Dru responds to this morning's post:

"If there's no market for your creative work the only reason to make it is for deeply subjective personal reasons.

Contrariwise: Monetary reward may not be forthcoming but you may receive respect and adulation even without being paid. Many people might find these things more satisfying than a small or moderate sum of money.

Case study:

A) Artist X takes a picture and posts it to Flickr. 127 people comment on his picture and 3,469 people add it as a favorite. His picture makes #2 on the Flickr explore page for the day.

B) Artist X has a gallery show at ABC Gallery, which includes the picture mentioned above. A couple dozen people show up. No one buys anything, but Critic Y writes a nice 600 word review for the Georgia Straight and Critic Z writes a deeply insightful 2,000 word review for Canadian Art, linking Artist X to a tradition stretching from Titian and Raphael through Duchamp, Foucault and Houllebecq to Regine Debatty.

Which of these two events is likely to provide more satisfaction to Artist X, and why?"

In event A, Artist X's picture is at best a distraction or a novelty. Someone else will be #2 on the Flickr explore page tomorrow, and the day after that, and on into infinity. Who'll remember, even a week from now, that Artist X's picture exists? At best, a very small group of the 3,469 people who "added it as a favorite." I'm Facebook "friends" with lots of people I haven't seen or interacted with in years. I think the same metaphor applies to Flickr favoriting. This is Warhol's promise of fifteen minutes of fame sped up to warp speed, and it favors works "of the moment" over everything else. It also isolates pictures as pure visuality, without consideration of the larger social, historical and philosophical contexts they're a part of.

Anyone can make one good photograph, but it's a lot harder to keep making them, and to have your work evolve in spontaneous, unpredictable, and aesthetically significant ways. When Critic Z describes Artist X as part of a lineage -- a retroactively constituted one, inconceivable before Artist X and his work -- he or she is not just evaluating the Flickr favorite in isolation, but Artist X's whole involvement with the world. Critic Z's thinking should count for a lot more than Flickr comment #97's "Dude! Sweet shot!"
- posted by cjb @ 2:51 PM