It is a good time to be a consumer of media. For the appreciators of art – especially with respect to visual art, music, film, and television – the options for streaming content directly into your eyeballs at all hours and in vast quantities are endless. Not only can we satisfy the need to watch or listen to almost anything anytime, but the increasing intelligence of algorithms and the unbelievable amounts of data we provide make new targets for our attention increasingly easier to find.

This will, of course, come as news to no one. It is very much the new normal, and in many respects, it is good! But what about creators? I think one would assume that the ability to [theoretically] reach almost everybody, without regard to geography and at little expense (as compared to pre-internet times) would be unequivocally good. Empower the artists, and the independent film studios, and the burgeoning musicians…right? 

In a lot of respects, that is true. But, I find one of the most challenging parts about being a working artist these days is the constant struggle to reconcile the differences between the creation of art, and the consumption of art. I think this is due in large part to the fact that, while we consume art much differently than we used to, the process of creating that art hasn’t really changed. 

Now I don’t blame the internet, or social media companies, or the availability of streaming services for changing our collective behavior. They were the catalyst, but the cat is so far out of the bag at this point that it probably doesn’t matter what caused it. The fact is that after almost three decades of the internet, the increasing availability of all media, and the prevalence of recommendation engines [a la Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and every other big e-commerce or entertainment company], our habits have changed drastically. It’s worth remembering that things are profoundly different. Recorded music used to be a product, now it’s a service. Let that sink in. 

Disrupting entire industries, spawning new ones…we’re all pretty used to it at this point. What doesn’t get enough attention, is that all of this availability has led to an unimaginable number of…available things! We are not paying for individual records or TV episodes, we instead pay a fee to access ALL OF IT. We can watch a century's worth of movies. We can listen to a good portion of all recorded music. We can scroll through art, reproduced in tiny pixels, by artists all around the world, all of the time. We have grown to expect quantity – which by no coincidence, is exactly what they (and “we”) are selling. 

This poses two distinct problems for the creators of this content. [I realize that I am using “content”, “media”, and “art” somewhat interchangeably here which is in itself pretty disturbing – but we’ll address that another time]. 

First, the scales have changed. Something has to be truly exceptional to not only stand out, but to remain even moderately relevant for any significant length of time. This goes for everything: film, art, music, etc. We are inundated with so much that all but the very best just fades into the background. Who has the bandwidth to think about all of the just “good” things you’ve seen or listened to in the past few years? But the thing is, most art / media / content is not exceptional. In the age of data collection and viral habits though, what is popular gets evermore popular, pushing everything else down in the pages. It’s the entertainment equivalent of Google search rankings. I can’t help but think that effectively losing all of that non-exceptional content in our search for the odd standout is a bad thing. What are we missing?

And second, the sheer numbers. The business model of subscriptions and continued engagement (ie. “if you liked that, then you might like this”) means that we’re served a constant stream of new material. Any predilection we may have to pause and think about why that was or wasn’t the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen is quickly overridden by more options. 

This is especially true with visual art in the age of Instagram. The algorithms reward quantity, and quantity is what we want (or have been trained to want). So anybody working in a field where posting new content every day isn’t feasible (without desperate attempts to turn every move in the studio into its own news item) is at a real disadvantage. And all those paintings and drawings we are scrolling past? Some of those took weeks, months, or even years to complete – and then there it goes. I do the same thing! My instinct to sit and appreciate something I like, learn from it and study it, is inevitably being replaced by my new semi-unconscious need to see more and more. 

Now consider what goes into the art itself; the music, the movies, the paintings. For the most part, the creation hasn’t changed. Sure, music can be created in a bedroom instead of a studio, and cell phones take great video, but mostly we’re doing things in the same way. Film productions take years, and oil paintings take…well, as long as they take (often, a super long time). [As an aside, one of the more appealing aspects of oil painting specifically for me is the fact that it has hardly changed in the last…700 years?!. It’s pigment and goo, slopped around until it resembles something pleasing]. A little over a century ago, salons to celebrate the completion of one painting were common – and the fanfare that might accompany an entire collection of new work would have been…well, significant. Not so much these days. 

So it’s really no surprise that I find myself wondering why my output as a creator doesn’t match my expectation as a consumer. And what was once exciting; the opportunity to release a newly completed painting into the world, is now tainted with unease and increasingly diminished expectations. 

Perhaps the problem is not our collective new standards or the sheer quantity of art on offer though, but my thought process from the very start. Art, especially in regards to fine art, should be first and foremost just what it says on the tin: art. Whether or not it’s a viable product to be consumed is irrelevant. If I can remember that, the challenges of being an artist today don’t seem that bad. 

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