I did not realize till I saw the Jenny Nicholson video on my fyp that Dear Evan Hanson had such a notorious reputation for cringe. My first exposure to its music was heart wrenching and bizarre. Someone had trained an AI on danny’s voice and made a TikTok of “him” singing Waving Through a Window. Hearing an uncanny simulacrum of his voice warble out the words —
I’ve learned to slam on the breaks, before I even turn the key //
before I make the mistake, before I lead with the worst of me //
give them no reason to stare, no slipping up if you slip away //
so I’ve got nothing to share //
no I’ve got nothing to say //
step out, step out, step out of the sun if you keep getting burned //
step out step out of the sun because you’ve learned, because you’ve learned…//
— was rough. This was right as he was starting to really pull back from his public social media, and I could see the writing on the wall. It took a few drawings to really process the emotions that came up from that tiktok, and listening to the song can still get me in the gut sometimes.
I had to tell that anecdote in evoking that song, but the lyric from it I’ve had in my mind today is “If you’re falling in a forest, and there’s nobody around, do you ever really crash or even make a sound?” I’ve been trying to nail down what minimum amount of engagement with my work would be satisfying, and what form would be the most so. There’s a dialectical tension between art being a process that has value outside of what is produced or shared, and it inherently being a form of expression meant to create moments of human connection. You can find ways to play catch with yourself, and it serves a function, but let’s not pretend that’s what we imagine when we talk about playing catch.
I alluded to this in a previous post, but there is really no place on the internet to post that feels meaningful to me. Scrolling through your IG feed is the equivalent of going to an art museum and full on sprinting through in 5 minutes, throwing darts at the ones you like. The piece with the most darts at the end of the day “wins”! Deviant Art had terrible issues, of course, but I do remember that the rabbit holes I would go down to find new work were based mostly on the individual artist’s pages. I would spend time going through their gallery, actually opening up the pieces that intrigued me, getting to see them in high resolution. Then I could see all the artwork they had liked from other artists, and these more organic artist to artist networks would form. The work wasn’t atomized into one 480p image that you see for half a second as you scroll past, or repackaged as a reel – repackaged here meaning your art becomes a prop in your videos, and the reels are the actual “content”.
I should consider even further back than my own experience, though. Before the internet, especially before the midcentury, an artist’s work might only ever be seen by the people in their town. The kind of artists whose work reached people around the country, or around the globe, were the mega mega stars. Even very established and talented working professionals likely had an audience of a handful of family and friends for their personal work. If they did professional illustration, they were essentially faceless. I was struck by that when I went to the train park last year, and I saw the gorgeous oil painted magazine covers. So much talent without any expectation of recognition.
There are ten million ways the terrifyingly genius black hat psychologists on staff at social media companies manipulate us to spend the precious moments of our lives looking at ads and rage bait and ai slop, but one goes a little under the radar. It’s one step removed and at first blush feels more like just a modern societal problem, but there is absolutely blood on google and meta’s hands (when isn’t there, I guess). It massively benefits them if we think our life is meaningless if it is unperceived. They cultivate that feeling in ways I can’t even really pin down, but I’ve only been self conscious of it as an outside influence after stepping away. I did not realize how deep those claws were. I kept running on this soul sucking tread mill, a death by a thousand cuts of deliberately instilled moments of insecurity and comparison, only marginally better than the abyss of total isolation.
AI chat bots can give self hating and socially marginalized people something that feels enough like human connection that it is a functional analgesic and a refuge from rejection. It can be a suffocating safety blanket though, and also presents a distorted version of connecting to another real person with agency and a life of their own. Social media can do a similar thing – it is a place where you need to trade much less vulnerability for a lot more interaction. There is less friction than in person social settings, and the ability to instantly disengage from confrontation. It is a painkiller for the loneliness epidemic, but it is massively contributing to it. In running from the pain we don’t have the motivation to treat the real problem, we don’t have the push to get over that social anxiety, that fear of rejection. And of course, the more time we spend isolated, the more likely we are to pick back up our phones…this is sounding more and more like an actual drug dealer, now that I’m thinking about it. Dopamine is a potent drug, especially for ADHD peeps (read, many artists).
So while I don’t know yet where my art will live, I intend to sit in the discomfort of making art for myself and for my friend Laura, using that to motivate me to investigate real life spaces. The art market route is still a question mark – more and more I am skeptical of art as a career given the direction of all the creative industries and the crisis of AI. Even at its best, you can spend the same amount of time doing administrative/promotional shit for your art business as you would a 9 to 5, but with the downside that you now have to adapt the work you produce to be commercially viable. Ironically you might have less time to make personally inspired work, and your pay is almost guaranteed to be shit. The one main way out now is to sell not your work but yourself, your brand – become an influencer. I’d rather chew glass than throw my soul to the wolves like that. Some people are built for it, I would be a hippo in a tutu.
It’s funny how things are mirrored sometimes – danny left social media from being perceived too much, I’m doing it for not being perceived enough. I get peeved at him for not thinking enough, if he ever thought of me I’m sure it was in the context of “she is overthinking and doing way too much”. In woowoo land there is the idea of a karmic contract – it’s someone you are meant to run into for ultimately good reasons, but they will fuck your shit up by being that mirror to the wounds you need to heal. When I’m feeling particularly narcissistic I wonder if that mirror is one way glass – has he gotten something out of this too?
In a bit of irony, I will leave off with a few sketches, and also some quotes from a short book I read today called Art and Fear. It didn’t have a lot of new or rare insight, but it phrased the difficult truths we already know in clear and concise and compassionate language. Sometimes you just need to be reminded that if your art practice is a constant struggle with rejection and uncertainty and inconsistency and doubt and fear – you are doing it right. Remember too, it’s ok if at times it gets too much – take your toys and go back inside. Go within.
>>robyns_ramblings 