I always get a little uncomfortable when I see posts featuring an artist who takes the exploratory scribblings of a very young child, to refine and polish and make a more conventionally representative image.
It never feels like collaboration.
I feel like giving the kid some paper and crayons and telling them, “Sorry they messed with your shit, go make some more and try not to let them get their hands on it this time…”
this very strange thing about tumblr is the way it objectifies art and other objects, completely removing them from their context. one stupid doodle in my notebook has gotten a thousand reblogs in less than 24 hours, and people make comments as if there’s no original person attached to it, as if…
Now that I’ve had a few drawings get out into the Tumblrverse and garner large numbers of notes I suppose I could share an observation. You see, the very nature of tumblr is something akin to a game of “telephone”. One can get 300 notes on an image and it’s unlikely that any of those people will end up following you.
Tumblr is a free art gallery where the patrons don’t look at the information cards beside the art. I think that to put work up in this gallery, one starts functioning more as an artisan than an artist. The process has more to do with what a product designer or craftsperson goes through than a studio portraitist or autobiographer. After the first re-blog, your work stands only on its merits. The artist mindset or story does not matter to the consumer in this case – only if it functions properly within a context. A million people own an article from Ikea, only ten of them really care that it was designed by a particular person.
And this is all fine! I happened to see emiljafrances’ Existential Crisis work and immediately recognized its mass-appeal. An image of an agitated young woman with tattoos and septum piercing accompanied by the words “Existential Crisis 2011” was MADE for this kind of blog platform. It transcends any personal meaning the artist associates with it and is immediately and completely absorbed into the culture that identifies with the image and sentiment.
The implications are simple. Either make posts that are personally satisfying to you the artist and disregard what becomes of them, or pretend you are designing something for the mass market. Both can be satisfying outlets.
you will not be rescued: this very strange thing about tumblr is the way it objectifies art and…
Duende. It’s a word peculiar to Spanish arts. It has no reasonable English equivalent. It’s about love and lust and despair and violence and beauty and the enormity of it all.
I feel it sometimes. That scorching burnt longing in the soul. Sometimes I want to find myself in 1927 Andalusia. In the caves. In the night. In the hot night when men howled at the close blackness and the universe listened. The cante jondo, the “deep” song. The hands on fire. The voice on fire. It was never recorded. Not the real thing. I want the real thing. The real thing.
Lachrimaestro 