notes on contemporary creation

transcript transcript transcript

This post is the transcript of a Youtube Video, if youre interested the link is below.

Navigating any realm of creation in recent years, whether through fashion design, maybe poetry or music is, I believe, growing increasingly arduous. Social media's ever looming presence and undeniable impact on creation is almost this sort of terrible dichotomy which is continuously eating away at itself. Ebbing and flowing between glorious positives and tumultuous drawbacks. In the reluctant defence of TikTok, and outlets of its kind- it’s very hard to deny the ability these platforms have to harness and algorithmically push their content to an insane degree. I believe this to be inherently brimming with negatives, but what it means for the average unpublished writer or designer is publicity to an audience they might never have connected with before. In turn, what this means for the consumer is exposure to a certain kind of creation to interpret and consider, and maybe even become enamoured with what might have slipped past them before. If you can look past the downfalls of these platforms, you might be able to see a space that’s seeping with beautiful writers and designers and musicians who are convulsively and ferociously creating who now have the means to do so by way of the internet. It is low hanging fruit but I’m using TikTok as a primary example. TikToks’ biggest advantages like its sheer platform size, polarisation and widespread notoriety are its biggest downfalls too - resulting in the inevitable collapse of any distinctly ‘TikTok’ creator. It’s like it seduces you with the promise of sort of an easy way to gain a following and opportunities you would never have had at your disposal previously, while knowing that the sheer fact it's doing so will be what causes your career to plummet completely.

If you are a creator, not just in the online sense but the artistic too, you're automatically now public domain and in need of categorisation. You need to now be a type of creator, you're very own, for lack of words, onlineism, is what created your entire career and will be the reason it’s doomed it seems. Once the certain label that has been bestowed upon you has run its course and is deemed embarrassing or god forbid, cringe, where do you go from there? Do you even need to engage with these platforms to be affected by this? Is the creative sphere as a whole being tampered with by this newfound urge to label and categorise every individual by their interests and hobbies? I think a lot of it comes down to the way we consume, not just creation but media in general. To be fair it’s easy to sit here, whilst contributing to such platforms, and say “they need to fix the way their platform operates!” but alas a certain amount of self awareness is necessary. Social media numbs the way we view art and creation in the same way it makes everything else dull and arbitrary. By constant exposure in copious amounts, making us view a poem or painting as a 2D pixel on a screen devoid of context.

I know this isn't unique to times now, like before social media it wasn't as if every piece of art you consumed would bring you to your knees in complete hysterics by way of its sheer presence. But it was being consumed differently, it was viewed as a whole, differently. It’s so incomprehensible to see the obsessive hours of work, the trials and tribulations that brought it all together and above all, what it means for the artist themself to have birthed this thing, whatever it may be, into existence through social media. To argue against myself then, would a huge amount of art that exists cease to if social media had not in some way allowed them to create it? What does this mean for artists? That in order to avoid this we should refrain from an existence on the internet? Even so, the consumer is the ultimate decider, so in turn does that mean this is the foreseeable trajectory in relation to contemporary creation? That your art is going to be constantly consumed through this narrow lens, seen as a ‘type’ of creator for a certain ‘type’ of person, stripping it off its beauty and thought and left standing there simply, just banal. 

My main point here I think isn’t to fear monger, i could be overwhelmingly incorrect in my assumptions. I think it’s an interesting perspective to consider. I believe simply to a certain degree both the consumer and the creator are hurt in this process of incessantly needing to compartmentalise the things were faced with. The consumer's experience of art is becoming numb and impersonal. All we really have is art, it is the foundation of life in all forms it finds itself encapsulating. Human connection, touch is art - the way we love and move through this world, the poetry we write when we find ourselves silly in love and the music we create amidst our suffering. The creator is stuck in this dilemma of whether to completely abstain from the online community - and as a result risk staying unnoticed, or to partake and have to engage with this new outlook. 

But it’s not all negative, naturally. There's a sea of positives that cloak this phenomena that we all reap unknowingly. Whether through discovering a painting you now love by way of Pinterest or Instagram, or maybe the main thing you have derived is an appreciation for art in all of its glorious forms. Perhaps before you explored this world of online creation you didn't care for art, it didn't seem accessible or inviting to you through the representation of pretentious art fanatics in film or your own personal encounters. But through aesthetic visuals, glimpses of a luxurious life full of creation and discussion. Faceless entities on the internet gutting themselves open and spilling out praise and complete admiration for a book, or fashion designer and what their existence has meant for them. By no means am I saying appreciation for art does not exist and even so in excruciating amounts, that, I do not think, will ever be the case. At Least I hope if in some funny way it happens to be so, I will not live to experience it. Love for creation is rampant, with so many talented, pungent artists emerging onto the scene. However, I think on a personal level we need to ask if our ever-increasing consumption of social media is harbouring our ability to appreciate art, in whatever funny way one is supposed to.