Above a fireplace

a relationship with living online

Fingers to phone, swiping through the stories section on Instagram (changing the channel?), I often see ads about painting, art, selling paintings, and how best to sell art. Usually the ads are videos of women sitting in their studios, painting while some music plays in the background. Consider myself targeted—seen? Though it’s worth mentioning that I do not have a studio.

I usually skip past ads, but the other day I let them play out; I watched, genuinely interested in what They thought I wanted / should want / or needed to see. 

The video showed an artist painting. She takes a photo of her work after it’s done. But what to do with this photo next? How does one display or translate what’s been made, cast it across a sea of audiences, markets, people, hearts, numbers, lungs. A question, always present, asks in varying degrees of shadow: do I want this to be seen? and how? How how how how can this / I / this / I be seen? 

The ad had an answer. 

An app that places your work in different scenes and rooms as if it’s already been bought—create an image of a lucrative transaction that never took place, but appeared to.

The spaces the app generates are affluent. Art hangs above affluent-looking fireplaces, in rooms with modern, affluent-looking furniture. The artwork is central, resting as if after a long run, effortlessly residing in Center. I mean, yes. Buy the art. Please buy the art. Yes, place it in a scene to be seen, as that is what many artists wish for.

But there are many kinds of scenes, aren’t there. Many ways that curtains can either open or close, maybe halfway, showing just part of a dimly lit stage, a performer standing slightly off center. I have yet to encounter a space or site that cannot be accented, disrupted, channeled, mind-blown, underscored—et Cet er UH, by “art.” This includes but is not limited to auspicious spaces.  

As someone who has struggled against The Machine for a while now, and without going too much into it, I want to gently remind myself that art exists everywhere, all the time, even—perhaps especially—when nobody sees it.  

This concept is not new to our collective culture minds. We all know the story of the starving artist, of “unseen / unknown art” that either exists for itself, or spends lifetimes in a cellar, waiting to be known—and we respect it, even idolize it to the point where it’s ironically and exhaustively CAPITALIZED on in our era’s folklore.

But do we practice this worship? Recognize it in all of its shapes? Do we allow ourselves to honor the kind of work and the kind of making that we may not understand or see?

To what extent do we accept difference, variation, and form? Do we appreciate the diversity in backgrounds, identities, and choices that allow for art to be born? Do we rise to meet art and makers on their terms? Do we do so without asking them to comply with our rules, even just slightly so we can digest it? Do we seek art, or must art seek to meet us—our pockets—in order for it to survive? As audiences, to what extent do we support creators that need to eat? How do we eat? What are our methods of interacting with our creativity, with images of ourselves and our lives, in this curated, and highly saturated online space and beyond? 

Though we are all well aware that spaces like Instagram are places to trade images of stylized success—homes wiped clean of what making and work can really look and feel like—our continued presence there, where Mistake is often sterilized, where Undesirable is removed or altered to fit a current pressing standard, can have us questioning our subjective realities, and our innate (beautiful) stumbling ways. But making, akin to living, is dynamic and messy, like any other uncertain shape:

narrow, non aesthetic rooms, piles of dust on things neglected and unused, paint on walls that the landlord will bill you for, unfinished or finished works that miss, disgruntled people who misunderstand your commitment or fixation to making, holes you made in your desk by accident, a room where beautiful light pours in, tools that need replacing that you can’t afford, rent you cannot afford, time lost and time given, people who use your work for their gain, empty chocolate wrappers and unwashed dinner plates, mounting and receding levels of stress that circle and land, moments of chills rushing up and down your arms, a smile from someone who sees you, and several unopened emails, some of which demand you bring your attention to the Order of The Real World, and “real things,” as if anybody knows what that means

Must we place ourselves above app-generated affluent fireplaces that aren’t real in order to achieve something real? What. Is. Real. 

This place we are living in now—I mean online, in IG. Hi, IG. What are we sculpting? I mean, What can we make in landscapes that aren’t made for us?

The shadowbans, the trolls, the rhythms of Algo, the addictions, blatantly harmful Beauty Standards, unblemished life, counter movements, inspiration and connection, and the things we see that we otherwise wouldn’t see are the elements we work with daily. Must we? When so many of these machine parts work against our well being.

Without The Screen, we imagine being confined to a single room in a single city inside a single body, limited without our access to the myth of limitless. Godless. Unable to sell art, for example. Unable to be known, or connected to our friends. Are we going to win the lottery if we remain faithful? If we stay here and play within the walls of this container? 

If the Blueprint was designed to absorb us—to create in us a universal, insatiable need for something because we are the implied nothing—to exhaust, overextend, and employ us towards external obsession, rendering us into transmutations of our original selves—What can We d0 whil3 we R here?

Lobby for this attention, and / or / then seek to disrupt it? Use it. Transform it. or reject it. What will we do while we are here, but to try to see and be seen. What will we do 

while we are here  

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tell me ur thoughts, what kind of relationship do u hve w/making, with IG / with sharing your work and yourself?