WP2: Freedom to Draw for Yourself
When I say I post art online, I’m not talking about a professional website that I show prospective clients.
I’m talking about posting cringey art of my favorite video game and praying to God I get more than 100 likes on it. I’m talking about interacting with other artists on Discord and drawing each other’s characters. I’m talking about fandoms, communities, YouTube channels, and content creators that all revolve around the premise of making art and showing it to other people.
As the Internet developed and art migrated to the online world, there were some serious growing pains. The idea of ‘art’ as a whole changed as well as the artist’s attitude towards making and sharing it.
Instead of galleries and portfolios, we’ve advanced towards likes and views. The Internet’s number game of pairing each art piece with a number associated with it has added an entirely new side to sharing art, creating the idea that one piece of art can and should do “better” than another.
When you post art on Instagram or TikTok, anyone in the entire world has the chance to see it. You can blow up and get hundreds of thousands of fans in days. This new precedent forces a creator to straddle the line between making art for fun and making art for as many interactions as possible to grow your online presence. The push to make your art as popular as you can is ingrained into users the second they start posting.
And these are only a few of the phenomena I see invading the minds of young artists online. God knows I’m missing a lot of ground from where I stand in the space.
For me, I’ve grown up with the idea of art already tainted by the new standard of the Internet and watched it grow and develop as I got older. As a student in the arts right now, a lot of my classmates and even professors have experienced the same but through the lens of their own identity and childhood. A huge part of my identity is how I make and interact with art, especially online, so I wanted to see how the same affects other people’s lives.
Thus, I interviewed three of my classmates and friends who similarly grew up among the online artist community. I asked them how their online life directly influenced their identity and vice versa. When your primary interest or passion is out on blast for the world to see, it surely would change the way you see yourself and what you like.
For each interview, I started by asking each interviewee their relationship with numbers: likes, comments, views, etc. When dealing with social media, it’s standard practice to want to get as high numbers as possible. To begin each conversation, I wanted to ask what they thought about this first. From there, I let each person speak on whatever topic was most relevant to them.
The whole premise of this entire project was to look outside of my own thoughts and ideas about a subject that’s really integrated into my life to try and get a better understanding of it all. I hope that you, the reader, can take something from this to look at your own art or posts. See what you relate to, what you disagree with, what you might want to try out… the beauty of the Internet is that everyone’s experiences are immensely different from one another.
Ultimately, I just want each artist to feel comfortable with themselves online and cultivate a space to express and explore themselves. Without a lot of the pressures and discourses in the art circles, it’s a really rewarding and inviting community I wouldn’t want any newer users to shy away from.
Feel free to read the following in any order.
