Allow me to sit in my rocking chair and shake my disconcertingly sci-fi techno cane as I regale you with tales of the good ol' days of 2010, when Social Media was mostly for real-life status updates and there were more than 5 websites people bothered to visit on the internet.
Mostly I want to pine for the simpler days when sharing your drawings and finding people who were interested was as simple as signing up for DeviantArt. You had a gallery, you added things to the gallery, and they showed up in a waterfall of images of wildly varying quality and subject matter, but all of which could, by some definition, be considered art. It was slightly less complicated than vying for attention in the firehose of content that is Twitter where your carefully crafted pieces are oft overlooked in favour of repetitive hot-takes and 5-second shitposts. It was the place to post just art and find other artists.
DeviantArt still exists but has moved from neat categories and a transparent 'latest' front page to an opaque algorithm and a tagging system. There's Instagram, which is designed for photos and social updates rather than art, but where people post art anyway. There's Twitter, which is designed for... jokes? Memes? Sharing things from other platforms? Definitely not art, unless you like posting your work and having it vanish into the obscurity of your timeline from whence it is unlikely to emerge without some questionably vain re-tweeting of your own previous content.
The benefit to most of those is that you get your art in front of people who aren't looking for it. It's a means to an end with exposure if you need eyeballs on your art to sell merch and commissions and have the time to fight algorithms. It's one place where everyone already has an account and there are no barriers to them hitting the like button to spread your work.
But 'likes' last maybe a day. It's questionable etiquette to share content more than a week old. Most followers are either dead accounts, bots, or people who look but don't engage. A lot of accounts only exist to automatically re-share anything that appears under a specific tag in a bid for attention. It's not a conversation. It's not really socializing. It's fake internet points that vanish into an uncaring, untouchable, unshareable timeline that does little to curate or promote the effort and hours of work that went into your body of work as if your latest piece is the only thing you've ever made.
I don't know if the niche forums and galleries of yester-year were really better, but they had a stronger feeling of connection and a clearer image of an artist's body of work than a timeline scattered with memes, random shares, and status updates.
I miss that.
Anyway, find me here, and on Twitter, and on Instagram, and on KoFi, and on DeviantArt, posting my work to an increasingly impersonal, indifferent, ephemeral internet and questioning the purpose of sharing in the first place. I'll take my fake internet points where I can get them.
