I return to this blog, after a nine month absence, to discuss an important topic that has been the focus of my attention whenever I can sit down and have time for reflection and perhaps a good cigar...
The topic I am referring to is the growing disaccord between the creative process, taken in its entirety, and the growing need for creatives to maintain a steady flow of “content” to nurture their following on social media. Note that by using the word “disaccord”, my intention is to convey “lack of harmony” as per this nouns’ definition in the Oxford dictionary. Now, with that out of the way, I can begin to expound this theory that I have been piecing together slowly over the past few months.
I am sure that everyone can recall how —unbeknownst to us at the time— the advent of sophisticated collateralized-debt-obligations, together with other increasingly complex financial products, gave rise to a complicated set of circumstances which eventually led to the 2008 financial crisis. Well, my analysis leads me to believe that, much like our lack of understanding as to the impact those lowly financial products would eventually have on people’s lives, the advent of social media is slowly giving rise to conditions in which the creative process and eventually artistic expression itself will undergo a period of radical change.
Only a fool, living deep inside a bottomless cave on an uncharted island, would be unaware of the fact that social media has changed the way we interact with each other as well as what we now consider to be “best practices” in most fields of human endeavor. The very nature of social media, with its instantaneous and nearly cost-free delivery of content to potentially billions of people anywhere on planet earth has dramatically changed the landscape of social communication. Within this large realm of communication, the changes currently undergoing human entertainment would be the ones that concern me the most, given my photographic aspirations.
Humans love to be entertained, we love to have our breath taken away by an incredible photograph showing us an everyday item or landscape in a new and surprising way that we never realized was possible. We love to view theatrical productions, watch movies or read books and poetry that make us cringe, curse and cry; just to name a few of the multitude of emotional reactions we get from being entertained by an artists’ creation.
It’s a known fact that humans react positively to certain types of external stimuli and less so to others, hence why we have created an entire lexicon of words such as “beautiful” and “ugly” to describe our emotional reactions to these sensory stimuli. These standards are deeply entrenched in our brains and constitute part of the value-system we develop throughout our lives. On a micro-level, these standards vary from person to person, yet looking at society on a macro-level, various patterns will begin to arise. Nowhere are these patterns more evident than within the “likes” and “views” hierarchy currently found throughout social media.
This blatant quantification of human emotion, measured by viewers actions/reactions on social media platforms, creates the perfect conditions in which the unquenchable human desire for competition can fester and feed upon itself. This very competition, already prevalent throughout society, whether that be in industry or in sports, should not be allowed to influence mankind’s artistic aspirations to such a degree that they, in turn, begin to evolve into this new set of circumstances. Probably the best example of this evolutionary change brought on by social media can be seen in photography. Like it or not, platforms such as Instagram create circumstances as well as incentives which, over time, will modify people’s behavior.
In my opinion, this type of competitive environment, within which artists compete for viewers’ attention —or better yet “views”— can become detrimental to the artists themselves, more specifically to their creative process, whether they recognize it or not. After giving it considerable thought over the course of many months, I came to the understanding that the concentration, accessibility and transparency found within a social media platform such as Instagram, are the deep-seated causes of the competitive environment it intrinsically creates.
Lets say you are casually strolling down Main street in Flagstaff Arizona, just a stone’s throw from the Grand Canyon, a very popular location for landscape photographers and painters alike. You can expect to eventually encounter an artists’ gallery or a shop selling a selection of work from various artists, but you will never expect to see them lined up one after the other, in an infinite line of storefronts. Even if they were, once you step inside, the experience would change drastically and the personal character of each artist and his or her art would suddenly move center stage. The very fact that in reality, these galleries will be physically separated and scattered throughout the city gives even more credence to the importance of concentration and accessibility in terms of the relationship viewers have with artistic creations.
Platforms such as Instagram are essentially providing creatives with the space to showcase their work, much like a storefront in a traditional brick-and-mortar store would. However, by condensing everything into an endless series of similarly shaped spaces that run ad infinitum, viewers are compelled to run on and on endlessly for hours viewing these virtual “storefronts”. This would be impossible in the physical world. On top of these important aspects of concentration and accessibility, we have witnessed “likes” quickly becoming a unit of measure that, over time, creates a quasi-hierarchical structure which is openly transparent to viewers and artists alike.
These various elements, working together, guarantee that —by design— scarcity of content will never occur, thereby creating a de facto market for viewers’ attention instead of the other way around. This set of circumstances has drastic implications for artists who will be competing for this limited resource, attention.
The creative process is different for every artist. He or she can sometimes take years to go from the earliest stages of visualization to the final completion of their work. One needs to look no further than Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Gioconda” (Mona Lisa), perhaps the non plus ultra as far as artistic creations go. The most recent re-dating of the painting by experts at the Louvre concluded that the painting was painted between the years 1503 and 1514 after which Leonardo suffered a stroke leaving him very likely unable to continue painting until his death a few years later in 1519. This painting and the long, often sporadic, creative process involved in its creation, proves once and for all that the direction and speed of an artist’s creative process should NEVER be sullied by external factors. That would, much like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, have irreversible effects on the very act of creation and hence the work of art itself.
to be continued…
In the second part of this series “The Long Game - Part 2” I use the example of photography to demonstrate how social media platforms, such as Instagram, promote certain behaviors as well as how those behaviors will, over time, begin to erode the creative process and have a detrimental effect on artistic expression. Stay tuned!