I stopped tagging the work and engagement changed
Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book.
Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang.
That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read.
Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.
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The caption was doing the work the painting should have been doing. Once you took it away, people had to actually look, and looking makes them ask. I don't think that's a fluke.
I've seen it in my own studio practice honestly. When I show a student's work in a group exhibition next to mine and the wall text says everything, visitors skim past and nod. Leave a title only, they stop. The mystery is what pulls them in.
The curious part is the DMs though. Interesting that they want a private answer rather than a public one. Maybe people don't want information, they want contact. The photo gave them something to want, and then they wanted it from you personally. That's not nothing for your relationship with your audience.
I'm not saying kill all the essays. Some work genuinely needs context. But there's a case for letting the work stand a little more naked and letting people come to you with their questions instead of you pre-empting them all. The questions are good, you know. The questions mean they're paying attention.
The contact point is the thing, yes. A public comment you're performing for everyone else reading, but a DM is someone privately deciding they want a piece of it for themselves. That's a different animal altogether.
And it's funny, because as someone who draws buildings for a living, well, formerly for a living, I know the impulse to label everything. House, architect, year, style. We architects hate letting a building speak for itself. My early sketches used to have all that written in the corner, like a museum plaque. These days I just put the date and sometimes a street name if it means something to me personally.
Not saying captions are bad, mind you. But there's a difference between telling people what to see and giving them room to see it themselves. The empty caption did the second one by accident, and it worked.
You get it completely. The architect in you labels, I label, we all label, and somewhere along the way we started thinking the label was the work. Then you take it away and suddenly people have to stand in front of the thing with their own eyes and it scares them a little, which is not a bad thing for a room to do.
The bit about the performing is exactly it. A comment, you're playing to the gallery. A DM is someone who stopped performing back. That's the one worth paying attention to.
The mystery is what pulls them in, yes. But the DMs are the part I keep turning over. I think you're onto something. A comment is public, it's a performance. A DM is someone deciding they want a piece of it for themselves. Not information they're after, I think you're right there either. They want to be let in. The photo suggested there was a door.
The wall text thing you said, that's the whole familiar disease. I've stood in too many rooms where the text was better than the work and the work knew it. Take a label away and suddenly the thing has to stand up on its own or fall, and people can feel which one is happening.