I finally looked at the traffic numbers for my studio site. 71 percent of it is one photo.
Not the work. Not the process shots, not the long text about the 2009 installation in a former slaughterhouse that took me four years and a divorce. One photo, from 2016, of the empty room before I filled it. Bare floor, bad light, a radiator I never removed.
I spent maybe six weeks building that website. A friend's son did the code for a case of beer and I wrote the texts myself, badly, in two languages. The whole thing performs like a shop window and the only thing people stop to look at is the space before anything happened in it.
I don't know what to do with this. Part of me wants to take the photo down out of spite. Part of me understands exactly why it is the one. People want to see the room they could walk into, not the thing I finally decided to put there.
Anyway. I am not going to optimize anything. I am 58 and I have watched too many artists become their own marketing department and I would rather spend the four hours rebuilding the radiator section than in a dashboard. But I looked, and now I know, and it is a little funny and a little sad.
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This is strangely comforting and also slightly insulting, na? I paint old Bangalore houses before they get torn down, and the post that does best on my page is one where I got the perspective wrong and the roof is crooked. People like the crooked one.
But I think there's something in it. Your empty room is the one image where the viewer does the work. No artist standing in front, no explanation, no 2009 to read about. Just a room with bad light and a radiator nobody bothered to remove, which happens to be the most honest thing on the site. The work you spent four years on asks something of people. The empty room asks nothing.
I wouldn't take it down. I'd just put it next to the work instead of in front of it. What does the rest of the traffic look like, is it all search or are people actually clicking through?
The crooked roof, yes. That is the whole thing in one image. You got the perspective wrong and suddenly it is a house instead of a painting of a house. I would not try to fix it.
And you are close on the empty room. The four years asks the viewer to trust me. The radiator asks nothing. That is why it wins. My best work is the one where I did not show up yet.
Keep painting the houses before they go. Crooked ones especially. Somebody has to remember the street while it is still standing.
The crooked roof and the empty room are the same accident, I think. The viewer gets handed a job and takes it. The finished thing, the four years, the divorce, that's all me talking. Nobody asked.
I have a bad habit of leaving the radiator in on purpose now. Half the time it is the only thing anyone remembers.