
As we collectively quarantine and practice social distancing by signing on to our Zoom room meetings or cast our Instagram Live, it makes us feel like we’re a little bit closer to each other. It gives us a sense of security and keeps us a little bit saner to see we are not alone in this scary time.
However, it makes me wonder if the habits we are creating now aren’t going to radically change the trajectory of the way we approach social media. How much or often are we going to be expected to be available for the world to see? Are we going to morph into a society expected to be in front of a screen and camera at all times?
I could get really conspiracy theory on this and wonder at what end does the tracking of every human citizen serve aside from the way the virus spreads? Is that all that’s being tracked? But all this is a side track to my initial point in writing this post. This post is about what it means to be an artist today and how much of ourselves must we expose in the process of making our art.
...what it means to be an artist today and how much of ourselves must we expose...
The Shadows
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
by Megan O’Grady
April 13, 2020
These days, artists of all kinds are expected to be available for public consumption. But a small and highly influential group of them has chosen to disappear from society in favor of letting their work speak for itself. For those of us old enough to remember an era when we didn’t account for our existence on social media, when we could attend a dinner party without being tagged like a shot deer on someone’s Instagram story, when privacy was respected and deeper meanings had room to quietly take root and bloom, this comes as no surprise.
Facebook post trying to separate from the dopamine destroyer.
Art, as Susan Sontag wrote in a 1967 essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” has acquired a spiritual quality in secular culture, becoming a place to reckon with and question the human project and, perhaps, even transcend it. To create, in other words, isn’t only about self-expression; it is also a realm of mystification, satisfying our “craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech,” as she puts it. Silence, then, is an essential part of the creative process, opening a space for contemplation. “So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience,” she goes on. To withdraw from the public is “the artist’s ultimate otherworldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter and distorter of his work.”

The Family
1918
Egon Schiele
“Even those of us who tend naturally toward solitary endeavors find ourselves running low on interiority these days.”
Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu
1919
Edvard Munch
How much do we really need to know about the person creating the work?
Resort Camouflage in Pink Swan
2020
Justin W John
As I become increasingly too self-conscious of my own work and the outside world's perception of it, I wonder if my inclinations toward my obsession with camouflage and the act of making it the exact of opposite have anything do with my own desire of wanting to be different without being ostracized?
(This is now going more into my take-aways and personal, and of course jaded, feelings on today’s “see me” culture.)
Sometimes these days it feels like pouring your severed cancerous heart out is never enough, they’ve seen that and it’s all blasé, “so last week,” or worse so, it’s a symphony of crickets. You’re not even given the credit of anyone’s time or discourse. Just left in a volatile internet sea of void.
Thoughts of “its all been done before” and that it was done bigger and better or what’s the use in trying quickly fill the canvas. But I digress… because this is the anxiety of creation, the thought of the after before the now, time spent worrying instead of doing.
This is the space between insta-tumbl-book-tok-tweet-pin-snaps, the crushing feeling of desperate dopamine dependence based on the color of your soul. The giving in to trying to please everyone first, to being everybody’s everything, before something for oneself.
Citations + Related Articles
O’Grady, Megan. “The Shadows.” T Magazine Presents We Are Family. Ch. 3: Legends, Pioneers, and Survivors, April 13, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/t-magazine/artist-recluse.html
O’Grady, Megan. “What Can We Learn From the Art of Pandemics Past?” New York Times, April 8, 2020.
https://nyti.ms/2x2r4cF
Siegel, Katy. “Making Waves: The Legacy of Lee Lozano.” Artforum, Oct. 2001.
https://www.artforum.com/print/200108/making-waves-the-legacy-of-lee-lozano-1701
Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” Styles of Radical Will. 1969.