Category: ART

YOUR ART NEEDS MORE OF YOUR ART

I believe a few things in my line of work:

Let people know what you’re doing.

By this, I mean when you have a new song, exhibit, drawing, or idea, you should share it with your audience or your fans.

Like Rick Rubin says, “make stuff, and show it to your friends.”

Let people know what you’re doing in a way that is as creative as the work itself.

Established artists can send out a flyer with a BUY NOW button because they have the luxury of being established artists.

Radiohead and Beyonce can drop a surprise album because they’re Radiohead and Beyonce.

You’re not Radiohead or Beyonce.

Posting “here’s my new thing” and a link gets lost in the river of content, because everyone posts “here’s my new thing” every hour of the day, week after week, year after year.

“Meritocracy is a myth,” says Delon Om. “I always believed that my art would speak for itself- that its merit would earn recognition and validation. Unfortunately, I have learned that is not the case.”

It’s never been easier to distribute your work and get it seen by a million people by lunchtime, but because everyone can do that, it’s also never been harder.

This video from Noah Kalina documents how he captured a photo and made it into a print, which sold out in a few hours. To my knowledge, he only mentioned this offering in his video, which “only” got about 900 views in a month, but his work doesn’t just speak for itself. His work is the work, and his art is the art. It’s all Noah Kalina.

He didn’t just post “new print for sale” on his Instagram Threads and call it a day.

He spent many hours making that art and told his friends about it in a 100% Noah Kalina way.

Bobby Hundreds doesn’t need to write 500+ word newsletters, he’s Bobby Hundreds! He could easily get away with posting his random thoughts and links to new endeavors. But I imagine someone like Bobby has so much creativity coursing through his veins that he’s compelled to share more about the big things he’s doing.

QUESTION: How can your creative spirit inform how you tell your friends about your work?

PROTECT THE NETWORK

Photo by Noah Kalina

Noah Kalina has a new zine out called ‘Protect the Network,’ all about how trees and branches are pruned so that the wires can safely pass, allowing for the network to be protected.

“I think we all have a fundamental understanding that what these lines of cable are doing is providing us with essential services. Power is essential. Phones, sure, for a few people. I might even argue the internet is more important than power. Either way, we depend on the network, and so we need to protect it.”

More info here, buy it here (limited to 100 copies).

HARD ART

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

Lots of people are making great art. And now AI is coming in to make things more tricky. Sure, Fiverr. All that.

The “great art” part is easy for consumers – they know it when they see it. They might not even care if you made it or a computer made it. They know what they like, and they buy it (or just save it to their desktop).

What I’m saying then is your art isn’t for those people. Your work isn’t for “I’ll take whatever is cheapest / easiest.”

Your work is for people who want to go deeper, who care, who think the person behind the art matters just as much as the art.

Those are your people, and if you’re lucky, they may someday become customers.

The text above was part of my reply to someone talking about the never-ending conundrum of “getting the word out” about what someone makes as an artist, or a painter, or a photographer. How we need social media, how everything is stacked against the independent creative person.

They had two posts on their Substack, so I mentioned this, too:

I read two of your posts – one about ADHD, and one about the atrocities of the war-ravaged world we live in. I already know you care, that you think about others, that you live with ADHD (something I know very little about)… but now I know a bit about you. You’ve already made it clear “this isn’t just about making pretty pictures.” You’ve put on full display, “This is me, this is what you get.” For what it’s worth, I’m going to subscribe – not (just) because of your art, but because of who you’ve shown yourself to be, which is how all this works.

I’ve channeled a lot of Seth Godin energy in this reply, but seriously… there’s a lot of great artwork out there. There’s no shortage of that. But there’s a shortage of people who care, who show up like you do. Keep doing that.

USE YOUR VOICE

Thinking about a section of Austin Kleon’s “Show Your Work,” which is “You Can’t Fing Your Voice is You Don’t Uset it.”

We find it by using it. We find out photographic style by taking more photos, we find out guitar style by playing guitar, we find out our artist style by… by being ourselves and being present in the world, sharing what we do.

The chapter talks about the movie writer Roger Ebert, and how he lost his voice so he then found his voice through writing online.

For any lone artist in a small town, whos prime disadvantage is that they live in a small town, well, here was a movie critic who lost his voice – such a loss! Such a “disadvantage.”

Write, post, talk, discuss. Do it online, do it often, seek out your weirdos, and make sure you have a website where all your weirdness resides (like this blog).

STOP RELYING ON INSTAGRAM

Build your project on someone else’s platform, and you’re at the mercy of the platform.

From their website:

“For each edition, all participants share their artworks via Instagram by uploading their typographic interpretations of each letter and number to their profiles, while using the project’s hashtags plus the daily hashtags to submit their work and enter the challenge.”

See, IG removed the “Recent” tag for hashtags, so now it’s just TOP POSTS.

This means that if you were to tag your entry to enter a giveaway or contest, you wouldn’t be able to see all the entries, just the TOP entries, according to however IG determines what “top” really is.

Because of this, the next round is canceled for now (via their IG):

Instagram’s never-ending updates have brought many significant challenges and changes since we started, leaving us with the feeling that the platform isn’t the same as it once was.

In particular, the recent updates to hashtags, one of the core parts of the project, have made them almost useless (with no way to browse all entries and no chronological order), making it almost impossible to manage a new edition as we used to.

This is just another reason why you should always be using social media to drive traffic to your own properties, where you own the content, the system, and the relationship with your readers.

And for fucks sake, it’s mullet marketing, all the way down.

Look how cool and vibrant their Instagram page looks! Party in the back!

If I had Instagram I’d want to check out every single one of those types! So much color, life, magic!

The website is all business. It reflects barely any of the magical energy of their Instagram page, which is such a bummer.

Friends – Instagram is still just a webpage.

You can make your website look cool, I promise.

And then as a brand (37 Days of Type has over 400,000 followers on IG) you simply tell your audience, “hey, we’re fucking moving. Don’t like it? Well, too bad.”

“Yeah but, Instagram makes it so easy to follow and keep up!”

Does it? What the fuck just happened here?

When you post do you reach more than 10% of your followers?

If 90% of your fans miss everything you post, maybe Instagram or Twitter are not great platforms for communicating with people who enjoy your work.

Drive people to your fucking website. Companies like Instagram and Twitter do not give a shit about your art, your music, nothing – if you ain’t dancing and singing and pointing at words, you’re dead to them.