devaluation of the arts – Kara Jorgensen

Last week in part 1, I discussed how video-based social media has screwed over artists and the artistic process. While you don’t necessarily have to read part 1 to understand part 2, I will be building upon those arguments today.

Scrolling through Tiktok, a woman making miniatures flashes across my screen. With a pair of long tweezers, she places a dozen tiny books onto a bookcase, one after the other. The cuts are evident, but I know that even someone with a deft hand and lots of practice picking up tiny things would struggle to put these itty bitty books on a shelf and have them look artfully arranged. I wonder how much time has gone into creating this video. Was this a time lapse or a rehearsed arrangement of books? Have the other books been glued down to avoid accidentally dumping or upsetting what’s already been placed down in this diorama of a library? But I’ll never know. The moment the last book hits the shelf, the camera pulls back to reveal a quaint, cozy library done in 1:12 scale. It zooms in on a few details before looping back to the beginning.

There’s something about miniatures that I love, though I don’t make them myself. It’s a replication of real life but on an inhuman scale. It’s a very human thing to build houses for ghosts. To decorate them to honor some unseen presence. We relish the work and time we put in making something the hypothetical inhabitant would like. Dollhouses pick up where our temples or homemade altars left off, and it’s comforting to know humans never truly change.

I follow a bunch of people who make miniatures on Instagram and Youtube. Miniaturists often make their own pieces for their dioramas or buy them from independent creators who specialize in a very specific niche like making tiny, lifelike vegetables or weaving itty bitty carpets on a bracelet loom. Under a video of someone rolling out and painting a clay cabbage, a commenter asks how much they cost. I wince at the responses to the creator’s honest answer. “FOR A CLAY CABBAGE?? I COULD MAKE THAT FOR $3!” says the questioner, and others quickly chime in to tell the craftsperson what a rip-off their price is.

The Price of the Aesthetic

If you’re an artist of any type, I’m sure you’ve heard someone complaining about the price of your work, whether it’s a $5 ebook or a $300 full color art commission. People don’t understand the amount of work that goes into making something. It isn’t just the cost of the materials or even the time it takes to make it. You’re paying for skill. It’s the same reason you can make yourself a cheeseburger and fries at home, but you pay $15 for the same thing at a restaurant. The chef knows what they’re doing, and you’re paying for their expertise. Yes, you could make that clay cabbage at home for $3, but do you have the experience to know what clay works best or how thin to roll it without tearing it or how to paint things in a way that makes them seem lifelike? In the amount of time, effort, and material you used to figure it out, you’ve probably spent more than you would have if you bought it from a professional.

When I commission artwork of my characters from my favorite artists, I do so because I know they can do a better job than I ever could. I’m paying for their skill, and usually, I’m underpaying for that skill. Most artists I know do not charge what their work is worth, and even then, they still get told they’re overcharging or trying to rip people off. No matter how little a creative charges, it will always be too much for someone. With the way social media algorithms demand artists to perform in videos, I wonder how much worse this will get.

As someone who crafts and writes, I know the time a project takes, the toll repeated motions can have on the body, the costs of materials, and the amount of energy it takes to learn a skill and hone it over years, but what about those who don’t? I think back to that Tiktok video of the woman placing tiny books on a shelf. I wonder how many people watching the video understand how much work goes into making each of those miniature books. Yes, they look uniform and nearly perfect, despite there being several dozen of them, but that is due to hours of labor and years of skill. They don’t look perfect because it’s easy. They look perfect because the artist knows what they’re doing. And now that work is been distilled into thirty seconds of “content” on Tiktok, being watched by people who may have no interest in miniatures or how they’re made or anything this artist is doing beyond consuming shifting pixels on a screen. The ratio of people who know what they’re looking at to the people who don’t is getting worse the further the video goes outside its target audience, and the more that happens, the more the demeaning comments flow in.

The shift to splashy thirty seconds or less videos is doing a disservice to the arts. A very common format on Tiktok is someone making something with half second sharp cuts between steps in the process. Thread the needle, needle into fabric, row, row, row, row, progress shot, tada. It forces the artist to condense their work and process into what I like to call the aesthetic of productivity. It flattens the creative process to the bare bones of each step, making it almost prescriptive when the art of creating the piece is not meant to be a tutorial. This format doesn’t leave room for contemplation or mistakes or reevaluation, just forward progress, a march to the finish before it’s onto the next Instagram worthy piece. It’s slight of hand that hides the work in favor of the sparkly product, but when we hide the work, we hide the skill, the meaning, the way we’re truly supposed to experience art.

Bob Ross wasn’t a cool artist because he made a shit ton of paintings; it was because he made the act of painting accessible and enjoyable. He took his skill and time and taught others how to make art and be fulfilled by the process of adding happy trees and embracing mistakes. What we’re seeing now is antithesis to this. It’s all product and capitalist consumption, no process or joy or fulfillment. When we take out the most fulfilling parts of creating and what allows us to express ourselves, we not only devalue what makes us human but the skill that artists have cultivated through years of practice and work.

Who Let the Tech Bros in?

I won’t get into my long winded rant about how the devaluation of the humanities lies squarely with white supremacy and its besties, capitalism and fascism, but for now, trust me when I say that the greater accessibility of higher education, online tutorials for nearly anything, and the ease of sharing marginalized voices via social media coinciding with a massive devaluation of the arts and humanities isn’t a coincidence. And as if smelling the blood in the water, tech bros have caught wind of the devaluation of the artistic process and sought to capitalize on it.

First, it was NFTs plaguing the art community, and now, it’s AI generated “art.” “Art” because art requires a certain level of humanity that a computer can never emulate. “Art” because it’s a plagiarist, and plagiarists don’t deserve credit for their work. And most importantly, “art” because it isn’t art; it’s an approximation of what the unskilled, uncaring, and uninterested think art should be. The worst part is, we’ve helped them get there with each high production value, no substance video.

For years, we have been devaluing the humanities. It started again in earnest more recently with the championing of STEM fields above all else and was compounded by the mass denigration of people who majored in the humanities (despite the fact that their skills make them more employable, even outside their respective fields). This has all been further heightened by the well-established misogynistic feelings in regards to needle crafts, clothing design, and artisanal products. Many of the crafts or types of art we see on Tiktok or Instagram were considered “women’s work” and were taken for granted or not seen as serious art for centuries, and now, that the queerness of many masc traditional artists is more obvious, there wasn’t enough “traditional masculinity” left to uphold the arts against the patriarchy. Techno grifters quickly realized they could cash in on those who wouldn’t dare debase themselves by dabbling in the arts and being vulnerable enough to be bad at something.

AI tech bros, whether they know it or not, are selling hyper-capitalist, patriarchal art. It requires no skill, no talent no practice, just stealing the hard work of legions of unseen (and probably marginalized) people. You can’t get more capitalist than that. At the core of it is instant gratification and accolades with none of the process or emotion that goes into actual art. And where do they show off these new masterpieces? Social media. Because as long as we’re quickly scrolling and haphazardly liking, we won’t notice the woman in the painting has seven fingers or that the pattern on her dress makes zero sense or that the piece has no emotional impact or intention. All that truly matters is that the tech bros have colonized a space that was inhabited largely by marginalized groups and filled it with easily consumable trash.

If the process no longer matters and the product barely matters beyond how many follows, likes, and retweets we garner, it’s no wonder that AI “art” has proliferated like a fungus. AI “art” is the culmination of the devaluation of art on social media because all that matters is pulling as much “content” and money from a piece as possible. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the solution is besides legislation cracking down on AI due to copyright issues, but there needs to be major push back from artists and art appreciators alike against the shiny-fication of the arts and the way it flattens the process and the meaning of the pieces themselves. Only by pushing back against the hyper-capitalist algorithms and trends can we truly move toward something more equitable and sustainable for artists.

If you want to help your artist friends, show off their art, like their quieter posts, and support things like UBI and other social safety nets that allow artists to more comfortably flourish. It isn’t too late to turn the tide.

I have a love-hate relationship with those “romanticize your life” videos you often see on Youtube or Instagram, especially when they’re paired with the arts.

On one hand, who doesn’t love seeing video clips of beautiful leather notebooks perched on an iron cafe table in some picturesquely autumnal town? On the other hand, 99.9% of the process does not look like that, and it makes me fear that social media is giving people very unrealistic expectations of what “the process” looks like in regards to art.

Eating with your Eyes

There have been plenty of articles recently that have discussed the burden social media marketing has put onto artists, writers, and craftspeople (I’m going to refer to everyone as artists from here on out because that’s what we all are, whether we want to admit it or not, and this may be part of the problem). Social media marketing for artists sucks. The main problem stems from the commodification of every single thing an artist creates. A fickle algorithm decides whether or not your video or photo is worthy of attention based on your keywords (or lack of) and whatever trend du jour is on order. This means art is being created with algorithms in mind instead of being created for art’s sake or for the artist or even for the artist’s intended audience. This is especially true on sites like Instagram and Tiktok where the idea is to get a post widely disseminated rather than it reaching the artist’s intended audience as one would encounter on Twitter, Bluesky, or author/genre specific forums. Tiktok especially expects the artist to find the audience rather than the audience go looking for things they actually care about. In order to get their work in front of more eyes, artists have to become actors and performers, and as the algorithm shifts further and further in favor of those who are better at this, then the rest of us are forced to become trained seals in their wake.

If you’re thinking, “Oh, well, you just have to get better at talking in front of a camera and selling your product,” you’re wrong. If it was that simple, my teaching skills would come in handy for once outside the classroom. The problem with these hyper visual platforms is that the artist becomes irrelevant except as a vehicle to take B roll or set up an aesthetic time lapse. Half the time, the product barely batters. What truly matters are the aesthetics. Does the artwork look good on camera? Can I put it somewhere aesthetic and film outdoors? Can I show the process at a cafe or in a dark academia-esque study lit with candles while I type nonsense on my very clean Mac Book in my Sunday best? It’s all smoke and mirrors to catch the algorithm’s attention and to get others to buy into that aesthetic delusion as well.

Viewers/followers are eating with their eyes. They are consuming a brand rather than a piece of art. They spend however long the video is taking it in before scrolling onto the next video and the next and the next with no end in sight. Artists are creating visual input that leaves little room for discussion, exploration, or even just the lingering one might do at a museum. You have to be changing camera angles and creating ambience; there is no time for contemplation. That isn’t the viewer or platform’s aim. But if no one is truly seeing a piece, what’s the point? Once the product is barely relevant, a blip on a phone screen, what does that mean for the process?

All Polish, No Process

Back when I was growing up, before Tiktok or IG or even Youtube, there was DeviantArt. It still exists as a place for artists to post their work, but it was a far different space than it is now. One of the things I appreciated about it was how there was a section specifically for artists to post their sketches or scraps. The main part of the site was all the polished works, but artists let you peek behind the curtain at their pages of rough sketches. There would be chunks crossed off, random scribbles, repeated anatomy practice (cough mistakes cough). Artists would post the vulnerable parts of art: the mess. Even then, it was often a curated mess, but it still looked like my best friend’s sketchbook pages. When I would grab his sketchbook and flip through it, it would be pages upon pages of sketchy mess. Places where he worked on anatomy, half-finished pieces that were abandoned, pieces that looked perfectly fine to me but were scribbled out in bright blue marker. But now, when I see a sketchbook tour on Instagram or Tiktok, it’s a notebook filled with picture perfect drawings that might be simplistic but blemish free. The emphasis is on the filling of space aesthetically rather than learning.

On one hand, I don’t think outsiders need to be privy to the process of creating. The creative process leaves us vulnerable. When people see the process, the underpainting, the handwritten outlines, they often don’t understand what they’re looking at. There’s no way to do it wrong, yet so many of us are hesitant to show the unfinished, unpolished product for fear of judgment. What if they think it’s the finished piece and think I suck as an artist? It’s a reasonable fear. At the same time, it isn’t a good idea to curate the artistic process so heavily that all people see is the shiny, Instagram-worthy final product because people will assume if it looks easy, it is easy.

The more concerning question is, what are young artists seeing when they look at the Instagram or Tiktok feeds of the people they look up to? If all they see is the final product or those highly edited four-weeks-of-work-in-thirty-seconds videos, they might assume that that is what the artistic process is actually like. It may sound silly, but how are they supposed to know about all the false starts, practice, and frustration that can go into a piece of art if they never see it? Young artists who don’t have other artists in their lives will get a false perception of how the process is supposed to look. If they assume there are no false starts or messiness, will they assume that, because their early work is messy, they’re a talentless hack and give up on art before they can get to the point of even having a true process? Artists are already lacking in community. This sort of alienation from the process will only make that worse.

But it isn’t just new artists who are being affected by the Tiktok-ification of the artistic process. Because artists can’t just toss their work up on social media in text or pictures, they need to document the process in video if they have any hope of gaining traction on Instagram or Tiktok. Instead of settling into the flow of a piece, artists need to think about whipping out their phones at every step, setting up the perfect lighting, making sure the process looks aesthetic enough to catch the attention of those who don’t already follow them. And what happens if they miss a step in the process because they get engrossed? What if the memory card runs out of story or the app crashes? Was the entire piece a waste of time if it didn’t yield the max amount of social media fodder?

The way social media has forced artists to turn the creative process into a made for TV process should be alarming to all creatives. While filming his show, Bob Ross produced three copies of each painting: one that was sort of a rough draft, one he made on TV to show the process, and a more perfect final version that was used for display. Will that become the expectation for creatives online? That we’ll have to hide the mess in favor of production value and work three times as hard for nearly no tangible reward. Julia Child, one of the most famous TV chefs, often dropped things or burned food on air, yet I can’t tell you the last time I saw that in a cooking Tiktok. We are no longer allowed to roll with the punches and recover when performing before an algorithm.

Social media promotes capitalistic exponential growth, and to achieve that, the algorithm requires flashy, picture perfect productions made digestible for the masses. But if we reduce hours of work to trending music and an aesthetic montage of productivity, what are we saying about the value of our labor?

Tune in next week for part two where I talk about the devaluation of the arts, the branding of artists, and how all of this has led to the rise of AI in the arts.