How does the artist do art?
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for all the blogging and making YouTube videos and studying algorithms and trying to build an audience.
I see myself primarily as an artist but how much of that time is spent arting? Well it depends on the season.
When I write novels I spend hours a day for a few months. When I write music it’s a least an hour a day on guitar. When I recorded it was almost 6 weeks straight making demos and learning the software.
Recently I made two music videos that took about 6 weeks and that’s the last thing I did that really felt like “art”.
After you put out some work and it doesn’t reach as far as you think it deserves, you want to spend some time to let it sit and find its audience. You could keep going but you could also take a break.
Behold, a music video:
I always feel like I’m not out there enough. For various reasons I won’t talk about here, I haven’t been able to play shows or travel around or comfortable jam or collaborate. I hope that will change in the next few months but over the past 5 or 6 years I’ve instead gotten into “content creation”.
I think art and content creation differ in their goals. Perhaps content creation is aiming for quantity and art for quality? That’s not to say art is always “better” than content, but art will sometimes sacrifice things that could allow it to reach more people because those things don’t match with the vision. Content can also make those sacrifices but I think anyone seeking to “create content” is ready to make more of those sacrifices.
Art also speaks to the heart more than the mind and Content is generally the other way around.
I started creating content because I wanted to promote my art but I found that the audience is quite different and the process is fun in itself. I like trying to understand what will succeed and what won’t and seeing how the algorithms work.
I’ve always been a bit of an armchair anthropologist, or rather, a bit of a wild DIY uncertified anthropologist, and so anything that helps me understand how the world functions as it does is fascinating to me.
Algorithms, human attention, trends, cultural phenomena, I want to know how it all intersects, and putting out YouTube shorts or blogs or posting on social media allow me to test certain things. Rather than just following trends, I want to poke at the giant that is our society and see if it notices.
Behold, a YouTube short or two :
What are you curious about?
Turn off the news
And so here I am, an artist who hasn’t really “arted” in a bout two months other than practicing guitar for about an hour or two a week.
Yes there is an artistic element to making these videos and blogging, learning which filters look nice, seeing which ideas are resonating and which aren’t, but I miss finding wandering musicians in a hostel cafe and jamming with them for an hour or two, playing shows and challenging myself to level up as a performer, getting lost in a story I created and hearing what friends have to say about it.
I want to try contact dance and piano and level up my production skills and maybe even design clothing or freestyle rap. It isn’t time for those yet though and so for now I’ll continue to produce these YouTube shorts and remind people that I have a novella series called Confessions of the Damaged that’s available at the link in my bio, and hope that someone bites.
I hope that 2025 is more about art than content honestly. Not looking down on content, but I still see art as my primary thing. 🔥 👨🎨 🔥
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I will highly guess that you will become successful because of your creative process.
Just continue doing it and you'll get there, mate!
thank you! Sometimes it feels hopeless but you remind me that I have something going for me, and it’s not like o even know how to stop
Meanwhile I've been told I need to promote more and I double whammy suck at that and absolutely abhor doing that with every single nanoparticle involved in my being.
also with the time I have I pretty much have to choose between making the things I want to make and making the "content"/blog posts/whatever and one of them feels pretty pointlessly worthlessly useless without the other one given and so it's a nonsensical cycle of extreme stupidity all the way down
On the one hand I don't know why you're feeling guilty if you're having fun doing the things, on the other I get it. Guilt in this case is misplaced and stupid and can and should be completely and utterly ignored at best (easiest option) and kerbstomped into oblivion at worst (while this sounds entertaining I haven't figured out the how of this one yet XD).
I think I could have written a lot more to explain why I feel guilty although guilty might not be the best word. It's more of questioning myself and what I'm doing and trying to figure out what is important to me, if this is really what I should be spending my time on.
I have fun with it to an extent, but I think I also choose it sometimes cause it's just easier and doesn't require the same level of commitment. There are many layers.
I want to commit to ART, but I also feel I don't have the energy to commit to the art, and then I end up resenting the grind that drains me, and sometimes I end up resenting the content because it also takes my attention and become an opiate that satisfies me enough to not find more radical solutions (like hitchhiking across the country or playing music on the street or something that would challenge me and also lead to physical interactions). I'm going to finish healing up my neck soon, and then we will see, I think everything will get a lot easier then!