When did you start Facebook and how did you come up with the idea?
Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2025 9:39 am
“My research started online. When I created a Wikipedia page for the first artist whose work I discovered, it was vandalized by someone from Arizona with a track record against preserving anything Arabic. I didn’t want to do that, so I started creating a kind of encyclopedia of Saudi artists on the museum’s website. The technology department of Arab News had already written about that.”
On which online channels are you active? Do you use a blog, Twitter, website in addition to Facebook? And why those channels in particular?
“In the beginning I blogged for a while. That didn’t attract many readers, but it did give people on the china phone number list other side of the world an insight into my ideas. On that blog I posted the now famous work Al-Siraat by Abdulnasser Gharem, after it had been censored in London for clumsy reasons on the advice of the British Museum and a Saudi sponsor and had been purchased by me. That resulted in enthusiastic phone calls from the border region of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. I deliberately avoid Twitter. It is a good medium, but not a logical channel for an art museum. It has to be able to show pictures. Twitter is of course unique for poets and politicians also use it to build a kind of court.”
“I started using Facebook just before the summer of 2010. In the run-up to a symposium at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where I had to have a conversation with a Saudi artist, I noticed that all the Saudi participants were very active on Facebook. And when in Rome, do as the Romans.”
To what do you attribute the enormous success of the Greenbox Museum on Facebook?
“The large number of passers-by who liked the museum on Facebook can be explained by the position of Saudi Arabia as the historical and ritual heart of Islam, where they themselves do not have a museum for contemporary art. The funny thing is that I was not aware of that at first, but now I can already read in Saudi literature that the first museum for their art is in Amsterdam. I heard from a British diplomat last year that the Saudi minister for culture and information was even teased about it in a meeting.”
On which online channels are you active? Do you use a blog, Twitter, website in addition to Facebook? And why those channels in particular?
“In the beginning I blogged for a while. That didn’t attract many readers, but it did give people on the china phone number list other side of the world an insight into my ideas. On that blog I posted the now famous work Al-Siraat by Abdulnasser Gharem, after it had been censored in London for clumsy reasons on the advice of the British Museum and a Saudi sponsor and had been purchased by me. That resulted in enthusiastic phone calls from the border region of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. I deliberately avoid Twitter. It is a good medium, but not a logical channel for an art museum. It has to be able to show pictures. Twitter is of course unique for poets and politicians also use it to build a kind of court.”
“I started using Facebook just before the summer of 2010. In the run-up to a symposium at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where I had to have a conversation with a Saudi artist, I noticed that all the Saudi participants were very active on Facebook. And when in Rome, do as the Romans.”
To what do you attribute the enormous success of the Greenbox Museum on Facebook?
“The large number of passers-by who liked the museum on Facebook can be explained by the position of Saudi Arabia as the historical and ritual heart of Islam, where they themselves do not have a museum for contemporary art. The funny thing is that I was not aware of that at first, but now I can already read in Saudi literature that the first museum for their art is in Amsterdam. I heard from a British diplomat last year that the Saudi minister for culture and information was even teased about it in a meeting.”