreciation for the craft. Just on your own canvas, please.

[zeldahime]

Honest question:

Why the hell isn’t that context in art museums?

If you go into a history museum, they don’t just have a bunch of pots with the caption “Pots” and no other context: there’s captions saying who made the pots and what they were used for and what relationship they have with other artifacts in the museum. If you go to a natural science museum, you don’t go look at a bunch of bones with the label “A Dinosaur” and no other context: there’s captions saying what the dinosaur was and where and when it lived and how big it was and why it died out.

So why do art museums just… not have that? I didn’t go to history school or natural science school, but museums meet me at my level. I didn’t go to art school, and art museums don’t even try. I haven’t been to MoMa specifically, but modern art museums are deeply boring and unpleasant for me because I vacillate between “A kid could make that; why is this so special?” and “I have no idea why this is important or special; I must be stupid.” At least in a “regular” art museum, I can look at a painting of flowers and know it’s special because it’s really pretty — but even still, why don’t they add the context?

[ms-demeanor]

I mean. They do?

Many art museums have audio tours that go over this stuff, but almost all of them have information about the art featured with the art. Here’s a page from the Scotsdale Museum of Contemporary Art talking about their didactic panels. It is not at all unusual for modern or contemporary art museums to feature explanatory panels or descriptions of the featured works or their creators.

Here’s the MoMA’s biographical information about Barnett Newman and here’s the museum’s extended label for one of the paintings in the video:

The Latin title Vir Heroicus Sublimis can be translated “Man, heroic and sublime.” Newman once asked, “If we are living in a time without a legend that can be called sublime, how can we be creating sublime art?” This painting, his largest at the time, is one response. Newman wanted the viewer to stand close to this work, and he likened the experience to a human encounter: “It’s no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there’s a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives.”

(The label for “Abraham,” the other Newman painting in the gallery, is pretty great, I think.)

None of this includes technical details like the difficulty of creating a painting that large with minimal brushstrokes or lines that clearly defined, but it is part of a collection called “Planes of Color” in which there are also two Rothkos and which has an explanation of the historical (postwar, post-atomic) context of the paintings and a brief explanation of the philosophical approach of the artists in the gallery. The gallery is set up to invite comparison between the techniques being used without overtly commenting on them - Newman’s pieces are silk-smooth and uniform while Rothko’s paintings are fuzzier and more textured with a different depth of color.

Here’s one of the current installations in the MoMA, and you can see that in the entrance to the room there is a fairly large label with two paragraphs of explanation on the installation and the artist:

Museums also often have videos about various works and installations up online. The LACMA has a good example of a label that gives an explanation for the composition and motivation of a piece and also two videos that go further in depth on the website. One video is a performance by the artist in front of another of his paintings, the other video is of the museum director discussing the painting. 150 Portrait Tone is about the police killing of Philando Castile and uses words from the video of his death, so heads up. It’s heartbreaking.

Obviously people are unlikely to sit down on their phones and watch a video about a painting from the museum’s website, but it is pretty rare for a museum to present art with no context.

Personally I’ve found that contemporary and modern exhibitions go out of their way to provide more context to visitors than traditional art museums - they know the work is less approachable than romantic landscapes or renaissance portraits. The information provided might not be at the level of technical detail or with the story about slashed paintings that are presented in the tiktok video above, but I also think that an art museum isn’t supposed to be quite the same immersive educational experience as a natural history museum (many of which have exhibits explicitly planned to guide visitors through a lesson with videos, interactions, and a timeline).

There are also art museums that have a stronger focus on outreach and education than on simply presenting and exhibiting art. Some people go to art museums to learn about art, some people go to art museums to experience the emotions evoked by art; these are both valid reasons to go to museums, but the things that make the experience enjoyable for one group might make it less enjoyable for the other group. For instance, a video about the technical skill required to create a uniformly painted canvas presented in the gallery might help people learning about art to appreciate a color field painting more; a quiet gallery with few distractions might help people who are there to experience the contrasts between color field paintings and the emotions they evoke. The people who want to learn about art might feel alienated by a quiet gallery with small, non-contrasting labels and the people who are there to experience the art might feel frustrated if the gallery has more visual noise and crowding to explain various works.

Again - some museums are set up to do more education and have more comprehensive information than others, and even within one museum a special exhibit or installation might have more information for visitors than a painting in a side gallery that is part of a permanent collection.

Audio tours are a good way of meeting in the middle on this - for example, here’s the audio from the MoMA on the painting in the TikTok. Here’s an audio recording from the MoMA about another piece, Accumulation No. 1 by Yayoi Kusama, which includes reading from the artist’s diary and biographical information. These kinds of things are *extremely* common in art museums and used to be provided on tape. Here’s the LACMA’s menu of thematic audio tours.

Honestly if you are interested in modern art but have a bad time in modern art museums, I’d recommend seeing if there’s a children’s exhibit in your local modern art museum or if there is a modern art wing in a more general art museum that you could explore locally. The children’s exhibit thing is not a dig at anyone, by the way - those exhibits are approachable, educational, and fun for people of all ages and are a good way to approach a type of art that you are unfamiliar with.

Also, go to museum websites! If you know you’re going to be visiting a museum, check out the website ahead of time to see what’s on display and what information they have about the pieces; if you aren’t planning on going to a specific museum check out various websites and find art that you think is interesting - look at the museum’s info and then search for the artist online and see if you can find some commentary videos or documentaries if you want to.

It can suck to find yourself in a quiet gallery full of a bunch of stuff that looks boring and feel like you can’t ask anyone about anything or speak to anyone and that you just have to rock back on your heels and look at a sculpture made out of trash like it means something, but the museum wants people there and it wants people to enjoy the art, I promise! You can ask people questions and ask if there are guides or extra info and there will usually be something available. And if there isn’t, at least you know it’s not a museum you want to go back to.

[ms-demeanor]

Also: when approaching almost any art, even art that you don’t understand or that doesn’t seem like art to you, even without any context at all, you can usually get a better experience from the art by giving it the benefit of the doubt.

If you’re looking at a Mondrian (the white, yellow, blue, and red grids that everyone seems to include in these criticisms) you can ask yourself why you think the Mondrian created this, you can ask why he chose these colors. You can try to figure out how he blocked off the shapes, get close and look at the brushstrokes and see if you can figure out his process for putting it together in your head. You can cross your eyes and see if another shape jumps out at you. You can ask yourself why he did this in one type of paint instead of another.

Even if you have no other context you can often improve a bad museum visit by treating each work like a technical puzzle. *somebody* had to assemble this - how did they do it? Why? How was it moved in here? Is it a traveling piece? How does a wall-sized painting travel?

[rotationalsymmetry]

One thing people sometimes don’t get about art is that art has movements. Think about it: you’re a painter, and all the artists a generation or two older than you, the ones who have been teaching you, have figured out how to make visually compelling scenes with lots of realistic looking people in incredible detail. You can learn to paint just like them, and you have. But if you keep only making that sort of painting, your work will never be appreciated. Because realistic art has been done. Why would anyone be interested in your art that looks just like your teacher’s, when your teacher’s been doing it longer and has more of a name?

So you do something different. Maybe you go outside and paint haystacks illuminated with natural light and paint them kind of fuzzy without photo-like detail. Maybe some people hate it, but others go “oh, this is different, I’ve never seen a work of art like this before, I didn’t even know that art could look like that.” Then a generation later the established famous artists are all impressionists and you, an upcoming artist who wants to distinguish your work, want to do something different so maybe you make art with blocks of saturated color and call it cubism. Etc.

Each time you have an audience — people who will say things about or maybe buy your art — who are very familiar with the previous way of doing things and who expect that, so your work needs to look interesting in contrast to what’s been popular over the last few decades.

It’s like a conversation, people tend to be weird about it if everyone’s talking about how dinosaurs have feathers and then the conversation’s moved to favorite restaurants and then to idk which sports team is sporting right now or whatever, and then suddenly you remember a thing about dinosaurs so you throw it in and they’re all “but we finished talking about the dinosaurs? We’re onto football now?” It’s like that with art. They’re not static pieces all existing side by side. A museum is like a transcription of a conversation, but if your eyes are darting from the dinosaurs to the football teams without realizing that one happened before the other you’re going to miss a lot. Basically, talking about football doesn’t seem new or interesting now because we’re onto whether that dress was white and gold or blue and black, football already happened. But when it happened it was the new thing and it was interesting, because the point of the conversation it happened in made it interesting.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Actually this might be a problem more common in the US in contrast to Europe. In the Western artistic tradition, most of the “conversation” happened in Europe and while some paintings ended up in museums in the US, the cathedrals with the gorgeous Renaissance art and the museums with the really good impressionist stuff and so on are mostly in Europe, in the countries where the painters worked. But with modern art, more of the conversation happened in the US so the really good museums in the US, the ones that have the most famous art, are modern art museums. So if you’re visiting museums in the US because you live there and aren’t traveling the world, you see the later parts of the conversation, which don’t make much sense without being familiar with the earlier parts of the conversation. Or if you aren’t thinking of it as a conversation, as a thing that happens over time.

[afronerdism]

[minicy]

[ID. Tweet from Dr. Jen Wolkin reading, "When you're down about the fact that Trauma Changes The Brain

I want you to remember:

So. Does. Healing.

So. Does. Healing.

So. Does. Healing.

End ID.]