Abstract: For this conference paper, I have chosen the stream of social media to analyze how artists can succeed digitally. I will discuss about the three tools that artists can use to have an impact on social media: knowledge, community and promotion. Social media can help in the learning process of the artist through engagement, shares and tutorials. The communities created though social networks are crucial entry points for a better advancement of the artist. Furthermore, I will also talk about how the artist can go in a proper promotion of his work on more art oriented social network platforms. Through this discussion, I will also highlight issues that visual artists can come across during their promotional process.
Introduction
Art theorists, dealers and museum curators are believed to exhibit the necessary expertise acquired through lifelong learning and experience, and these traditional gatekeepers have declared what constitutes as ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ art. However, new media platforms have allowed for a participatory culture which appears to be challenging the top-down art evaluations (Arora & Vermeylen, 2011).
Social media regroups several online platforms which are linked to each other. Each platform has several common features that forms part of the day to day routines of each individual. The world is connected and people nowadays have the capacity to create their digital footprint. Everyone is visible and is willing to be part of a bigger community. When it comes to artists, this visibility generated by social media becomes crucial. Social media has an important impact on the success of any artist. Social media can be considered as a tool kit to become popular.
There are 3 main tools that will help the visual artists develop and succeed: Knowledge, communities and promotion. For many independent productions, fan engagement on social media remains a way in which content creators can create awareness about their work through directly interacting with fandom (Chin, 2016). Therefore, the goal for an artist to succeed is to seduce existing online art communities to create his own fandom. All the communities, in social media, have the ability to judge whether an artist is worth following. Each likes count, thus the artist needs to become more than just an artist. The key is to become a good content creator.
Knowledge
With globalization, learning has become easier. People have access to large amount of information and can go beyond ideas of their own cultures. Within the structure of social media, individuals are also able to share their knowledge in any field of interest. This knowledge is then discussed, argued, updated or remediated. Participatory culture has created an accelerated process for learning things, because content is available at any time and in different forms. Agim Poshka (citing Shirky & Pink, 2014) refers to “the great spare time revolution”, he affirms that before sharing required people to be in the same place at the same time and that nowadays, sharing ideas can happen anytime, anywhere. Whether they are poking through Twitter streams on Smartphone’s before the morning bell rings, reading blog entries on iPads while sitting in waiting rooms, or extending conversations started on e-conferences on laptops while unwinding after a long day of work.
Moreover, these social media platforms can surely contribute to an artist development. Pinterest, for example, is an open space for discoveries. The pins are distributed in various themes for a better search experience. Each pin leads to useful websites across the web. The fact that all information is already gathered together, under the same theme, decreases research work and optimizes the amount of time for learning. Pinterest is also very visual, hence, very adequate for visual artists since they tend to be sensitive to image. The search process and learning, therefore, becomes straightforward. Visual data provide an essential entry point into the phenomenology of platform vernaculars that captures their storytelling capacities, affective rhythms, and publics, beyond engagement metrics or purely textual content which are easier to analyze at scale (Pearce et al., 2018).
Apart from the facilities of research on social network, there is also the aspect of learning for free. Pages like DRAWING PENCILS on Facebook offers lots of video step by step tutorials. On the page, each tutorials showcases the artist, Veri Apriyatno, specialized in pencil drawing. Apriyatno regularly posts his artworks in the photo gallery and promotes other artist’s work. He also posts videos of other artists that influences him. There is a large amount of drawing techniques being displayed on the page and the artist is really willing to contribute his skills to his audience.
Communities
Being part of a community online will help the artist forge, its interest and influences. These interconnected Internet technologies allow new opportunities for user participation and collaboration simply because they are implemented across so many technological devices and used in such a variety of ways… artists can present new projects, they also may become collaborators and managers (Garland, 2013). Through the participation process, the artist can assess his work. Any artist can post his artwork in art groups and get feedback though comments. The feedbacks will help the artist to adjust himself with the critics of his community. A good example is, the fluid art movement on Facebook. Fluid art is basically a style where the artist plays with and combine fluids to create patterns on canvas. In private groups, artists discuss about techniques and trends affiliated to fluid art. There are often beginners who post photos of their work in progress to get tips from other members.
Communities in social media is a great process for the development of an artists. It brings new perspectives to the artist and often give highlights for new updates. Artists can keep in touch with new trends and inspiring events only by going through their different online communities. Moreover, online communities act like a collective library with different entry points who can bring the artist to new spaces. Audiences are viewed as active participants who “work for the text” (Milner, 2009) and are willing to labor freely for non-monetary gains such as social connections with other fans and deeper engagement with the texts themselves (as cited in Massanari,2014). It brings all the whole concept of participatory culture into action.
Promotion
After going through his learning process, the artist is then ready to act as a content creator online. His aim must be to understand all the features of social media; it can help him in the promotion of his work. This is where storytelling comes into action. The goal in promotions is to create the audience engagement. All social networks sites are framed for continuous promotion. Artist can easily post their artworks on Instagram to become popular. However, several social media only give artists opportunity to post their work as amateurs without any involvement with professional networks. Yet, there are also specialized social networks that are framed for visual artists who seeks to pursue an art career. These networks can easily connect with popular social media network to enhance the visibility of the artist.
For instance, Behance.net, is made for artists who are ready to promote themselves as professional. The website is linked to various platforms and tools that will forge the artist’s career. The artist can create his own visual portfolio according to his visual art field, talk about his art and connect to other artists. Two interesting aspect of Behance are its Creative tools, and School and organization pages. The creative tool page, promotes a variety of software for visual artist to enhance their creativity and learn about graphic designing. The school and organization pages connect the future professional artist to join art schools’ networks and follow student portfolios. Behance is really a professional guide for future visual artists.
After setting his professional network visual artist will still have to establish a social network plan to increase his visibility. Online sharing opens up new social possibilities, new kinds of networks and new forms of distributed creativity and collaboration (Meikle, 2016). As a good content creator an artist need to be aware of the features that would help him succeed on social media. Since social media are very visual, it is already an advantage for artists. The point is to know on which feature to lay attention in order to get the audience engagement. Instagram is one of the most powerful visual social media worldwide and is surely adequate for a visual artist promotion. It minimizes the amount of text in order to focus the attention on images. The platform also has the collaborative and participation features crucial for a good promotion and engagement. Shares, likes and comments are the three elements which can create a big change for visual artists.
Storytelling is the shutter button for the public engagement. An artist should be able to tell a story through the different social network platforms. It involves creating a new corpus of extensive stories that move beyond traditional storytelling and demand new terms of user participation as well as analysis (Schiller, 2018). Artists need to know how to give a different narrative to each aspect of their art. It is also important to address the right platform. Each social media platform has several unique features. Visual artist should know how to deal with those unique features with their creativity. Before sharing his narrative, the artist should think about his online identity and understand what to showcase online for a good promotion. A good transmedia framework for an artist can be: video tutorial on YouTube, posting his artwork on Instagram, creating a fan page on Facebook in order to share and discuss about latest art trends and promote offline exposition events.
Issues
Social media can act as tool kit for artists but it also has limitations. It is important that all artists understand the weakness of learning, collaborating and sharing on social networks. Firstly, in communities with a large number of members the effect that each individual has on the user profile is only a small portion of the collective community feedback. As the number of community members increases the collective profile tends to represent what is of interest to the community as a whole (Nanas et al., 2011). Groups in social media tend to become one entity which merge acknowledging one common interest. This collaborative process can become a difficulty for artists who rely most of the time on social media for learning. Communities offer a large amount of information that often focus on popular trends. If artists are really willing to go through a deeper learning, they will still have to go through a filtering process. On Facebook, information can easily be filtered through tags however the relevance of the information may differ from the user’s expectations.
Moreover, UCC may have begun as a grassroots movement not focused on monetary rewards, but monetization of UCC has been a growing trend (OECD, 2007). Promoting a work online may not lead to monetization. If an artist is really willing to get paid by organizations or brands, he should learn where to direct his work and know the preferences of companies, in order to see if it fits the artist’s vision. The loss of uniqueness may also become an issue for the artist. When trying to create content online, artists may be influenced by trends in order to go viral and forgetting about their long term aims. On the other side, artists can also copy other artists without any further remediation and this lack of creativity is surely not powerful enough for an audience who longs for update and creativity. Copying other works may also lead to copyright infringement.
To conclude, Visual art is very dominant online. It is clear that social media is a tool kit for promotion, learning and collaboration. However, these online platforms can easily become saturated due to the large flow of information and the fact that a large amount of people goes through process of promotion in the same field. Just like when looking for a job, a visual artist needs to make the right choice and be continuously creative in order to have a greater impact online.
References
Arora, P., & Vermeylen, F. (2011). THE END OF THE ART CONNOISSEUR? EXPERTS AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE [Ebook]. Retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2012.687392?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Chin, B. (2016). Social media, promotional culture, and participatory fandom. Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, Social Media and Community Engagement [Ebook]. Retrieved from http://file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/TindallNatalieT_2016_2SocialMediaPromotion_PublicRelationsAndPar.pdf
Massanari, A. L. (2014). Participatory Culture, Community, and Play. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang US. Retrieved May 5, 2019, from https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/22651
Meikle, G. (2016). Social Media : Communication, Sharing and Visibility. New York: Routledge. Retrieved from Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1166174&site=ehost-live
Nanas, N et al. (2011). Collective Information Filtering for Web Observatories. In P. Francq (Ed.), Collaborative Search and Communities of Interest: Trends in Knowledge Sharing and Assessment (pp. 164-181). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-61520-841-8.ch008
OECD. (2007). Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking. Retrieved from https://doi-org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.1787/9789264037472-en.
Pearce, W. (2018). Visual cross-platform analysis: digital methods to research social media images [Ebook]. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486871?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Poshka, A. (2014). Digital Culture and Social Media versus the Traditional Education [Ebook]. Retrieved from http://nowadays.home.pl/JECS/data/documents/JECS=201=20=282014=29=20201-205.pdf
Schiller, M. (2018). Transmedia Storytelling: New Practices and Audiences. In Christie I. & Van den Oever A. (Eds.), Stories (pp. 97-108). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5rf6vf.10?refreqid=excelsior%3A09b431f294b5bdc2e3bcb00deba8e3be&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Hi DConstance,
I enjoyed reading your paper, I also wrote about social media but relating it to visual artists was a really interesting choice that made your paper stand out to me!
When reading your paper I was wondering if you would mention art theft, which strikes me as an absolute nightmare for an artist in the online space. I was happy to see you mentioned this aspect, it seems to me like a double edged sword, social media allows artists to self promote and maybe gain an audience, but it’s easier than ever to steal someone else’s work. I was wondering, based on your research, do you think that visual artists are overall better or worse off in the age of social media?
Hi C Sligh
Thank you for responding to my paper. You are right about the fact that stealing someone else work is quite easier on social media and I am feeling very concerned about it. Visual art is a very suggestive discipline which has evolved through the artist capacity to observe, look for inspirations and create unique artworks out of it. When copy pasting an artwork, this whole process of creativity is turned down. I am convinced that visual artists are still struggling to make their work stand out within their communities. The high rate of saturated content and this whole issue about art theft creates lots of risks for visual artists. Maybe, new external components, copyright laws options and new tools should be added to upgrade social media capacities to protect artists. However, for me, visual artists are better in the age of social media. It plays an important role in their lives. It has the great potential of generating more reach and support for any user looking for recognition. What makes social media very significant is the fact that there is no barrier. It gives the chance to anyone to prove his skill and show off his work. There are no hierarchy and no specific style to abide with. The visual artist only has to choose the right connections and know how to brand his artwork for more likes.
According to you, what would be the best way to protect visual artist from going through art theft?
Hi again,
Yes you raise a good point about he low barriers to entry for a visual artist on the internet. One way i know of to stop people using art without permission is to watermark it, but I think a lot of people do not do this as it also inhibits the enjoyment of the work. I don’t follow a lot of artists online, however another thing I know that artists rely on to reduce theft is their fans letting them know when they see the art elsewhere. This is what happened in November last year when Jeffree Star released his new merch design on Twitter, and some people said they recognised the design from a Tumblr post years before. The merch design had in fact been traced from another artist’s drawing, Twitter users were able to notify the original artist and Jeffree was able to contact them to apologise and work things out. For artists with a small following I can imagine it would be very difficult to control your works until something like this happened though!
Hi C Sligh,
Thanks for sharing with me. You are right fans and communities really help in reducing theft and I think you can also read the article I shared with Devyn Ronaldson as we are having a debate about how communities can help people online.
Please take a look
https://aaronwesterberg.com/blog/116668/stolen-art-copyright-and-the-power-of-social-media
D Constance
Hi DConstance,
Your paper was a pleasure to read! Your argument was presented very clearly and remained very engaging, especially with the incorporation of the hyperlink to the Facebook page Drawing Pencil.
As @CSligh mentioned above, I too was thinking about the risk of having one’s art stolen by another user when sharing on social network sites such as Pinterest and Instagram. It must be hard for both the platform owners and the artists themselves to account for the illegal distribution and copying of artwork and I wonder how many cases are resolved in the long run. As you said, there is a degree of saturation on these sites with other artworks, which must contribute to the risk of art theft since it would be hard to track where the art originated and who it truly belongs to.
Within this participatory culture, we also see the remixing of others’ work. This remixing then, would contribute to the risk of art theft since it would seemingly be difficult to distinguish between what is a blatant copy of an art piece, and what is simply a piece of art that has been ‘inspired’ by another.
My question for you is, in terms of ensuring art theft does not occcur when sharing on social network sites, who do you think is responsible? Do you think it is the artist’s responsibility to ensure their work can always be traced back to them with the use of a watermark, for example, or do you think it is the platform’s job to monitor new submissions and try remove exact copies of others’ art, like YouTube does with music that infringes copyright?
Looking forward to your response,
Thank you,
Devyn 🙂
Feel free to check my paper out too, if you’d liked!
https://networkconference.netstudies.org/2019Curtin/2019/05/05/active-now-how-web-2-0-allows-for-the-formation-of-online-communities-capable-of-initiating-change-through-activism/
Hello Devyn,
I think that it is both the artist’s and the platform’s monitor responsibility to protect artworks when they are shared of social networks sites. Watermarks are often not sufficient to remove the threats. Social media monitors can apply several copyright laws policies over any platforms but it also important for an artist to apply copyright on their work before even posting it online. The visual artists are directly related to the good application of copyright laws in social media since they are the one who should decide to what extent their artwork need to be protected from copyright infringement.
We should not forget that some artists also benefit of other social media users who freely promote their work by creating remediated contents. Just like on YouTube where several copyright statements are applicable with fair dealing, other social media should also be given options for copyright that would not affect some creative process and inspirations made by the visual artist’s fans.
I see that your paper is all about how online communities can initiate change through activism maybe I can link it to this whole debate on art theft. Here is a good example of how a social media community helped in fighting against art theft and copyright infringement. Maybe the issue Aaron Westerberg (2017) went through can inspire you for further discussions:
https://aaronwesterberg.com/blog/116668/stolen-art-copyright-and-the-power-of-social-media
Thank you for your response,
D Constance
Hi D Constance,
That is a really great point about artists needing to ensure that they apply copyright to their works before sharing on social media. I think it best that they utilise Creative Commons to do this so that they are able to allow and benefit from remediated content. What do you think?
Thank you for sharing that article! I’ll be sure to give it a read!
Devyn 🙂
Welcome back Devyn ^^
Creative commons is always the ultimate solution when sharing content online but sometimes some authors also ask for credits even if it is free to use. According to you what is the best way to give acknowledgements to someone for his work online, so that it does not affect the visual artist’s own work?
Thank you for sharing with me
D Constance
Hi Constance, I really like your paper and the way you have create a pathway for a visual artist. You got a good narrative and there are some good development of different points like Knowledge, communities and promotion.
Something that you could add up is a proper definition of what is a visual artist. You could also explain the economical side of promotion of contents on SM. Also not all visual artist can afford a good promotion on SM. Promotional posts prices on SM like Facebook and Instagram differ.
Lastly you, is there some example of visual artists you can relate to your article?
Looking forward to your response,
Thank you,
William 🙂
Hello J Favory,
When speaking about visual artists, I am referring to any time of visual content creators like photographers, designers, film makers, illustrators, painters, sculptors and so on. Since I like to draw, I focused my examples on drawing and designing. However, my paper can apply to several other disciplines, like music or dance. Yet I think visual artists deserved some special attention.
Speaking of the economical side of social media promotion for visual artists, my focus was more on self promotion of visual artists and fans promotion which is completely free. Still your statement is very interesting and I think that paid promotion is required when it will have an impact for the artist offline. Some examples are, if the artist is planning to display his work in an exhibition or if he is opening a gallery, for a photo shoot or screening, to sell artworks or any other offline events. Since we are talking about social media as a tool for success, for me, all these offline events happen when you start promoting your artwork online for free.
I hope my answer is clear enough for you and thank you for sharing with me.
D Constance
This was such an interesting unique paper. As I am studying both Web Media and Photography so I felt I could relate to this paper a lot and was incredibly engaged with it all. I strive to find inspiration in multiple fields online to help create my artwork, with my main website being Pinterest. as well as searching for tutorials on Photoshopping techniques.
Your statement “These interconnected Internet technologies allow new opportunities for user participation and collaboration simply because they are implemented across so many technological devices and used in such a variety of ways”. I found this statement interesting since new technology has opened a lot of doors for me through collaboration and meeting new people in the art world through networking. all communication done through online technologies.
I love the different approach and focusing on how social media has affected visual artists.
Hi S Ferguson,
Thank you for your comment, I have a question for you. Since you are a visual artist can you tell me how do you manage to impose your uniqueness in this whole interconnected sphere?
I am looking forward for your answer 🙂
D Constance
Hi DConstance,
Great paper. I hadn’t thought much about the ways that visual artists can work and promote their work by using social media platforms for content, sharing and collaboration. Like previously mentioned I was also thinking about the risks to visual artists’ rights in terms of the ease at which technology has provided us with the ability to screenshot, copy and paste, or download images and visual art from the web. Is there technology that can assist creators protect their work?
Hello DConstance,
Your paper is very interesting. You have highlighted some points that are important to the understanding of how artists reach have changed. Nowadays, we should use social media platforms to advantage us professionally. The online world is so big and full of content that inspirations might come easier; remediation and so on. However, if I was an upcoming, I would see if my work has success online before any real business. The internet gives the opportunity to do a sample of the audience thus reaching a specific one. Do you think that with so many contents online, artists might find it hard to find a place to have a name thus success?
I will be looking for your response! And thank you for this paper as an art lover myself it was a pleasant read.
Hello M Legeant,
Thank you for your response. You have a really good question. I think that something interesting about social media platforms is that they actually give a place to everyone to display content. The key issue here, when you have a blank page like an instagram page or facebook page, is that you should make the right choices. This is why I talk about knowledge, community and promotion. Yes, there are lot of people sharing online and not succeeding but there are also millions of people getting views, likes and subscriptions online. I think it all depends on the right story you want to convey to your audience. If visual artists are not willing to share, connect and learn from others, it can become harder for them to succeed. Moreover, I think that the word success online works differently since there is no barriers between producers and consumers. Everyone has an equal chance to start something big online and there is no final reward to it. People online create, post, react regularly and continuously in order to keep their popularity, therefore succeed. It can be hard sometimes but the thing is that you must try first and use the right tools to do so.
I hope my answer can help you,
D Constance
Hi DConstance,
Overall your paper was such an interesting ang thought-provoking piece. I especially liked the idea of knowledge, communities and promotion as being tools to develop and succeeed by visual artists, and the idea of creating a fandom is such a new concept for me which I found super interesting.
Thanks,
Patricia
Nice paper, well in terms of art theft. It can be troublesome to really distinguish whether plagia has been done. For instance a server may look at the different ajoining pixels and see for similarities. Yet that would not be 100% accurate. My question would be whether platforms would agree to employ people to review all visuals?
Nice article and strong argument. As a content creator myself, I can’t help but agree on the fact that storytelling is key in visual arts. This is according to me, the best way to connect with the audience as you wish to express something, to pass on a message. Else, what would be the point? Also, since the rise of the web and social media platforms, they can indeed engage and have a say in it as well, which again confirms what you mentioned about participating. It is now easier to get feedback, even through visual arts themselves, like creating a video to respond to another video, even a parody and so on.
Hi DConstance,
Your paper’s title instantly grabbed my attention. Actually the truth is that I’m an art lover too and I have a passion for making digital art illustration. I know it’s not my major but I believe everyone should do what they love, whether as a profession or as a hobby. Okay, back to your paper. You’ve talked about 3 aspects: Knowledge, community and promotion and then explored some limitations. Well as an artists who own an online about my own illustration, well it is not easy to indulge into this business without name or fame. Everyone says that social media is a great way to promote your art works but unfortunately that’s only one perspective because the truth is that, this system will work only if you have build your name or business or art organisation. As newcomers, this online platform is a saturated market and in the beginning, one may feel extremely discouraged for not getting the required attention. That’s my point of view though. What about yours?
Hi D Constance,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your paper because, like some of the others who have commented, I am a visual artist myself (I draw and make digital art)!
The points you raised about social media being crucial for promotion, the ease of sharing knowledge and resources for learning and the ability to receive feedback to help improve your skills were explored well, I believe.
Since you are a visual artist yourself and you now have some knowledge from academic literature about these issues, I would like to ask whether you think technology and social media has completely changed what is traditionally considered ‘high art’ and ‘low art’? People are able to produce ‘paintings’ using digital software only, more and more art galleries and exhibitions have featured art that references popular culture and many traditional artists are collaborating with companies to produce commercial work. Do you think examples like this indicate that the online and offline visual art community may need to completely scrap the terms ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ because they overlap so much now?
Thanks,
Petra
Hi DConstance,
This is a very interesting topic that you have.
My family had this stigma where they said that artist will not have good future as they will face lots of hardship in trying to find a job. However, your paper helped me to understand the situation better by clearing all this misleading information that I’ve been fed with.
I guess, online community really have a huge impact in promoting an artist’s artwork and eventually, through online community itself, artists could find more work opportunities through freelancing and connections from their followers. The online platform could help artists’ reach his/her viewers despite demographic location.
However, still, I too agree with the previous comments that others had written. Copyright certainly is an issue that many people often ignores. Personally, when I uploaded my artworks online, I will put a stamp of my name / signature to show that it’s my work. But, people can simply crop this sign as they claim it as their own. I think this is something that people should take in more to their consideration and find a way to ensure that these artworks are protected by copyright by law?
Cheers