Why Real Artists Struggle On Social Media

what annoys me people will come up and just fil me I'm 5et in front of you I'm right here in real life taking inventory of your life being a viewer to your own life living an experience and at the same time hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience those are really weird strange disassociative things that are I think new hi guys I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow we are going to be deactivating our social media media accounts simply because I have so many other interests social media can be a toxic space for artists and creatives a world where your passion can slip into content and the focus of your creative practice can become distorted and bring feelings of embarrassment self-doubt and even shame please wait as your individualized operating system is initiated in this video I'm going to take a look at the deep feelings of discomfort that the eyes can build up around this online space and find some pragmatic ways we can gain some sort of strong basis to engage without falling into traps or letting our work slip in terms of quality or the passion that we have for it I want to look at some key questions like how can I release this shame I feel about trying to connect people to my work in an online space where should my artistic practice end and content whatever that is start and in the back section what are some key principles we can take away to make sure we Thrive and stay sane as an artist in that online social media space as a company the interview is stting before I jump in I just wanted to note that I hope you'll notice that this video doesn't come with the third party sponsor and allow me to signpost a way in which you can help support this educational content for the price of a coffee per month for the paid patreon or substack users this week I'll be posting the extended discussion and audio version version of the video as always along with a sneak peek of the stuff that I'm building for my second YouTube channel which will be launching soon you live with creative minds radio I look for I can't find as well as that exclusive material there you'll get the understanding that your support goes directly into allowing me to make this free to access content for all kinds of artists and creatives who are getting value from it and yeah thanks for listening and let's jump into the discussion part one I'm not a showoff or attention seeker I just want people to value my work this sentence I'm not a show off I just want people to value my work is the first thing that I wrote down and started off the whole process of creating this video as independent creatives of any kind when we show our work to others that small sense of self-doubt or feeling that we might be being a little bit too much never seems too far away but what is is that feeling exactly and why do we often feel the need to put disclaimers around the quality of our work one thing you said was you stand proudly by it and um I thought that held so much weight cuz I know a lot of people who make things who don't stand proudly by their stuff they'll put a song out they'll put it in their story and that's it a simple explanation is that it's just vulnerability your expressing yourself something you spent time on and care about and you sticking your head up in a crowd and leaving yourself open to failure and negative response but for me I don't think this explanation really covers it on reflection it's more like the pressing importance of not wanting to seem too self-absorbed or look like an attention seeker or that I'm just showing off these judgmental phrases around attention seeking or narcissistic self-absorbed Behavior have follow followed Humanity from the real physical spaces of our recent past into the new social media landscape where they rage more strongly than ever and that tension in the experience of performance where you're half wanting to show people something you care about and love and also not wanting to come across as an attention seeker or too much can be brought into every moment of Human Experience where someone considers taking out their phone to take a picture of themselves or something they love walking through your life and not just living your life but taking inventory of your life being a viewer to your own life living an experience and at the same time hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience those are really weird strange disassociative things that are that are I think new because of the specific structure of social media and the way it sort of disassociates our self from our self the key thing I want to empower artists and creatives with here is to say that the neurosis and self-doubt that can of often come with the documenting of people's everyday life can easily follow us back into our artistic practice and how we see the act of sharing our creative work but it doesn't have to your art is not a meme Levi's advert or amazing video of two blue whales breaching in unison and although the platform where you post it might offer all these things up to people in a smooth scrolling feed of content rated in neat comparison of view count and likes you don't have to let that framing seep back into your head and your practice oh and speaking of content we need more artists to feel empowered to fight against the swirling Vortex of everyday content and adverts for shaving cream welcome to the internet have a look around anything that brain of yours can think of can be found we've got mountains of content some better some worse if none of it's of interest to you you'd be the first it's been said that when the world wakes up and looks at its phone in the morning we're stepping into a toxic sense of reality based only on the importance of the now from social media to news stories and most everything else the fact is that a huge percentage of what circulates in that online space on a particular day has either been created on the day or in a 48 hour time span prior to when it's been seen when we're looking to try and understand the definition of content and find where the border between content and art sits we can look to this idea of creation posting and the act of consumption as a factor to take into account where your piece of work might have taken months or years to create that Meme of a cute animal falling into a swimming pool or Tik Tok video of a well-known Creator jumping on a popular dance Trend might well have first been thought about yesterday and after being created was posted almost immediately important however each of these articles has given the same breathing space in the never ending Scroll of that social media environment could I interest you in everything all of the time a bit of everything all of the time apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime anything and everything all of the time another kind of work that doesn't always fit into this time based limitation but does give us a helpful look at how we can separate our own art from a world of content is the activities of explicitly commercial companies within that social media space Pepsi Seline Uber and your local physiotherapist practice all might take months and large teams to create their social media strategy and output but the explicit intention of that output to lead sales or brand loyalty for example again should allow us to separate it from any kind of comparison with our own [Music] work you went through something you wrote words down you figured it out in the structural format found music to go along with it you recorded it recorded you know you know most of the time you don't just do it in one take you go back and forth d d da fix some parts get some parts replayed and you mean to tell me that you're going to be passive with your own and just put it on your story once are youing crazy bro at the back end of this piece I'm going to be looking at some more practical techniques we can use to empower us as independent creatives but in general there's one more overarching useful perspective that I wanted to mention now to help us remove that self-doubt when we're posting our work but not slip into a world where our own creative practice is becoming confused or slipping towards the General Media mediocrity of that content space when the first climber summited the famous peak of half DME without ropes it required the focus and purity of a passionate artist at work to achieve that goal but when the movie was made afterwards the scenes were reconstructed to draw the attention of an audience to that original Amazing Story and act Alex was going to do the climb with or without us but we decided that to be able to live with ourselves filming it we needed to set certain guidelines first Alex's safety was always going to be the priority and second we needed to protect the Integrity of his experience as artists then it can be useful to take that analogy and bring it back into the way that we see our own art and relationship with social media and imagine the Inception and creation of our work as the actual thing that we do and the content or small piece of it that we distribute through social media as the necessary Ro Recreation of that thing in an attempt to bring an audience towards what we're doing I'm aware of that a camera changes the dynamic in some small way and when the margins of success and failure are very very thin you just don't know what it's going to be that might tip the scale yeah buddy and with that clear distinction of the actual thing of the art process and the recreation that takes place in the building of the content I want to dive down for a moment a little bit deeper into the psychology of some of the discomfort that we can feel as practicing artists in that online space starting with the simple concern that can affect so many of us constructing your self-respect and confidence outside of a market-driven validation model something you might have shared with me on your own creative journey is that feeling of putting your workout in a space where you know that a teammate colleague or friend might see it and experiencing some pressure around their judgment of it having to discuss it with them or maybe even worse The Joint understanding of its existence alongside a complete ignoring of the fact this is a common problem to face and a lot of times I think it stems from the amount of obsession work and care that we can put into these things as artists we don't have to find words like delusion or Obsession a Bad Thing necessarily and I'll personally embrace them as realities and necessities of my own experience but this tendency to throw ourselves into our work and Care a huge amount about it can mean that we overestimate the effect that it's having on other people's lives it's also not unusual that the people who know us well but don't fit into that intended audience that we've made our work for might look at the stuff that we've made or life decisions that sit around prioritizing it and start in small ways to question whether we're prioritizing the correct things in our life the interesting thing to remember as a practicing creative an artist is that these judgments that are made by the people around you usually exist purely within a framework of market-based validity if you've obviously spent a month making a companion intro piece For an upcoming album that you're releasing and a post of a pastor Maker's dog shaking 0000 flower off its fur slides by behind it dwarfing your views by 100x then the explicit market system that separates the most valid from the least valid content in the social media space has reflected on your work to be not interesting or not useful I was speaking about this stuff to another YouTuber who only started to make money off their work recently when I began spending loads of time putting videos out in the covid lockdown he told me people thought I was having a life crisis but as soon as it was clear clear I was making money from them there was an immediate switch to validity and respect now I've always been lucky enough to be surrounded by people that generally support my decisions and the value of the work that I've decided to spend time on but we need to understand the inherent capitalist nature of these social media spaces and through no thought of their own necessarily how other people value or devalue our work is naturally going to reflect that nature to some extent now in an Ideal World these perceptions of other people don't have to matter too much to us but the problem in all this comes in the inevitable reflection of how we perceive the success of our own work and how that can relate to what we choose to do next I'm all for trying to advocate for artists and creatives to make money off their work but if the stuff that you're creating doesn't fit into the tight concerns of current market interest it's important to constantly be able to detach from these cheap ideas of validity or [Music] Value New York City the early 1970s graffiti emerges as an underground tool of expression and communication for young people across the five buroughs it begins with local wall tags but by the middle of the decade the movement has taken its art to subway cars spreading its visibility and its impact only in the following decade would galleris seek to commercialize the scene if you ever do feel badly about something you've made because you spent so much time creating something that doesn't seem to reflect value in that market driven space maybe just picture the dystopian future where the only creative passions that Humanity chooses to develop are those that will perform as neat business opportunities too are you going to behave yourself yes yes what yes sir that's better with that framing we can recognize if we have a drive to create something then there's probably undoubtedly a community that will appreciate it too and we should move forward drop the toxic comparisons and continue to drive on with our efforts to create that people don't realize like your art makes art you know like it just it it it can hit people and you you don't know when or where or who or how but you know if you don't ever put it out there then nobody can be hit by it and then nobody can be you know nobody can create something out of it and I think it's like important to just get it out there so cuz there's going to be somebody that that gets something from it you know even if everybody hates what you're doing if one person likes it yeah you're creating art in that person's brain a quick injection before I jump into the final section of this piece and some practical mindset tips that we can use to survive all this I thought it is important to understand in this video that these online Spaces by their very nature are going to more often feel different depending on who you are and how you move through them for that reason more than ever if something I'm talking about is not resonating for you feels different in your experience or you just have additional advice or commentary on these issues I hope you feel free and empowered to add it in below and make the comments here more valuable for other artists and creatives who visit okay peace and back to that final section of this discussion how to stay sane and quality within a green Maze of toxic incentives so now we've dug into what social media is a bit and how its relationship with artists can form for good and bad I wanted to give you some really simple practical solutions to how we can try and Thrive there and I'm going to keep the first of these really short and clear and that's the value of having real physical counterparts to the work that you're doing online thank you for you know continuing to kind of see me through the music for right now I think I'm going to just uh keep my circle a little bit closer and um continue to develop some other skills and interests and again I'm always here making lots of records and in the meantime living life this is about thinking how we can Empower ourselves as artists and creatives by retaining that practice outside of social media that can come to Define what we see as true quality in our work taking a look at music here we can see that there's a lot of people complaining of the 15c snippet culture on social media that can lead into those Spotify views or some semblance of the artist popularity or validity online but what we want to ask ourselves here is what does all this 15sec snippet music actually mean if you can't create a longer listening experience that fits the other main functions of why we find the form of music so meaningful to us my name is noon in my life I was feeling insecure and I was really looking for a way to kind of have a burst of approval that might artificially make me feel better about myself and so I was like I'm just going to write a verse tonight and I'll put it up on Tik Tok because I want to feel approval from people cuz it certainly wasn't coming from myself and then the chorus really did well on Tik Tok people were really into it and then it became like another added layer of like oh my gosh I have to write a second verse so the next thing for the life of the song was starting to play it live in a practical sense I'd recommend as an artist a decent aim may be to create an experience with your own work that fits in some way with that experience that made you fall in love with that art form yourself this is about not not forgetting why we're passionate about this stuff or came to do it in the first place keeping that place of real value in mind and returning to that idea of social media as a world where we recreate the actual thing with a direct purpose of simply trying to engage an audience can enhance our confidence and the way that we interact with these platforms as simple tools of the trade keeping your priorities around the real value that you want your work to bring forward can also stop the slip of spending too much of your efforts on the seemingly easy Promises of social media culture and being pulled away from the actual real way that your work's going to connect and bring value to that audience what annoys me people will come up and just fil me can I get a photo and I'm like no and they're like oh you didn't leave and I'm like but I'm down to have a conversation like put the phone down let's talk I'm down to talk people be at the shows like this and I'm like I'm 5T in front of you I'm right here in real life an addition to this idea of real world counterparts is that if you're finding yourself demoralized or lacking in passion because you've been engaging in your creative practice solely for online spaces then finding a real world scenario where you can bring it forward and practice it can be massively valuable and give you a huge amount of certainty about what you want to do I realized as of recent that a lot of this [ __ ] is not normal and I didn't know how to like I don't know like process that experience I hate being famous it sucks I love connecting with people in the crowd when like I feel like it's really me and you right now when I'm recording these videos it can often seem uncomfortable just to be talking to a camera and caus me to have some self-doubt around what I'm actually spending my time doing for me I use the real world counterpart of teaching which I have some background in and whenever I'm feeling uncomfortable turn back to that framing of the work that I'm doing in the online space as just another form of that real world teaching environment for a second principle in these practical tips in terms of dealing with social media I wanted to flesh out how we can understand and process the possible negative responses we're going to get how do you find it how do you find trying to balance a social media presence where it feels like you have to give so much of yourself you're required to give so much of yourself it's it's a weird thing dude obviously people think they know you no matter what if you have an online presence how to think about negative response and feedback as I drew out earlier in this video when we interact with social media we need to nurture a feeling of Detachment in that relationship this is going to be most important when we think about feedback and possible negative response over the last week I've been reading Al Kennedy's Book on writing where she discusses how she deals with book reviews and I think she does a great job of outlining some of the key concerns here book reviews are usually written and really should be written for readers Kennedy writes but may on occasion wander off and end up being about the reviewer's idea of the author or literary Theory or even some kind of personal issue the reviewer is working through this first point that Kennedy brings forward transfers so clearly into the social media space that world of social media is specifically designed as a personalized and friction free area for the perspective of your audience member so although we do want to keep an ear out for productive and practical feedback from people that are really invested or enjoying our work it's important to realize that a lot of comments in these space are coming more from the viewer's own mental state at the time they made them or something they are working through themselves and your piece of work could have been subbed in for countless others where they just as easily could have left those responses that they chose to that's why you're so popular really we talked about this didn't yeah we were so St you're so sweet Lana have a good night thank as we start to discuss ways in which we can function effectively in the online space both retaining our vulnerability and the value of reacting to productive feedback but also keeping that resilience to move through negative or toxic Behavior I want to bring in the final section of this video and the power of this idea of the practitioner's mindset in building a more healthy relationship with social media what it means to approach social media like the useful tool that it is for principle one on how we can think about this practitioner's mindset I wanted to just put down the simple point that you don't have to have self-doubt or feel neurotic about the work that you're putting out and it's run you're on with the last three albums like what do you attribute it to like just run your mom right now uh Focus I'm really good um I'm not afraid of change and yeah I'm just dialed in and just trying to make [ __ ] that I'm a fan of at the highest execution that I possibly can to me that means that when we release something we can just remember that we've put effort and Care into it it doesn't have to be perfect it means enough that we've tried to develop it and we're happy just to put it out and see if it connects with an audience just like a company who's using social media we're not going to then sit around obsessing over the feedback or refreshing the page to see if we got one more like instead of getting into Loop GRS of watching our own content back and forming their opinions about stuff we put out depending on our mood at the time we're just going to see it as an experiment take any productive feedback that comes through to us move on and make something else principle two of this practitioner's mindset is going to be about looking at social media as a producer as opposed to Consumer the people that I used to think were really dope because they were like really mystique and kind of mysterious like then they they started being super they just shared everything and I and don't you know I think people people feel like they have to share everything but how do you have that connection with the fans that we were just talking about earlier like is there am I is there a balance there there there has to be yeah and it's it's really hard to I mean I kind of wish I was more Mystique anyway but growing up it's like it's hard not to share everything cuz everybody else is sharing everything this is about continuing to understand that you're using social media as a tool and holding in the front of your mind why you've come to it in that moment as a practical tip for this and a way to set these boundaries you can consider creating a folder on your phone where you put all the apps with your account to use to post your work stuff like this can help us stop jumping into those accounts at odd times and picking up negative comment or impression around our work that might then have an opportunity to bleed into those moments in our personal lives just like a company posting stuff and trying to bring an audience towards our work is just a part of what we do and whether it fails or succeeds we're going to continue to take that systematic approach and try and push toward success the final principle that I wanted to put down here was to continually remind yourself of the boundary between the content you put out on social media and your artistic process I've talked in a previous video about the different types of work that we might have to take on as an independent creative you can categorize this simply as deep work where we're trying to get into that flow State and produce the highest quality of artistic creative practice and our more analytic trades person approach where we might be versioning this up into content for social media or planning out schedules for posting again we can bring this back to that analogy around the professional environment where there's a clear divide between the editing session where the TV episode is put together creatively for artistic and dramatic effect and the editing session where the series is clipped up into Instagram reals to be put onto social media and gain attention maintaining these barriers clearly can stop that toxic slide where our artwork that brought us here in the first place is getting mixed into the more mediocre concerns of social media output it can allow us to retain what makes our work really special and the key factors that are actually going to get someone to connect with and love it in the first place right I really hope some of the above discussion and advice was useful remember you can come check out out more and support the creation of this stuff over on the patreon now and I mirror everything I post there on the paid substack also so you have the ability to access it there too if you'd prefer thanks as always to the patreon supporting and yeah good luck in your work peace and see you next time signing off

Channel: Creative Minds

Views: 153,724

Keywords: Social Media, Artists on social media, toxic social media, content creator, lana del rey, tyler, tyler the creator, bo burnham, inside, creative advice, quitting social media, social media success, content creation, making art, making music, music production, art student, successful creative, creativity, writing student, creative writing, making it on social media, how to succeed on social media, how to succeed creatively, creative success

Id: KL-EI66SLaw

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024