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The comedian and podcast host, Kevin Pollack, says that every good comedian has a bad case of hey-look-at-me-disease. Lesser strains of this malady are common throughout the arts, I think, for better or worse. One thing is certain, social media isn’t the cure.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a truth universally acknowledged that great artists are often self-absorbed. Social media requires us to at least appear to be obsessed with ourselves. But at some point we end up serving this system rather than the other way around\u2014posting everything we do as nourishment for our insatiable \u201cfeed.\u201d Being aware of this, I tend to post my latest painting or exhibition with reluctance on Facebook and Instagram, because I think twenty years from now people will look back on this whole phenomenon and think: \u201cHow tiresome.\u201d All of this is partly why it took so long for me to write my last post about the recognition I received from Manifest last year–doesn’t this get annoying for some readers?<\/p>\n
In a way, the whole social media game is a sweetheart deal for those of us who don\u2019t have mass followings on the Web. It becomes a game of I\u2019ll-like-you-if-you-like-me. (Granted, it isn\u2019t all a mutual schmooze. Most \u201clikes\u201d are sincere.) But social media\u2019s basic OS is reciprocity. You click on other peoples\u2019 like buttons as much as possible to prime the pump for likes in return. Yet isn’t that the definition of an echo chamber? I love coming across an artist now and then for whom I can find no Instagram account.\u00a0 And, ironically, it was refreshing when a now well-known art site that started up a few years ago wrote and asked me to link to their home page, as a way of increasing their rank on Google searches\u2014it was honest and forthright. And I was genuinely impressed with what they were doing. But my attitude is a lot less calculating–I put my work and my thoughts about it out there so that people will discover them if they come looking or else just stumble across it. But hashtags and SEO optimizing search words? It\u2019s never too late to start, I guess. But not today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The comedian and podcast host, Kevin Pollack, says that every good comedian has a bad case of hey-look-at-me-disease. Lesser strains of this malady are common throughout the arts, I think, for better or worse. One thing is certain, social media isn’t the cure. It\u2019s a truth universally acknowledged that great artists are often self-absorbed. Social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n