“Blogs are free,” explains Gabby Bess, founder of Illuminati Girl Gang. “Websites are like, $10. Illuminati Girl Gang started out as a Tumblr blog, and if no one had followed it or cared about it, it would have been no loss to me. The internet just provides more in-roads for people that don’t have access to larger publications and outlets.”
For Bess, blogging is a way of subverting commercial publications and galleries, the traditional gatekeepers of culture, which tend to be dominated by white men. “Personally, I cannot control who owns the major publications and galleries,” she says. “I can only start my own magazine and my own gallery.”