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.
Kara Jorgensen 