Deviant Art: what is it about ? It's foremost a community driven by an artistic creativity, hugely influenced by the new ways of expression conveyed by the Internet and its subsequent technologies (like sharing) and usages (like interactions between people). From an artistic point of view, one may recognize all the Neo-Surrealism recipes in it: overflowing creativity, politically incorrect tone, blend of genres and the use of numerical and analogical techniques. Thanks to the Internet these artists are brought together around the eponyme website. They propose to showcast all the works produced through it. As the community is worldwide spread there is a lot of new works each day, creating a kind of perpetual museum. Indeed, according from Wikipedia, there has been about 100 millions contributions – or deviations – at the date of December, 30^th 2009. This news doesn't deal with the artistic trend with the same name.

You may have guess that DeviantART is the reference website in the field of iconographic creation. But if the major part of the production is pictures there is as well litterary production (versified poetry or not), tees or tissues printed stuffs and so on. The categories listed gives an overlook of the richness of the production : Digital Art, Photography, Traditional Art, Film & Animation, Contests, Cartoons & Comics, Artisan Crafts, Designs & Interfaces, Customization, Resources & Stock, Images, Game Development Art, Literature, Manga / Anime, Fan Art, Flash, Anthro, Community Projects, deviantART Related, Scraps, just for the main categories. Members can communicate, organize themselves in groups, criticize or submit pictures. This is a very open content sharing platform, but can we still talking about community when cohesion is diluted in the mass ?

This blend of strong popularity, mixed medias and not-so-discriminatory categories gives the impression of an undepictable sense of chaos where the worst is along the best. The well-informed internaut won't be that easily discouraged and will surely find the diamond he is looking for in this ocean of zircon. In short, deviantART is a bit of a mixed bag. Considering exclusively photography, I tend to prefer Photodom : the unity is better, and the pictures quality is far superior... Flickr ? Never heard of it...