"you had to write out how it was smart"

December 2, 2022 4:33 AM

"how many painters are having to basically become process artists and action artists instead and setting up a camera in order to film themselves doing the painting because actually, what the algorithm cares more about is the verb..." Gabrielle de la Puente, in the conversation "Instagram Has Ruined The Art World" (27 Nov 2022) on making alternative online venues for artists to display work. (via sliceofpearpie: "this isn’t about external validation.... these form part of our working conditions.") "You were trying to explain to an artist how they could reach ten times more followers online by adhering to certain principles. You felt like the devil when you explained it." A comic by Jaakko Pallasvuo about relatability and attention. "Not everyone presents well in 280 characters, especially in a space they don’t even want to be present." charlottemadison42 and largishcat on a similar issue for writers.
posted by brainwane (10 comments total)

Thanks, this speaks very clearly to my wife, whose watercolor work is great but she has always said non servium to the algorithm, to the point where she has instead focused— with more satisfying results— on getting her stuff in more welcoming local businesses.
posted by BlunderingArtist at 5:09 AM on December 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

Not everything has to be video okay, some of us LIKE STATIC PIECES SO WE CAN LOOK AT ALL THE BITS OF THE FINISHED WORK IN PEACE
posted by sciatrix at 7:00 AM on December 2, 2022 [9 favorites]

The discussion in the first link RE: Tinder having a 1-10 secret hotness rating for users is not accurate. The truth is more nuanced and less sensational. Which is maybe off topic but also a perfect example of the problem at hand. Instead of the detailed and nuanced reality, the podcasters all remember and are uncritically propagating the inaccurate but high engagement, algorithm friendly, attention grabbing fiction.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 7:52 AM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am just not going to waste a lot of time making video of me making art. The fuck is that?
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:19 AM on December 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

I can’t say enough good things about the white pube, who are the first link. They’re really using social media as a tool to unpack a lot of the problems with and around the art world, and they’ve been great at it. I also came across this Atlantic article which shows that the criticism of Instagram is coming from other directions. Gosh oh no.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:57 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah the videos sure do work well on video sites but fuck it, I do not want to sit there recording/streaming my process and hassle with managing a chat or editing a video or whatnot. I go off and focus on nothing but the art.

I am really thankful for Furaffinity's continued dominance of the furry art scene, there's still a healthy number of people who are delighted for me to sit around by myself and occasionally show up with a cool drawing. And some of whom are interested in joining my Patreon or paying me to draw things or whatever. Often something insanely obscene but I like drawing that, I am not one of those people who rolls her eyes at the crazy perversions people ask them to draw and takes their money anyway.
posted by egypturnash at 2:28 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

(and reading the transcript of the first article now, I wanna also note that FA is oldschool. There's no algorithm, you just get presented a newest-first chronological series of thumbnails of the stuff people you're watching have posted. No weighting based on how many favorites/comments they get. Just... here's your art. It helps that the site's always been more of a hobby than a business, the owner is part of the furry community and is married to an artist, so if he tried to implement the same shit you find in FB/IG/Twitter/other corporate media he would get his face clawed off in a very intimate and personal fashion!)
posted by egypturnash at 2:32 PM on December 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think we (and by we I mean techbros sold it and we bought it) put way too much faith in the idea that algorithms will provide better curation than plain organic sharing does. Before algorithms, that's how creators and their audience would find each other, and I still feel that this leads to a better quality audience that is more likely to appreciate the art.
posted by Aleyn at 10:37 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

GDLP: The ordeal. Not trauma, the ordeal of being on social media

If social media is an ordeal, it might be that we should demand wages from the Zuckerberg
posted by eustatic at 10:02 AM on December 3, 2022

A novelist who succeeded at using social media to promote a book and is dismayed at the lesson some take from that.
posted by brainwane at 4:35 AM on December 9, 2022