Lately on my dash, I have been seeing lots of wonderful mutuals get too hard on their beautiful minds.
Lovelies, your stories and art are beautiful because they are from you, and FOR you. Stats do not determine the quality of a product. Again, some of the BEST stories on the archive I have ever read were around 100 hits, and 0-10 kudos. Some of the BEST ART I’ve seen has 0 notes.
You know how I can tell? Because the authors and artists poured their heart and soul into their craft. As long as it can inspire ONE person, you should be proud. You just radically changed the life and perspective of ONE person. That’s amazing.
Sure, you might think your art or story is “cringe” or “bad”…OR, it can be someone’s comfort piece that they go back to after a long day. You may see your stats and think, “man, nobody enjoys this,” not knowing that maybe, juuuust maybe, you have that ONE person who you’ve inspired, who loves your work, and lurks your socials awaiting for your next project. Your art, your music, YOUR story has the potential to do that, but you have to love what YOU do.
And yes, your love WILL show. Maybe not with stats, or kudos, or notes, or comments. But you may be someone’s favorite without even knowing. As long as your art is out there, it WILL reach somebody. I will try to be that somebody for a lot of you, but there is indeed A LOT of you.
In a world where media is being “consumed” for “content,” remember that ART comes from the heART (sorry not sorry for being cheesy). Artists, Writers, Poets, Musicians, Sculptors, HUMANS: Get your hearts out there for the world to see. The world needs more motivated minds. 💫
The problem with being too much is not knowing where to put it and how to hide it. When I was in grade 5 I had a friend. I loved her enough to want her to have all of the world that I knew and had. I didn't have much, but on her birthday, I wanted to give her a big gift. So I took a pink shoe box although I didn't have much to put in it and put in the best of the things that I had. Despite them being used, I wanted her to have them. A beautiful key tag, a colourful pen, a card, an artificial flower and a lot of old things. My mom took one look and gave me a lecture that it's not appropriate to give old things as birthday gifts. But it was everything that I wanted her to have and everything that reminded me of her. It was all I had. I couldn't ask mom to buy me things when I knew she had it hard. So I hoped for the best and gave the gift I put together to my friend. I felt proud to see her smile at the big box in spite of my overwhelmed broken heart. Because I wanted her to have the best but I could not give her the best. I could only give her all I had. It was things like this that made me inappropriate. I cared too much, I wanted to give a lot, I wanted to solve your problems and feed you tasty home made dishes and hear your opinions and ideas and difficulties but it was nosy, unnecessary, overwhelming, serious, boring, elderly, over-sensitive, fragile, problematic and all the terms that they used to put off my strongest of feelings. I was simply too much, although that made them happy they didn't want that normal. Not too often. So I hid it. I grew tougher, stronger and even though I was too much and i hid it well, I still wrote my friends love letters with essays too long which I could only send on their birthdays and hope I put it in a safe place
I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
When I ask people not to steal my scans I assure you it has nothing to do with my ego. I have relationships with a number of people that trust me to provide full credits and copyrights and supervise, as much as possible, how things are used. And it gets a little complex, like some people will give me a photo I can only use on instagram. I have to honor these agreements.
And, Rothko paintings are copyrighted so, unlike some artists, if you make tee shirts or use it in a movie or something , it's actually illegal (without permission) They are not going to come after you for casual use of you own, but I know of many examples where people were hit with a copyright notice for trying to profit in the work.
It took me a long time to build these relationships and get all of these scans, including many i have done myself. I gave myself this Rothko job I do, and because of that I didn't have background to give me things or answer questions. It was only after years of doing it that people started to reach out to me in a bigger way and help.
The art world is strange, I was talking to a museum curator recently and there several questions I had that I was told they were not at liberty to answer. In the case of Rothko, there's nothing really cloak and dagger about it, it's just the family (who I think are great) fought really hard for these rights and spend a lot of time trying to control how the work is used and seen. It's a good thing because we get things like the Paris exhibit which took an insane amount of planning, loans, insurance etc. All the paintings had to be inspected before they were shipped over seas, in case damage was done to them over there. These paintings are BIG and in the hands of many different people, so it really took tons of effort and (sadly) money to do it, but it's something like (can't recall exactly) 179 paintings. The biggest Rothko show since 1978.
People on tumblr do sometimes (as we all know) take stuff from here or from my other social media accounts and I know it's typical social media behavior, as people like the credit and notes to their own blog, but I mention this now because I have some things coming up that almost no one has ever seen and I don't want to lose this privilege because I won't be able to show you cool stuff and big scans.
So, sorry for the ponderousness, I just thought a little background might explain that I'm not just being grumpy about it. I think people may see it as "It's the internet get over yourself" but I honestly feel a responsibility to do the best I can for people following these accounts and I am just trying to keep doing it and hopefully, expand as I go.
This blog started on out tumblr and it was the support of all of you that made me continue it, I will be 10 years in July. I can't take a lot of credit for it, it's not my art. My only idea was the once a day aspect. However, I try to do my homework and striving for accuracy is part of that, including copyrights and credits.
So thanks for everything too, people participating in this has been very valuable and educational for me.
The problem with "I could do [X popular modern art piece]" being responded to with "then go ahead and do it!" is that I think the point that a lot of people are making is not so much "this artwork has no value" but rather "modern popular art is a heavily gatekept industry that you cannot enter into without requisite pre-existing social cachet".
So even if someone is technically/artistically able to create something on the level of a gallery piece (and, to be honest, I think substantially more people have that ability than anyone would be likely to admit) they do not exist in an environment where they have the financial freedom or recognition for that to be possible or worthwhile.
I assure you that there are millions of people who absolutely could and would want to make Pollock style abstract paintings or giant time-consuming sculptures made with garbage or whatever, but they're currently stuck in a low wage job and if they quit in order to make their masterpiece then nobody would bat an eye and they would go broke because they wouldn't have the sociocultural weight to impart that special numinous reverence that "high art" is granted, and which makes it financially viable as a thing to spend your time doing.
It is also true that a lot of people who have that cachet are able to spend their time making pretty much whatever, and will still be able to support themselves even if the art itself is fairly mediocre outside of the time dedicated to its creation.
Anyway, I feel that people are perfectly valid in feeling a sense of vague resentment at that when they visit galleries holding paint/canvas combinations that sell for more than they will earn in several years. I mean it speaks to what society is implying about their worth as a person. I don't think that it's as much about arrogance and entitlement as people like to pretend, because a lot of that comes from buying into the mystique of the Worthy Artist anyway.
What is Aesthetics? A Study of the New Art Movement that Art History is Looking Over
It started on tumblr [citation needed], we've all seen the "a e s t h e t i c" tags and all the blogs dedicated to the many many different types of aesthetics. I have spent the better part of 4 years collecting, studying, and categorizing theses aesthetics. I do have a formal education in art and architecture so I sort of know what I'm talking about. I'd like to share with you what I've found. I've also made a chart (link) of my findings. This chart is very rough and not meant to be taken as fact. It is how I've categorized almost 700 different aesthetics but that is not even close to how many there are. I do plan on expanding it more. If I get some attention, maybe I'll make more posts that dive deeper into defining this new art movement.
In short, today's use of the word "Aesthetic" is a noun that refers to a title/word given to a specific atmosphere, emotion, feeling, or vibe that a collection of images evokes when viewed together. A comparable approximation would be a "mood board".
Anything can belong to a particular Aesthetic; an art piece, a song, an entire show, an outfit, etc. In my opinion however, its very rare that a singular work can express an entire aesthetic. As stated, an aesthetic is a very specific emotion. Thus, in most cases, a singular work (work here referring to any form of expression) is likely to be interpreted in a multitude of different ways. The only exception to this is if a particular aesthetic is based on a very specific motif found in a particular work that is unique to only that work and from there new pieces can be made that also carry that motif or relate to the original work that the aesthetic was built upon. This will be discussed later. Not every genre of art can express an aesthetic, for example, some aesthetics may not translate very well to fashion, imagery, music, etc. That is to say that it may not be possible to express the emotion evoked by the aesthetic through other mediums other than the original medium the aesthetic was created in.
In summary, an aesthetic is a collection of images that evokes a specific emotion. Most often, this emotion is evoked through the combination of particular motifs found in each work that contribute to an overall "vibe" or atmosphere. These motifs can then be used to create new original works that belong to this aesthetic.
There are a multitude of categories of Aesthetics that I have identified and some of them may seemingly contradict this definition. We will discuss these later. There is also much overlap between specific aesthetics, it is extremely common to find that an art piece may belong to multiple different aesthetics.
This is a very brief definition of the movement. But to fully grasp the depths of this new art movement, we will need to discuss a lot of art history and definitions.
Review: Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard
A good book for anyone interested in art history, historical propaganda, or in our responses to it. Mary Beard is a strong writer as always: clear, grounded, and brings the past to life without sensationalizing it. I think she did an especially good job of acknowledging the role of art in propaganda and issues of racism, sexism and imperialism, without being preachy or condescending. It reads as if she trusts you to be an intelligent and caring person who is ready to move beyond "social justice 101."
I love politics, but I admit Beard made the right choice by only mentioning it briefly, to give context for each artwork featured. You don't need to know any history before reading this book. You don't need art theory, either - she skips talking about artistic techniques like composition, linework, and color. Instead, her focus is on how people react to art and use it for their own purposes. It's about the role that images of Suetonius' twelve Caesars have played in European culture.
I particularly liked that she explores a variety of media, from coins to teacups to book bindings, as well as the usual busts and paintings. She even steps out of the aristocrats' homes into middle-class kitsch and raunchy pamphlets. The chapter focusing on imperial women was also very good.
I would have liked to see more Roman art of ordinary people, and of art about Romans made after 1900. There's also no discussion of how the Papal States, Holy Roman Empire, and Byzantines used images of the Caesars for their own political ends, either. But these are huge topics worthy of books in themselves, so I can accept Beard didn't have room for everything.
I learned that western cultures can't really separate our art from Roman influence. It's often very subtle, but our ideas of "What makes a good portrait?" are shaped by how Renaissance artists borrowed Roman postures, gestures, and realistic features. If an English speaker points at an abstract sculpture and says, "That's not real art," his assumptions about what art is likely derive from this tradition. And European pseudosciences like phrenology and physiognomy were partly inspired by studying Roman portraits, and feed into modern ideas of biological racism and discrimination against the unattractive and disabled.
I also came to realize that celebratory and contemptuous portrayals of the Romans can both represent at reactionary ideology. A prejudiced person could either glorify Rome to pretend that modern society is degenerate in comparison, or he could claim we're degenerate just like the Romans and thus doomed to "fall" like the Roman empire did. I suspect prejudice against modern pagans has also been encouraged by centuries of art portraying Roman pagans as cruel, corrupt, and lascivious.
Anyway. If you want to better understand the relationship between art and the people who make, view, and buy it, check this book out.
Most of you have no idea how making a living with art actually works
Your experience begins and ends with watching a generic popfur smut artists get 10k a month in passive income via patreon subs and cashapp donations and it shows
In the professional art world if you take 40 hours a week to produce 1 digital piece you will be replaced laughably fast. Being expected to yield something after a 40 hour work week is not crunch culture, that’s an average full time job. People I’ve worked with who make an income exclusively through art are capable of producing 6 12x12 water color landscapes a week and that’s on the slower end.
Hobby commissions =/= art as a full time job
It’s unreasonable to expect fully lined and painted art from a commissioner online to be done quickly. That’s a completely different standard for completion time since most people who do commissions are only doing it on the side and aren’t looking to enter professional spheres
The site credits almost 20 artists. A significant few being “contributors” im not sure if they were hired on a one-off contractual basis to do one or two drawings and no more than that, but nearly all of them address themselves as active members of the art team so Im counting them as well. A lot of the apparel is copypasted, rotated and flipped. There is nothing wrong with this but it’s a simple fact and it’s efficient. I’m not sure why users get so angry about acknowledging this but I’m not arguing this point because it’s obvious with the barest amount of looking. Undel sketched and lined a dragon in 5 hours in a stream where she was heavily distracted by chat and kept forgetting how to use her tablet. They dont’ color by hand, they run it through a coloring program.
All of this adds up to a system that should be more efficient than it is
If this site can’t manage to get a modern done more frequently than 1 every 5+ years then it’s a sign of either gross mismanagement or they need to hire more productive artists
“the artists are already bogged down/there’s too much apparel” yet they release a new ancient every couple of months which increases their gene bloat and errors and decided it was a good idea to add 2 genes a month to the festival items. Those are not the choices of a struggling team. Nobody adds a few gallons to the tub when they’re already drowning.
It’s fine to think that the pace that they produce art is acceptable. If your standards and opinions line up with their output then you’re entitled to feel that way. At least try to admit it’s based on your personal preferences and opinions rather than a professional standard you clearly don’t know anything about
Open wounds. What are open wounds?
A taunt not forgotten.
A joke that hit a little too close to home.
Anxiety.
An open wound to live with, your entire life.
You might get used to it gradually,
but it's always present at the back of your mind
Burning like embers after a bonfire,
and if added a little more wood,
it would burn a little too brightly,
a little too painfully.
And the smoke makes it a little
harder to breathe,
the initial smoke that is.
Later on, you would need oxygen masks for it.
And when your chest tightens a bit too much,
when the wound is poked a bit deeper,
and you really cannot breathe.
It gets harder and harder,
more difficult, like an
out-of-body experience.
You watch and watch, helpless to do anything
because what can you do?
how could you stop it?
how could you hope for it to stop,
when it hasn't for years.
But then it does.
Slowly, steadily, like a train coming to
a stop. And then it's gone and
there's relief.
Relief as it's gone and
relief that I don't have to feel
like that anymore.
Until you do.
Until you do again
the next time
⁓SS
Anyone else not understand why people are moving to cara. Like I understand it’s because ai and shit,, but like. What confuses me is as long as your art is on the internet, aslong as you chose to post your art online anywhere, doesn’t matter where, it is prone to being stolen by ai. To me ai is nothing more then when people trace your art and call it their own. Ofc I don’t want people to do it, but ultimately that will not stop them. I do have a cara account, I was the first to claim abacus. When I tried posting there a few times I’ve been met with an error message, alongside that the app is really buggy and slow. I don’t see why people feel the need to come up with new apps to post art on when you could just use tumblr, but then the argument with tumblr is that there’s no engagement. But if we all flock to tumblr like people are flocking to cara then I don’t see why engagement would be such a big issue. Even then, if engagement is your main concern with your art I feel like you should reevaluate why you are pursuing art in the first place. I had this struggle ages ago where I didn’t feel my art was worth anything because I couldn’t cap 10 likes. But I realized, my art is for me. I’m the one that should be enjoying it, and my reason for posting now is for other people to enjoy it, so if they don’t,, I really don’t care all the much. I understand it is really detouring to post ocs and to have zero engagement, but that’s just the way art is. Unless you are producing fanart consistently of shit that is made into content farms, I really don’t see how you can garner a following just doing ocs. That’s why, doing art for your own sake is more important than trying to please everyone. I can guarantee there’s atleast one stranger on the internet that will fw your stuff the way you want. And the more you post, the more the number will grow. Most of the time it’s gradual, but one goes to two, two goes to three. And maybe you’ll only get one or two. But the important thing is, there’s someone. If you feel like you have no one, remember your art is for yourself. You’ll always have one, even if that is yourself. This might all seem contradictive. But trust, only you matter when it comes to your own artwork.
This “speech”, if you can call it that, isn’t to deter people from drawing and posting their ocs. This is just to say, engagement shouldn’t matter. As long as you’re happy, that’s all the matters. Post and draw what you want aslong as it’s not straight ripping from someone else. Idc.
This whole thing was supposed to be abt Cara but it turned into a uhh,, Ted talk of sorts. I’m not saying people shouldn’t use cara, if it works for them then by all means go for it. But personally I will not be making it my main form of social media. In my opinion, it’ll be like that other art app people were using for a week before they forgot abt it, I forget the name of it but I remember the interface was a light pink, similar to Instagram,, but somehow worse.
IM GONNA SPECIFY THAT I DONT CONDONE AI STEALING PEOPLES ART EITHER,, just putting that out there because some people have a way of misunderstanding or misinterpretating things. Which is okay!! Because some people genuinely get confused and that’s alright. But like please don’t use so first handedly. With that being said, I’m just a nobody on the internet so why would you listen to me,, you won’t. But i uhh,, am gonna put that there anyways
Thanks if you read allat,, idk why you would but that’s anyways I guess😭😭😭
In the quiet corners of my mind, there’s a secret place where time stands still. Abandoned castles overlook vibrant gardens, and rivers run clear as crystal. Here, I reside—a solitary cottage, my sanctuary, where I devour the words of Dostoyevsky and pen verses about the dreams that visit me at night. These dreams paint the life of a girl, my counterpart, whose existence mirrors yet opposes my own. I drift into her world, where she, like me, finds solace in books—not for the love of stories but as a refuge from her reality, a world that is unkind and relentless. Although surrounded by the constant hum of people, she seeks not their company but the distraction they offer from the echoes of her own thoughts. Her diary, a vault of penned emotions, traps memories not to relive but to encage. Each entry locks away a piece of her life, transforming recollections into distant stories—observed but no longer felt. She often murmurs apologies, too many and too frequent, as though she bears the burden of her very existence. Her life oscillates between torrents of words and profound silences—her voice either a flood or a drought. Though she lives when I dream, and dreams when I live, in our moments of sleep, our worlds overlap, meeting in a dreamland where the lines between reality and imagination blur. I wander through the maze of her mind, an unseen companion. We meet in the quietest corners of her thoughts, places so deep within her that she convinces herself I'm just a figment of imagination. A thin veil of doubt separates us; she can't see or feel me as I do her, and I often wake with a tear slipping down my cheek, grieving the distance between her disbelief and my existence. Unseen and unbelieved, I can only weep quietly for her sorrows under the silent watch of the stars.
Voronya Cave, the closest point to the center of the Earth !
Voronya Cave, also known as Krubera Cave, is the deepest cave in the world.
The cave, Krubera-Voronya, is considered the “Everest of Caves”. The total length of the cave passages reaches 13,232 m, the depth is -2,197 m. It is located in Abkhazia (Georgia) near the Sea black.
The elevation difference between the cave entrance and its deepest explored point is 2,197 ± 20 meters (7,208 ± 66 feet). It became the deepest known cave in the world in 2001, when the expedition of the Ukrainian Speleological Association reached a depth of 1,710 m (5,610 feet), which surpassed the depth of the previously known deepest cave, Lamprechtsofen, in the Austrian Alps, by 80 meters (260 feet).
In 2004, for the first time in the history of speleology, the expedition of the Ukrainian Speleological Association reached a depth of over 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) and explored the cave up to -2,080 m (-6,824 feet).
The Ortobalagan Valley extends along the Berchil'sky anticliminal ridge, which descends gently northwestward. The entrances to the caves are lined along the anticlinial ridge, but the caves are controlled by longitudinal, transversal and oblique faults and include complex winding patterns in the plant view, remaining largely within and near the ridge area anti-clinical.
Caves are predominantly a combination of shallow wells and steep snake passages, although in some places they cut seemingly ancient fossil passages at different levels.
