Marketing is a middleman . A trojan horse the system uses to keep its hooks in your production of creative content… if you bow to its parameters. But as long as you are creating for engagement the system sees as valid, you lock yourself out of the rawest internal exploration and external expression creating can give you power to access.
Your outside focus fucks with your artistic filter from inception to presentation.
No matter what that external focus is.
The desire to inject yourself into the global conversation, to be seen in and spoken of in that flow is not a horrible, shameful desire at all. Until you try to cloak that aim as something other than that for others you’re doing everything you can to be seen by.
If you want in on that shuck & jive, be real about it and move on it… but don’t try to dress the pig that you’re showing up to the roast as …as a more pious offering than it is.
It’s okay to want to be part of the evocative noise going on around you. To be in step with the zeitgeist. That’s why the term zeitgeist came into fashion. But just understand that producing content to be in cohesive step with that collective song puts you in the choir, no matter what you do.
You can call yourself whatever you want in this day and age. That’s part of its charm. Doesn’t make your self- labeling or the gatekeeping you try to do (to try to secure your standing in the eyes of whomever you feel your success hinges on performing for…) as you try out weird sovereign complexes …true.
When it comes to authentic creative geists, the more you move to stay in step with the current song or be the “IT girl” of it, the further away from your soul’s actual artistic capability and probable true intent you can get.
IF sincere creation is your “just cause.”
& You HAVE to become okay with that if that is the road you are drawn to… without trying to demand all others who call themselves by that title defile their pursuits on paper to line up with your stunted comprehension of the caste.
Just call what you do what it is. Make that plebeian push your true art – & there really is an art to successfully doing that. One you can be proud of. Success at that can be your definition of art but it is not the definition of ART overall, at all. No matter what the auction houses & the media tell you.
& If that is what someone is doing…and they are honest about that…they will have no need to muddy up the definitions of others as they explore themselves on their own arthead paths.
You don’t get to forcibly glom anyone else into that little cage you are constructing for yourself with limits your soul has misread as horizons with you. Not for company, comparison or competition.
.
There’s a difference between an Art Geist …and an Art Heist.
I used to stand down on this subject matter.
Because I know that Everyone IS an artist.
Everyone Does have the capacity and capability to be a true artist in whatever pure medium they truly came here to rock with.
It’s not the outside affirming, assignation or confirmation that should matter to creative folks the ways it does in 2025. Everywhere you look, oeuvres are chock full of unoriginal thoughts, mimicking, pandering and outright plagiarism of other artists that they say “inspired” them when pushed to admit it…who they very well May have no idea were the reductive hacks of yore, having stolen the due diligence done by artists who had something raw and wonderful to say at the root of that stolen work …that the hacks of then nor now can’t even fathom.
These days many things that should be positioned as expansive theoretical tests (or middling minutiae) of ‘what was it in another artist’s work that triggered you?’ and “what is your kernel to glean from it to make yours?’ instead go straight to market with whatever gimmick they can grab, brayingly positioning themselves in the grand scheme of things. It is right up there with Jojo Siwa’s sincere belief that a new Gay Pop ideology was birthed through her own hoohaa thanks to her neophyte lesbian awakening and not the wizened genX & millennial stylists, handlers & A&R folks who handed her that ‘new to her’ mask sans references.
Speaking of masks…
You look an an african mask. Or a guitar…
Early 20th century artists were smacked in the forehead with the potency and unmistakable skill, beauty and craftsmanship in African artistic output for millenia, people who had otherwise bubbled up in European propaganda of the time as no more than slaves and/or savages…
& the next thing you see is the entire crumbling of everything those European artists thought they knew about ART.
Crossing with that “ authentic content” changed the courses of their lives.
That’s what cubism IS at it’s root.
White folks aesthetic mores shaken to the core so violently that they couldn’t see straight anymore. Or better yet… couldn’t see in 2D anymore.This may be the first time you see it phrased as such, but all of modern art as we officially know it today is still trying to find suitable work-arounds to the psychological bruising that left.
& that allowance of psychological impact…that RESPECTING of that collision, that run-in with new art… gave Western Civilization a real, true New Art.
And from it’s utter disrespect …you got artists who mimicked everything about African art and tried to call it their own flights of fancy without any respect to the primordial cause of the shift in their work.
If you were lucky, you got artists like Juan Gris…whose eyes were forever changed by his own headfirst crash into African art…who then created something new out of his studied documentation Of that exploration.
Or …you have the Ladies D’Avignon. Which is where your query to me first came from. A painting where Picasso ribaldly inserts for all intents a seeming garish african mask-esqued chick in the lineup of whores in barcelona that he frequented- which can be read as a slur against the more moorish prostitutes in the mix or a testament to the morphing of esthetic understanding of “beauty” encapsulated in one piece of work. Something was happening to him internally, artistically as he moved from left to right across that canvas.
And that’s something that is obvious to some people viewing that piece of art. The vibratory shift the painting reverberates with is embedded in that.
…To others? They just parrot the institutional footnote now given to the piece to show they are intellectuals.
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso is considered one of those pivotal artistic moments unquestionably dividing the past from the future. Modernism was swooping across Europe in the period that Picasso painted this masterpiece, and with it, he reinvented the wheel of Western painting. The artwork depicts five naked women, created from flat, jagged planes, their faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso’s landmark work, was a precursor to the style that became known as Cubism and is often considered the first Cubist painting.”
The gold star for bringing nothing to it but the ad nauseam echoing of this and that art history professor[or gamesman] who drilled into you this was an important work. But just because that kind of energy has been held as the defining line in hindsight of how to explain the piece to the masses… Very school of early Dua Lipa “Yaas girl, give us nothing~”
(…To Dua Lipa’s credit… not lying to herself about that honeyed honesty led to an explosion of artistry From her…as if she vividly got curious as to what she could make that thing…do. That’s arthead as fuck, frankly. )
The world has championed the best parroting presented in the game for a very long time.
But blah blah blah.
I mean, sure…the words DO means something. But it may as well be a word salad comprised of nothing but the palest fronds of room temperature, wilted iceberg lettuce at this point.
For the past 30 years, being able to say the above with a straight face was damn near a passcode, a proof of life into xyz, climes that those “in the know” clamored to be, in.
Doesn’t mean that was how the artist himself …moved.
“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”
Picasso.
ut what is the truth of the painting for Picasso? Fuck all it signified in hindsight as a movement.
You can describe that big bang and travel along all the lines you want back to it as though that gives you proof of life in navigating and creating with the here and now…but was that supposed to be your tour of duty?
/
Why are you marching through mausoleums of artistic thought and process to show off your knower… instead of finding out what the fuck you came here embedded with that is wholly yours… that the world is literally waiting on you to mine and expose them to, in hopes of strengthening their immunity in the game of life??
Do you want the truth no one monetizing what it means to “be an artist” will ever broach with any of those they meet out on the path? Do you want to know what is often held closer to chest out of a self- centered desire for continued company walking on the long, wide road?
…Want to Know What is in that painting (in particular) that should be important to every person that calls themselves an artist to this day in the 21st century?
The ocular equivalent of a psychotic break with everything that the artist had been told defined art up to that point and had gained abject proficiency mimicking. You see his sight split. You see his pineal gland pop the fuck open and him ask how else he can see besides how he’d been shown he was allowed to play with seeing. & then you see a career steeped with seasons of him retriggering that effect within himself in different valuations.
That is not chorale work.
That…is the work of a symphonic composer… Of an actual arthead.
You can be in step with the zeitgeist. OR you can fuck the zeitgeist raw and make it birth nefilim-like babies with the son of god-like arthead Ya got sent down to the surface of the simulation to manifest.
You chose.
Notice I didn’t say you choose.
Because you already haven chosen. Yep. That part is past tense.
What you are going to do with that choice is the present tense…begging to help you foster the future as a creative that you truly have on your heart, no matter what the zeitgeist is whistling.
You have to get beyond the zeitgeist to truly create.
&…The only way to get beyond it is to go so within that you are without again, able to patch back in with new eyes.
You asked… and I picked Picasso because he is whom artists tend to be told to hold up on a mount Mckinley of Artheads as the way to “do the do,” focusing instead on when he consciously became a caricature of himself “AS the latest artistic iteration”… Instead of how he “did what he did” all those years…in his studio to get to that jump off point.
He is lauded alongside Warhol as the same beast when he decidedly is the antithesis of the beast that Warhol chose to be.
People have been trying to move like both of them for literal generations…because those with any real exposure to arts edu in at least the 90s and beyond were taught that his map[ drawn in crayon] was the most who shot the dawg map to arthead success there was on offer.
So they’ve been slapping their creations on this and that…doing that work, doing their best to nail That aspect, utterly ignoring HOW this man operated within his different periods artistically, for himself, towards himself, towards his subject. All that groundwork is brushed off, waved away…without any understanding that the groundwork he did is the spore that infects everyone else via his work to this day.
If they truly understood the homecoming Basquiat was… they’d have burnt his every offering in outrage. Instead, those closest to him who passive aggressively Did get the circles his work closed across every board… in this game…
helped ensure his time here was as brief as possible.
They will hold up Van Gogh, will bleat melodramatically for hours about the more gothic, starving turn his arc took… [because a sex & death cult culture is gonna sex & death cult the fuck out, blindly championing the primal tenets of its fucked up culture as art to avoid being driven insane by its despicable tendencies often snuffing out the very light it is always supposedly looking for]
…and utterly ignore all that was done with his work after he died to make his imagery a juggernaut that technically was a twisted form of necrophilia in itself that fucked the corpse of the artist, repositioning his emaciated corpse as a titan in the industry to strive to be like. When what that means is let the industry makes it’s money off of raping your cold, dead body’s work with you enjoying nothing but what you poured into it spiritually to create it.
& I GET… that in today’s world, many “artists” chasing after brass rings in the field of art are doing so because they actually are trying to defy that bullshit BDSM they know generations of artists Have been fed. That you must starve to call yourself an artist unless you’re a cosseted white American guy or willing to suck off some variant of one so they can position you as such out in the world. Then you can “prosper.” A lot of artheads I have known across 35+ years being exposed to this shit I know have been in the long haul fight against that aspect of the beast …and I give props to them for making that their war and sticking to it.
BUT~ They…LIVED.
I AM NOT exactly SAYING SO MANY ARTISTS TODAY DON’T.
In fact, thanks be to God…a LOT of artists have long been eschewing all that To Live…because they ARE quietly paying attention. It will be the tribe’s saving grace that kids with that twist in their DNA to truly create still will stumble on rebels out in the weeds, taking their personal geists to the mat and the matte …instead of all the society tells them they should hold dear.
But a lot of these kids are being fed in a way that ensures nothing spiritually can come out of interacting with their work because wet brows aside, nothing spiritually went into it. & that’s due to how this has willfully been sold to the brunt of them.
What I am saying is that…it’s time to string up the marketeers onto the very crosses they keep trying to compel this current crop of kids to crawl up on As the true, demonic business of art.
When in actuality their bottomline focused brain worms driving the cart is what has the fucker veering of the road into potential oblivion as it is-
Trump forcing his way rapaciously into the Kennedy center & thinking it’s fine, normal & dare I say nobel…lays at the feet of every gimmicky artist out here the last 20 years denigrating the field to the chicanery he literally is a bona fide master of. He is there due to the mediocrity those “making media moves” in the field screamed had merit beyond money laundering.
& you’re going to see a lot of craptastic “artists” of that caliber clamor to cut a rug with him, with the future art textbooks they are sure this alliance with him will surely lead to them being included in.
Make your peace with the pending noise… then get your ass back in studio.
Get back to work.
GETERDONE.