I started my second job last week, as a TA for a Data Analytics course. I know it’s common to spew to the world the particulars of every aspect of ones life. I’m not into it. Suffice it to say I’m shorter on time, and a little more tired.
How are my 2023 Goals?
Not terrible.
I’ve actually managed to draw every single day with one exception. It’s was all figure drawings all of January, equally divided between male and female figures. The plan is to fill February with portraits, again dividing equally between genders, hopefully all gender identities if I have the right reference imagery. March will all be hands and feet. I really with the portraits I’ll break away with the strict pencil drawings I’ve been doing and pull in some color, either with colored pencils, watercolor, or gouche.
Reading has been less successful, but already more than last month and any progress is good progress.
The gym…. or really just exercise… has been less successful than I’d like but more successful than not going at all.
Posting here may end up a monthly affair. I’ve recently lost 12+ hours a week, and I rather not-blog than sacrifice anything else.
What I’m Reading and What I’ve Read :
So far this year I’ve finished 3 books:
Death of the Artist (and oh the thoughts*)
You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce- a surprising, lovely, ambiguous, creepy wonderful book. If you’d like a story where happily ever after is not what’s expected, and possibly not an option - start here.
naked statistics by Charles Wheelan
The current book is The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Dr. Kevin Duncan
What I’m Listening To: An audiobook - The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden, which is a sequel to the Bear and the Nightingale. All of my music is Medieval Lofi streams from YouTube
What I’m Watching: My partner and I just finished Fleishman is in Trouble - and my god. Go into this gently and with a therapist perhaps, very few shows have emotional wrung me out as throughly as this did. Away from him I’m watching Legion. It’s weird and I love it.
*Oh The Thoughts:
Art is weird. We want it, on a certain level we need it. In a way it’s compulsive. I don’t think I’ve met anyone in my life who didn’t have that drive to modify their surroundings to one extent or another. Small children mark on everything they come across the moment they have enough finger control to hold a marker or crayon.
Socially, art lives in an uncomfortable place where art has value, and simultaneously no value. People want art, but very few people want to pay for it. Or it’s thought of as an unaffordable luxury. It’s sort of in sacred whore territory. There’s an attitude surrounding art and artistic pursuits that it must be done for love and attaching money to it demeans the process in some way. That the enjoyment the artist may achieve in the creation of a piece is payment enough, and to ask for financial compensation on top of that is greedy and selfish. And yet there’s a place and a time in which pieces of art are traded for massive sums of money as investment pieces on the hope that they might appraise in value - an investment that is contingent on the artist creating more work, building more of a reputation, which is only possible if the artist can afford the paints to paint with (or any materials required for artistic creation, music, media, books, etc - first and foremost the brain and body) and a space to create work in.
There was a time when artists had patrons, which worked in a sense of providing for the artist financially, but at the cost of the artists freedom and voice. It’s hard to criticize the ruling class(or the church) when they ruling class owns you and your blue paint is made of lapis lazuli and is very expensive.
Now we live in a time where artists have much more freedom, but the ability to live on the fruits of that labor is becoming harder and harder.
Compounding this is American Puritan culture - where if you worked hard wealth would be rained down upon you, a blessing from God. If your art was truly worth anything, if your work was pure and looked upon favorably by sky-daddy - you wouldn’t be struggling financially. A notion that any work that has worth is rewarded with bounty and if you’re struggling clearly you are morally deficient and belong in the muck - otherwise why would you be there?
Enter AI.
The democratization of art has possibly entered its final phase. Where once art could only be seen in the homes of the wealthy, museums were created giving art viewing to the public. Art schools have exploded in number, making a formal art education easier to obtain (though no less expensive). Easier and cheaper than art school(for the low low price of your attention and a few ads), online art tutorials make learning advanced and niche artistic techniques accessible to anyone with a device to view them on and a wifi connection. Digital art, though expensive out of the gate, removes the cost of supplies. Similar advancements in audio production have made home-brewed song releases easier than ever. If an author can’t find a publisher, self publishing is there, waiting on Amazon to help you get your work in front of people.
Anyone can access art. Anyone can learn to create art.
Enter AI.
Visual Art is the first to be hit by this. AI is coming for the rest of it, fast and hard.
I have had this thought in my head for a few weeks - When everyone is an artist, no-one is an artist. And when the magic is removed from art making, when art has been democratized to the point when it’s not a job anymore there’s the possibility for a fundamental shift in the how and why anyone creates anything. And I’m weirdly looking forward to it.
I spent a lot of the summer after the release of Midjourney having an existential crisis I had no time for, and kept pushing off. In slow moments it would creep back up on me, and I’d let the panic hit for a count of 10 before I pushed it back. I was in school, I was busy, I had no time. (My therapist called me the queen of compartmentalization - I don’t think it was a compliment, but it’s handy at times). By the time I had a moment to look at AI art and really look about it, and think about what it was bringing the panic had subsided and it suddenly didn’t matter. Might my job as an artist get replaced with an algorithm?
Possibly.
Probably.
But I’ve never really loved creating art that other people asked for. The odd commission aside (I don’t take them unless I’m interested in doing them) not making art commercially any more really just removes a task that I give up fairly willingly, which frees up all of the energy I would have expended making art to trick someone into reading bad stories - frees it up to make things that don’t cost so much emotional labor and leave me fulfilled at the end of the day. Admittedly this is a huge privilege. I have other skills I can rely upon for an income, and I’ve been working long enough to have backup plans in place. Not everyone is this lucky. Not everyone can look at a garbage commission and reply with “I’d rather not.” There are absolutely artists who are being hit with this directly in the wallet and I have no idea what to say to them. There is no making it better. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. For better or worse these tools are loose in the world now, and there is absolutely a culture fight happening around them.
Something That Made Me Laugh: Someone grafted meat cells into grapes and made meat berries.