I don't think I'm gonna make art anymore.
Melodramatic, I know. Anything said or done in this world is only out of melodrama or advertisement. Humble-brags or "felt cute, might delete later".
Online space has changed. Everyone native to the internet began with their own naïvety, but it is truly not a free place anymore. The things you subscribe to see are hidden from you, the people you want to talk to are withheld to a drip-feed, so that interactions are dispersed thin enough for you to return multiple times to receive the reward of engagement. Advertisements have now fully camouflaged how humans interact and, in turn, humans have fully adopted speaking and acting like advertisements. Bots have perfected shit comments to create the illusion of chatter. After 2012, The only time my work was seen by any crowd was when I paid Meta ad revenue.
Online, you are truly alone.
There's little difference in the real world, either. The gallery space is a place I had already forsaken after leaving university. It's run by yuppie aunts, who want yuppie things. It exploits minority groups like tokens to append to their own prestige. In order to be seen, you must market yourself, merchandize your ideas, propagandize your authorship. Fail to do that, your work will never speak for itself. Art almost never speaks for itself. Nevertheless, I volunteered, I applied, I tried to say something new - compiling my years of study and training to try expressing the indescribable feeling of being an imposter with a blackened fruit for a soul, and how art can be personified to also feel like a thing trapped and forced to perform. I realize that not only what I want to say is uninteresting, but is completely incomprehensible (besides, what the hell is so novel about a cishet white dude with anxiety, anyway). Time and time again, the only people that truly made it were the children of landlords: those that could invest in thousands of dollars in donations, rental space or promotion just for the *exposure*.
I really tried at creating something new. Tens of thousands of words, hundreds of illustrations, dozens of costumes and props, years of work went into an ambitious Larp game, and I really tried to make it something unlike whatever existed before. I even roped in a few suckers to help make this non-western, anti-d&d, anti-colonialist, low fantasy folk horror project come into being. I made videos, I wrote dozens of diagetic stories, made promotional adverts, one-click navigational pages, emojis, postcards, stickers, t-shirts, and more. I posted weekly illustrations, promotional descriptions, and online interactives. I made hundreds of graphics and formatted a fully illustrated rulebook, cover to cover. I composed a 50k word holy text, designed in-world character sheets, sculpted a giant foam boar costume, spent months on eight foot tall stagecraft menhirs, lacquered dozens of hand sculpted masks, carved dozens of larp safe foam weapons, and countless other things I've forgotten in the waste. I even roped in a half-dozen other rubes to help me put on this production, and wouldn't have been able to do anything without their help making unique rulesets, coordinating inventories and timesheets, organizing crew NPCs, let alone group testing whatever I made have coherence. We made fully realized cultures with unique and compelling stories, motives, rituals. It wasn't Warcraft, but it was *new*. We made a story that I still feel was not yet ever done in a game - it was a low fantasy survival game that wrestled pataverse antimemetics and colonial erasure. I spent four years not only writing and creating that world, but guiding the intent, the theme, the artistic *statement*. What this larp was going to do would ape what larpers in Scandinavia do, and elevate the medium above dungeons and dragons. This would be designed to burn slowly for years, and foster a new community of storytelling that changed the way people think of themselves - not as dragonborn heroes, but as a collective chronicle. Not Dragonball, but Deadwood.
Almost a year after we put on our first event with no response or reaction, I heard gossip that the game was a mess, the story was stupid, and the setting was shit. Almost nobody liked the world, and our group of interest followers went from fifty or so to zero. Gut punch.
There are a myriad of excuses. The site costs increased by 100%, and our player base is profoundly poor. Our marketing could never breach the algorithm. Our scope was too large, and burnout was heavy. Maybe people were indeed interested, and social media hid their interaction from us. Excuses.
I think larp was the last medium that I felt like I was making art with value. Online, no one sees if you draw something every day for years. Offline, the only venues of exposure are the kind you have to spend thousands of dollars coercing people to see what you have to make. In larp, there was something magical in having your art be seen in the context of discovery - to be immersed as a character, for instance, and, having checked under your bed, discover a doll made in your likeness. If you wrote that as a short story, there's some amount of simulation in the mind's eye, but it's altogether radically different when you experience it.
What do you do when everything you make is mediocre. What is there to do when your reason for making art is for the sake of others - in the service of others, in the act of love for others - but no one likes your work.
I don't think I'm going to make art anymore. Felt cute, might delete later.