Making art versus making noise

A rant on creativity in the world of social media.

I’m thinking these days about the modern art practice, and how so much of it has become a performance piece for social media.

I really like writing this newsletter. I like making drawing, painting, making art.

You know what I don’t like doing? Promoting what I’m doing. Making bloody Instagram reels. Making content.

Why content sucks.

Content is something designed to fill. Fill up social media platforms so that you keep scrolling and advertisers can bombard you with products you don’t need. Fill your time so that you go to look at TikTok for a moment then find yourself there thirty minutes later. Fill your head with endless noise so that you never have a moment to stop and look around and think.

Content is like fairy floss (cotton candy to you non-Australians); massive and meaningless, mostly air and spun sugar.

Great art is not content. Great art is not fairy floss.

Great art is a baked potato. Nourishing. Satiating.

David, if you’re reading this, this artwork is available for purchase for the bargain price of $100,000.

But we’re told we need to make content to be successful.

I so often see despairing artists taking to platforms like Reddit and Threads, asking how they can find an audience. The answers all seem to be the same.

You need to post consistently. Video content 5-7 times a week. Show your face. TikTok will preference videos with high volumes of skin tone. The algorithm. The algorithm wants content. The algorithm must be fed.

Art time-lapse? War footage? Dance challenge? The algorithm will take them all.

I can’t help but think about what this constant requirement of self-promotion does to a person. As the wonderful Maria Popova puts it:

“Algorithms prioritizing selfies over sunflowers, algorithms amplifying the word I, algorithms doping us on the dopamine of being noticed, seducing us into forgetting the art and joy of noticing — that crowning glory of consciousness. And somewhere, in the quiet core of our being, this frantic hunt for likes is making us like ourselves less.”

– Unselfing social, The Marginalian

I see some artists finding success with their content.

They post a video a day and have hundreds of thousands of followers. They sell paintings they make in front of a time-lapse camera. They do live sessions, tutorials, studio tours.

But part of me thinks about all the time it took to create this perfectly curated home studio, tidy everything, put on makeup, do the hair, wear something cute, paint and film from multiple angles, cut the video together, post on social media… when do these people find time to actually make the art?

The result is something that’s usually visually pretty, but ultimately meaningless. There is no message behind it, there is no lasting impression. You watch for a moment and move on and it’s replaced by the hundreds of thousands of identical videos being served in an endless buffet of colour and noise and robotic voiceovers.

The artist becomes the product.

Art takes time. It requires quiet. It is not served by the endless noise of a social media feed. It is undermined by it.

Social media turns art and artists into products; we are the ones creating the value for these platforms. Artists are the pretty things making pretty things that attract the eyes that can then be sold to advertisers.

As Julia Cameron says in her pivotal work for artists, The Artist’s Way:

“We inherit the obsession with product and the idea that art produces finished product from our consumer-oriented society.”

However:

“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.”

– Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Source

The Artist’s Way is notorious for the media deprivation week; one week devoid of social media, television, books, newspapers. What do you fill your time with when you don’t have the distractions?

My week was full of art making, music playing, conversations, cooking. I suddenly found I had a surplus of time. The space it created was uncomfortable; I wasn’t used to having so much time to think my own thoughts instead of absorbing the output of others. It made me realise just how much of my life was mindlessly poured into the social media feed, and I vowed to cut myself off.

But then I get sucked back in…

Part of me thinks, hey, I can play this game. I can post everyday, I can make videos, I can grow an audience, I can market myself and my art.

Then I think, wait a sec. I have a 6 month old baby. I work. I have about a thousand loads of laundry to do.

I don’t want to have to change out of my oversized t-shirt with crusty white baby vomit on the shoulder in order to be camera ready. I don’t want to have to untangle my hair that’s been in a bun for a week. The last time I wore makeup was in April, I’m not putting on makeup for the sole purpose of filming myself performing at making art.

The idea of someone watching me while I make messy experiments makes me break out in a cold sweat.

If I have a spare hour to make art, I want to make art, not spend the whole time fiddling with a video editing software in the vague hope that the almighty algorithm will bless me with views, comments and likes.

Social media is antithetical to art.

A little while ago I read this wonderful book by Jenny Odell all about the attention economy and the importance of where we direct our attention. She puts it well; these little distractions away from the important work of making art are actually dangerous.

“In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to ‘want what we want to want.’ Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.”

- Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Source

I think I can play the game, but the game is just a distraction from the work. The whole thing is rigged, with me as the loser.

So how do artists operate in our social media obsessed world?

No idea, sorry.

The more the online world is populated by noise, the less I want to be part of it. I’m not interested in adding to the cacophony.

I suppose I tend my garden (this little corner of the internet) and try not to get distracted by the shiny allure of the screen.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk! If you’re still here, and interested in reading more random thoughts about the creative process, go read about some of my failed projects. If you’d like to contribute to the rant, please do so in the comments!