An Artist’s View of Social Media: On the business of culture creation.
As an artist I was attracted to social media before there was social media. A good 10 or 15 years ago I was moving in a direction that had to do with my belief of where things were going. This seems hyper mysterious to me today: It means that there’s a broad set of issues related to art in social media today, that I’ve been exploring for the last 10 or 15, or maybe even more, years. Someday I’ll really take you on the journey into all that, but for now….
Let me share with you parts of the plan I’ve been working on since I was in high school.. early 90s, late 80s:
#1 Do everything:
The idea was that there were all these pieces to the puzzle, and your job is to learn about all the pieces. What this means is you don’t limit your self so much.. It means you say “why yes, I could be a carpenter” and “why yes, I could be an astrophysicist.” What defines your skill sets should now be internal rather then external: They should be your passions! Your passions organically link your potential with where you are going and how you are evolving.
This idea is very much in keeping with the DIY (do it your self) zeitgeist of social media. The difference, maybe, is that if you spend 19 years going in this kind of a direction you’re not so much the amateur / folk artist, you’re really in a much more pro space.
The suggestion that you should “do everything” is not always 100% advised. It is perhaps best to team up with someone who’s good at the stuff you’re not as good at, but then social media is a world of relationships, thus the “social” in “social media,” which if nothing else, means we ought to be playing well together. The other issue is that the amount of time it takes to “get good at everything” is a good deal more then what it takes to get good at “one thing.” So somewhere in here there must be a balancing act made.
But maybe the point here is that the lines that articulate your area of specialization ought to be organically linked to your potential, not to what the market place is talking about. It also means that the puzzle has to do with all that it takes to be successful in this space, and if you’re able to have all those pieces worked out in one brain you’re able to think about all of this stuff in very holistic ways.
#2 Business strategy and the art should not be compartmentalized as different areas:
This is maybe a radical idea but the point is that within the art it’s self are market issues. These market issues, like the extent to which media aesthetics are a crystallization of market forces, are often dealt with by artists in an intuitive and not always 100% conscious way.
Further, if you look at the history of the relationship between art an commerce, the business of culture creation has mostly always been a mass media idea of business, which then defines what has “commercial potential.” It is common for cultural critics to talk about this problem as “the expression of market morality on culture.” What I propose to you is, and especially in the social media context, that it is often the wrong question to ask “does this have commercial potential,” the right question is probably, “what is the business approach that is right for this.”
When you contemplate this, it then makes sense for “a part of the art” to be what it’s relationship to the market place ought to be. This is in part a cultural critique, and thus it seems that this should be explored.
When you look at social media you will find that there are a whole lot of “best practices” that are a part of good social media strategy. A question you might then ask is “what are the cultural, or other, implications of these best practices.” If, for you, art is more important then the commerce side of the equation then: you’re work, your pr and marketing efforts, and everything else, should reflect this understanding.
So that’s probably enough for now. At this point I should plug The Asymmetric Biz Cult Podcast: A New Philosophy of Art Mind and Business, which is a place where I really explore these kinds of ideas.