Multi-Media Art Online at Tinyvices.com

In her famed, unambiguously-titled collection of essays “On Photography,” the celebrated American writer Susan Sontag notes that “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

Upon visiting artist-curator Tim Barber’s online art gallery tinyvices.com, a mixed-media motley of art and artistically-inclined product, one might feel inclined to agree with Sontag.

Perhaps because Barber himself is a gifted photographer, the site is photo-heavy and characterized by the now-standard downtown blend of the High and the Low. Life’s outtakes are elevated to the level of art, and art, with greater intention, is made accessible to the modern viewer.

Tinyvices is written in “Seinfeld”-era HTML, with simple hyperlinks assigning each work its own independent page against a black background. It is as if the site is consciously positing itself at odds with the sanctified white-walled world of Chelsea galleries and international auction houses.

In a 2006 interview with Fader magazine, Barber even stated that he “wanted to create a simple, accessible and almost neutral venue to show stuff—my own and other’s.”

While the struggle between art and the structures in place to sell it is far from nascent, it is important to note that tinyvices seems not so much above it as beyond it. Though Barber rightly identifies the advantages of being outside of the established systems, he is not self-important or righteous enough to find them below him.

Over the past two years, TV (as tinyvices is abbreviated) has had a baker’s dozen of shows in real-life galleries located in slightly fewer cities. What’s perhaps most surprising is that the shows, just as sprawling as the ones online, translate to physical space in a way that is both natural and honest to their origin.

A show this May at the New York Photography Festival, curated by Barber, featured a collection of work presented in a massive yet cohesive unit of black frames on white matte. With this, it became clear what kind of gallery Barber would run if he didn’t believe in the advantages of running a site like tinyvices: one with endless walls blanketed with limitless and constantly changing content.

Because physicality is important to art (and is an element that the site lacks), Barber created TV Books earlier this year. Each book is made on demand as orders come in, and “editioned prints and original artworks from its authors” are also available for sale.

There is also TV Music, a page that, like the art pages, solicit amateur work as well as work by art star photographer Ryan McGinely and up-and-comer Aurel Schmidt. Most of the work received ends up on one TV subdivision or another. This strange approach is why some have termed the site an “editorial project” or “community publication.”

It is clear that tinyvices represents a mentality that is finding traction (or at least popularity) in the art world—one typified by a complete absence of stuffiness, the consciousness that fine art is often a blend of good fortune and talent, an openness to appreciate the beauty of work when artists find that confluence, and the levity and humor to celebrate work that doesn’t quite live up to that standard.

The “photographic explorations” of a teenage girl are just as at home as a monograph of paintings, as is a collection of biographical drawings, as are tracks from a band called Hooded Figures, whose founder and lead singer is a 10-year-old named Lula (great stuff, actually).

It’s certainly odd, then, that in light of all of this, my mind turns once again to the words of Susan Sontag, who once wrote that the advent of photography had forced people to develop a “chronic voyeuristic relation” with the rest of the world and criticized it as a harmful and misused force.

In later years (and after a long-term relationship with photographer Annie Leibowitz), she quite openly stated that she no longer believed much of what she wrote. Another statement from “On Photography” portends this reversal of thought, and I believe it speaks to a belief held by the tinyvices crew. “Photographs don’t seem beholden to the intentions of an artist,” she writes, “rather, they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject...which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong.”

Never entirely wrong, indeed.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.