User:Jonas Lund/1500Word Essay

Transmission is more important than creation

With an artistic career your network plays a crucial role in determining your success, in terms of being invited for exhibitions, asked to be part of a gallery, included in publications, asked to do artist talks and lastly to sell your work. As of late, this network has slowly moved from an offline setting, largely based on interactions at art events (openings, exhibitions, talks etc) to be on Facebook. This is especially true for upcoming and young artists trying to establish their self-owned personal brand.

Brad Troemel and others writes in ‘Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook ’ that “We live in a time when young artists look at each other’s Facebook pages more than each other’s art.”, drawing the conclusion that young artists don’t produce much art anymore as the feedback from the network, the likes and comments from your friends, might be more positive based on something with much less effort.

Lauren Christiansen explains in Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age (2010) that “self-design is a practice that unites artist and audience alike in the most radical way: though not everyone produces artworks, everyone is an artwork. At the same time, everyone is expected to be his or her own author.” Self-design and how you craft your own personal artist brand is a pressing matter, and if you’re not aware of the fact that on Facebook you are the product you want to sell (as well as Facebook, but that’s a different essay entirely), you need to quickly realize it. By designing yourself into a successful artist, both your artistic career and practice will follow suit, as the end goal is to be included in a certain clic of similarly successful peers, and thus by the magic of peer review generalization, so too will your self-design become fact. [**Steve writes:there is a very useful book called Perform or Else, which gives the background to the 'self-performing subject'**<<< Also, in relation to the following para, it might be worth looking into the 'institutional critique' that preceded this moment= see, Inside the White Cube and The Exhibitionary Complex and Relational Aesthetics ]

Traditionally an artworks value was determined by a collection of players within the art world, “if the producer, the dealer, the curator, the critic, the institution, and the patrons all agree upon the mythical monetary value of an object and its significance in authorship the profitability of the work can only go in one direction, up." (Christiansen). However within the new digitally networked art world, the importance of the old established institutions as the validators of art is slowly withering, and the accreditation of an artwork’s worth happens within its own subculture. (Christiansen)

Seemingly pointless actions and events might generate more feedback, positive reactions and extend your network compared to long-term artistic endeavors, hence the number one most important strategy for a young upcoming artist is to use Facebook as a tool to establish your own personal brand, your artistic practice. Rather than struggling in awkward social situations, networking offline at gallery spaces, Facebook offers you the possibility to network internationally within the reach of your fingertips.

An artist needs an audience to make art, to be able to transmit it to his network, otherwise it will largely go unnoticed. Facebook is the number one network and thus plays a more important role in your artistic career than your work, let’s focus our energy on a couple of strategies on how we can maximize our transmission success by using Facebook to craft our very own network of curators, artists and critics.

1. Your Network
The first step is to isolate what network you want to be part of and included in and influence and be influenced by. Once you’ve circled the key-figures, friend-request them, with a little luck, they’ll accept and your on your way of creating an extended network of influential people. As the friend recommendation of Facebook will aid you, you only need to find between 5 – 10 key figures, and then rest will happen automagically by Facebook’s suggested friend recommendations. As a rule of thumb, if you have more then 5 – 10 friends in common, always add and always accept the incoming friend requests.

If the key figures are declining your friend requests, you need to create an awareness about you beforehand, this we can do by using the following steps.

2. Your Brand
Initially you are what you make, in the beginning when you don’t have a network it’s very hard to get the proper attention and responses to your work, since no one will be around to see or hear about it. A very common artistic problem. So how can you get the people you want to impress to care about your work?

One way is to make work that includes the people you want to influence, in a way to comment on internet culture, recent popular services or other work. If you don’t have the skills required to make something of your own, use a preexisting format, curate a BYOB or a Speedshow somewhere in your town and invite all the people you like to be part of your network. Once you’ve accomplished the event, it’s easy to add the participants as friends as they now both know who you are, and are grateful to be included in the show.

3. Events
Artists rely on offline events, such as exhibitions in galleries, workshops, parties. Once you’re part of the network, you will be invited to a lot of them. Join all of them. This is a way of showing your support and be part of the crowd. Wether you can make it or not doesn’t matter, as long as you’re on the participating list it’s all good. However, if you can make it, even better. Then make sure you’re part of at least a couple of pictures next to some of the people in your network. Once they’re uploaded, tag yourself and share them. This will future benefit the awareness of your brand.

4. Posts
Now this will require a bit more fine detail, what to post and when to post it. There’s a couple of different categories of posts and when they are suitable and not, so let’s have a closer look.

a. personal
Avoid complaining about personal things as it’s just dragging the network down, unless that’s your thing and you want to be known as the complainer. Focus on positive ‘lifestyle’ things, for example travel stories, high tech products you recently bought and party pictures are excellent personal posts.

b. interesting works
Sometimes you bump into something interesting, a nice article about art or a fantastic piece of art. If it has not been posted already by one or more people in the network, or if it’s not on one of the more common popular blogs, post it! If it’s on the more popular blogs, don’t post it. You don’t want to look old – if your friends would think “oh, he only found it now” it’s a sure sign that you should not post it.

c. your work
Your work is an important part of your posting. If you produce a lot of work, time the posts accordingly. You don’t want to post new work all the time, but keep it to once a month tops. Once you posted it, let it linger a bit in your feed, so don’t go and post something straight after to take focus away from your work. You want maximum reach with your work-posts. If the work has bright colours, or a concept which is slightly ironic and easily understandable the chances for success are high.

5. Comments
When should you comment on a post of someone in your network? Pretty much all the time, the more clever things you say, the more people will start noticing you. Please be aware though to not overdo it, it’s easy to become spammy, and no one likes a spammer, really. No one. Ideally you’re a half witty person, and can make some quick funny comments to the posts in your newsfeed. This will further benefit your Edgerank, as the people on who’s posts you comment will show up more frequently in your news feed, strengthening the feeling of belonging and working within a group of likeminded peers. By the way, make sure you like most posts too, an easy effortless, one could argue meaningless, way of showing support.

6. Groups.
There’s a lot of artists groups, a collection of people surrounding a certain topic. A couple of examples of groups are “✦ℙ☯ST IℕTERℕET✦”, “#Screenshots”. Join them if you can, if they are on invite only, request one and hope for the best. Once you’re in, the same principle as before concerning posting rules with some slight alterations. For example, in the group “#Screenshots” the topic is screenshots, so don’t go posting lolcats there, but stay on topic.

7. Pages
Every notable institution, gallery, blog, website, record label, shop etc has their own Facebook Page which you can like, to subscribe to their feed, and have their page show up on your timeline. This is an excellent opportunity to curate your interests and your own style in accordance with your preferred network, remember the same feather flock together.

References.

1. Brad Tromel & Others – Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook
2. Artie Vierkant – The Image Object Post Internet
3. Lauren Christiansen, Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age (2010)