Hi! Im not sure if you've answered this before, so feel free to just reference an old post, but what are some of your favorite ways of finding art for your monthly themes?
I don't believe I've addressed this directly, but I think I've mentioned that it was quite a bit more challenging than I initially expected! My first clue that I was potential in for a bad time was during my very first month of dedicated midnight posts for the #scary tag when I tried to find a good piece by Beksiński using Google Image search and discovered, to my horror, that a ton of the results even then (almost a year ago) were AI-generated trash. I think his paintings were an early part of the gold rush because "too many fingers, and wrong" was a feature of his art rather than a bug.
I quickly determined that DuckDuckGo's image search had less AI trash, for whatever reason. It's still consistently better than Google Image search for quick & convenient use, both because the quality of the results seem a bit better (for art, anyway) and there's a "Wallpaper" size option that's a bit better than the "Large" option Google offers. So my first port of call when trying to get good candidates for a theme is to search there.
Regardless of the search engine, I would try a bunch of different synonyms that felt like they might be fruitful. I've founds that the quality of my results has improved when I include the term "museum" in the search in quotation marks, as well as a specific medium (painting, sculpture, mixed media) or style/movement (surrealism, expressionism, pre-Raphaelite).
From these initial searches, I will always find a few good candidates, but I'll also often surface (a) museums I've not considered that have whole collections I can search directly, (b) blogs/aggregators that post in in some genre or along some theme (these were especially crucial to unearthing some of the illustrations and pop art I included), and (c) artists whose style looks compelling but for whom I think I can probably find a more on-theme piece. It would also transpire that through these peregrinations, I would stumble onto pieces that would fit well into other themes, and I would file them accordingly. My rule was always to keep every artists different during any given month, but I don't mind repeating an artist several times across a year.
Relatedly, I kept an eye out for works being third-party-posted on cohost specifically, not as a way to find art to make my own post (no need to do so redundantly), but to find artists. In quite a few cases, I was able to use posts by, say, @the-museum or @funeralpyre (among others) as a jumping off point if an artist seemed compelling, then would track down a new work that wasn't already on cohost to add to my various theme backlogs.
Unfortunately, this forward-thinking strategy means I have at least some art for all the months we will never get back to again on this webbed site. The art posts are surprisingly time-consuming to write, because many of the works have quite tenuous provenance that makes correct citation difficult, and I've also taken writing captions/alt text very seriously in a way that forces me to really think about what each piece is doing or provoking in me. I genuinely don't think there's time left to compose all those posts that would have instead unfurled over the next 11 months, because this is also an unreasonably busy time of year for me at work. I may just do an art dump later in the month (without my usual rigorous practice) if there's time, just to get them out there, but I'm loathe to do so in a way that doesn't unambiguously and clearly credit the artists responsible.
