The Death and Rebirth of the Artist
We live in a commerce-centric world that tricks artists into thinking they have to monetise before being creative, removing the soul of what they do. When you start a creative project, if your guiding north star is revenue generation, you've already prevented yourself from being authentically creative, undermining the entire process before it begins.
Now more than ever, artists and creatives are beginning the wave of change to bring back an era of craftsmanship, quality, excellence, and creativity at scale without being dictated by commerce. Before we move ahead into this utopia of beauty in art, we need to understand where we've been and how it all went off track.
Throughout the last decade, we've witnessed a true breaking of the barriers that separate art and creation and how it's consumed and engaged with. This goes for anything you might deem art, including literature, fashion, music, writing, tattooing, and everything in between. This barrier-breaking moment is simultaneously both thankfully and unfortunately caused by social media.
Social media was a tool we thought we could use to carry out its literal name: use media to socialise with people we never could've reached. Over time, artists realised they could share ideas, art, and concepts with like-minded fans or creatives to get feedback, constructive criticism, and support while they build a community around the thing they live and die for: their art.
Just over a decade ago, Instagram was seen as a platform for selfies, widely viewed as a narcissists dream. However, for others, especially those in creative industries, Instagram has become the perfect answer to a live art journal or an online art gallery.Instagram offered a way for creatives to share their work directly with connections worldwide, levelling the playing field and changing the way we consume art forever. Galleries, showcases, record labels, publishing companies, and more become obsolete to the small-scale artist, offering a foot into any industry they wanted to enter, without having to be ‘found’ by an agency.
In the modern era, we use Instagram in vastly different ways. Rather than being a place to showcase art, it's become an expected starting point for artists to curate and grow with the intent of generating a living to support their art. The sheer notion of NOT being on Instagram as an artist seems preposterous nowadays.
"If an artist creates art off social media, did it even get created?"
In theory, the combination of social media and art seems like it would have all the pros with no cons, but the nature of social media and how we use it has corrupted it over time. The speed at which we can get our art to consumers has never been faster, nor has the rate at which our consumers consume the work we put out into the world. Born out of this record speed of consumption was the expectation of a record speed of creation, requiring artists to find ways to work faster, cut corners, and get to market as quickly as possible before another artist steals their fans' attention and hard-earned dollars.
This has plateaued into a creative catch twenty-two: our financial ability to sustain a living as an artist is better than ever, but only for a fraction of artists. Those able to hire teams, expand their reach, use industry connections to amplify their content, and continue to offer purchasable content to the market as fast as possible have been taking the lion's share of the income generated from art. Those artists opting to stay off social media and create at their own pace are feeling the pressure with the increasing costs of living and dwindling income per piece of art created that has come about as a natural byproduct of an art-for-commerce society.
Our creation process is expected to speed up to match the consumption process, which creates an unstable way of creating art and shifts the way our process works. Quality takes time, quantity requires a reduction in quality, making it a necessity to let quality control down to keep up the pace, or risk not making enough money to cover the cost of creation.
Where'd The Craftsmanship Go?
If you look around on social media, the erosion of craftsmanship has become more apparent than ever. People are using AI to write books, draw pictures, and answer questions—this would be a wonderful aid to productivity (and it can be) if it weren't for the fact that we're training it on already existing art, reducing any innovation. An example of this would be the recent Studio Ghibliification of quite literally everything: iconic photos, family snaps, moments from movies, and more. Instead of taking time to draw or create our own versions, everyone just Studio Ghiblified their photos, flooding the internet with a mass reproduction of an existing concept.
The idea of taking time to craft a piece of art that aligns to your maximum potential has been slipping away for a while now, but if you wheel it back, you'll realise the time spent learning and crafting was critical to the progress of any given medium. Historically speaking, artists at the top of their game got there by spending time using trial and error to create art. For every singular brilliant painting by a renowned painter, they likely messed up dozens getting there.
We all spend time bettering our craft, putting in our proverbial 10,000 hours of handwork that leads to mastery, and to earn the respect of our peers, maybe even creating a job out of it one day. But now the focus is on creating a job out of the art so that you can create enough art to fill the void consumers feel in this lightning-fast digital world while making enough money to keep cycling creations out. Artists are being forced to compound issues that are built on shaky foundations. This race to create and consume removes the time artists would spend practicing, creating stressful creation processes, and starting to devalue art that requires the time and effort to learn to do. It's a vicious cycle spinning towards the bottom at a rapid speed.
The consequence of this race to the bottom is the destruction of "the process" or the time it would take you to practice, learn, research, and experiment with your chosen art form. This is apparent in all aspects of creation, but take fashion, for example; in the past, someone would learn to sew and create garments. Through trial and error, they would attempt to fit these garments on the human body to make them wearable, and understand aspects of fashion design. Over time, seamstresses might learn enough to start their own brand, but in the modern era, people would rather funnel cash into starting a brand without ever learning the craft behind it or knowing how to make their objects themselves. Being an artist and student isn't the ideal anymore—it's just about generating enough finances in the now to retire and create 'real' art later. We're working backwards.
Laying foundations to create is essential; it builds the skills you can lean on when creating in future. The expectations on an artist surrounding social media require the foundations to be built faster, which leaves them at risk of being built poorly so that artists can learn to be content creators, brand managers, marketing overlords, and customer service teams while finding time to execute their initial goal: creation.
Another byproduct of this is that the option to dedicate time to crafting a completed series, body of work, or collaborative effort becomes less and less common. While we can blame technology for everything, it's ultimately up to the consumer and artist to find a compromise that allows them to offer better work while allowing them to take the time and learning required to become artists.
Artists are finding ways to make the most out of the bad situations that social media has created.
Artists are now rallying against the 'system' of creating and consuming rapidly that social media created, taking their time and going with the flow of the process. Instead of showing up with a complete project, artists are now documenting their time spent behind the scenes building foundations in real time for their prospective fans, whether for money or not, to increase the value of the end product. This isn’t just about commerce in the now, it’s allowing artists to bring fans along on their journey towards the mastery of their craft.
A renewed focus on the exceptional effort required to make art has led to artists' ability to create without the pressure of focusing on the end dollar amount but instead on the legacy and respect they want to build through their art. On the flip side, the artist, fans, and consumers have been drowning in a tidal wave of content from all angles: consumption, creation, and the economic toll of it all. These fans are now opting to buy less of everything else and instead invest their money into directly supporting their favourite creatives through an array of platforms and monetised art creation, shining a new light on the art world and its potential.
Reversing the death of the master
The craftsmanship that goes into being an artist has been decreasing at an alarming rate, and despite what some of us want to believe, the rise of AI is not the start of it. The capitalistic nature of social media led everyone to think they could make a living off art, even if they weren't creatives or artists. The problem is when nothing feels real anymore, genuinely dedicated art consumers will burrow down to find smaller creators that they think deserve their thoughtful purchasing and consumption habits. It's like a reverse uno to an existing reverse uno; artists had free range, then social media came in as this beacon of potential but ended up changing the landscape of the art world in many negative ways. But it's now flipped back the other way: people are supporting real artists that they deem worthy of support, shunning the large-scale copycat artists they feel disconnected from on a creative level.
Humans have killed the idea of mastering craftsmanship in the race to the bottom, but there's a shift happening in the tectonic plates of art, bringing us back towards the age of mastery, and the fans are on board with the creatives in this new era.
The concept of being an artist has morphed and changed through its infinite life cycles since the dawn of humans, we’re approaching a rebirth into something new.
If we look to the past, when we needed a table, we ignored the carpenters and went to IKEA instead, reducing the financial viability of building art out of furniture for the skilled carpentry crafter. But in this modern era, we're thrifting our furniture and upcycling it into something new and unique more than ever. The creator economy isn't dead but shifting and utilising alternatives outside of what we've traditionally known.
The future is about creating a legacy.
Social media's sea of cheap thrills is driving many of us back to falling in love with our chosen craft all over again, especially in the post-COVID-19 era. We all have a relationship with our craft, and social media might've made some of us become complacent with the acts of love, service, and sacrifice it takes to build a lasting yet meaningful relationship with our creative side.
Artists are now opting to return to their love of focusing on the long-term process over the short-term financial gain. Instead of selling five quick prints for $100 each, they're doing one big painting and selling it for $1000 to their dedicated, dialled-in fan base, who will ravenously fight each other to own an original rather than a reprint. It's like the old saying everyone's grandpa used to go on about; "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", or in this case, one thoughtfully original piece of art is worth 5 AI-generated reprints.
We're seeing artists find new creative ways to financially support themselves that exist hand in hand with their art. Tattoo artists are venturing into disguising merch as clothing labels, creating billboards out of fans. Instead of going to Sotheby's and bidding for art, painters share snapshots of the final product and let fans bid in the comment section, with the piece going to the highest bidder. New platforms are popping up to support artists outside the pre-existing traditional ones, including Cosmos, Blue Sky, Monetised Reddit, Substack, Patreon, and others. Even the very platform you're reading this blog on, Squarespace, has a monetised paywall version for creators wanting to build directly with a fanbase without requiring social media.
Our place in this new eco-system
For our team at Frxnkly, we left a couture bridal brand that we helped create from the ground up after being slowly morphed into a copycat house by a 'race to the bottom' style industry. We are now opting to focus on creating art, engaging with artists, and experiencing art out in the real world and online as we share our thoughts and opinions on it here. I hope you'll join us in this brave new world, where we're all embarking on a journey to build together.
