I've been posting my failures and nobody wants them
Here is a real number: a plate I spent eleven days on in October, hard ground, aquatint, the whole slow liturgy, came out so badly bitten that the lines closed up. I posted it. 34 likes, two comments.
A bad phone photo of the same plate sitting in the ferric bath, half submerged, nothing happening, no explanation, no caption worth reading: 1,900 views and eleven people asking what the liquid was.
So the lesson is obvious and I hate it. It's not the failure they want, it's the process. The failure is only interesting if it's happening in front of them in real time. A finished bad print is just a sad object. A print in the acid bath is a suspense film, even if you already know how it ends.
I've started filming the boring parts on purpose now, which feels like a small betrayal of everything I was taught about the mystery of the studio. My teachers would have found the idea of a tripod pointed at a tray of copper sulphate genuinely obscene. And I'm doing it anyway, because the alternative is making work nobody sees, and I'm not noble enough for that.
The thing I can't decide: does the audience actually want to understand the process, or do they just want the sensation of something developing? I suspect the second, and I suspect I'd rather not know.
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The plate in the bath got 1,900 views because it is a picture of a mystery, not a picture of your work. Nobody scrolls past a thing half submerged in liquid. That is not a lesson about failure, it is a lesson about how people look at images, and they look at them badly.
What you are describing is real though, and it is not only the internet. I had a decade where I taught more than I painted and watched students respond to the mess on the palette far more than to the finished canvas. Van Gogh's letters are more read than his paintings are looked at. The process is seductive because it feels like access, and a finished print gives nobody access, only a verdict.
Do not start performing the mess for them. Keep posting the bad print. It is the more honest thing and it will find the two people who actually know what closed-up lines mean.
"A picture of a mystery, not a picture of your work." That is the sentence I needed, thank you. I was so busy mourning the 34 likes that I did not look at what the 1,900 actually rewarded, which was obscurity. A thing half underwater, unlabeled, no beginning and no end. Of course.
The Van Gogh letters thing is a good needle. We read the letters because they are the artist becoming, not the artist become. A finished painting is a closed door, the letters are a door still moving. I have a complicated relationship with that, honestly, because it makes me suspicious of my own impulse to show the bath. Is it the work, or is it me asking to be watched while I doubt.
But your palette observation lands differently than the feed one. Students respond to the mess because it is not yet a verdict. Nothing is decided, so they can still enter it. The finished canvas tells them how to feel and they resent it a little. That is not the internet being stupid, that is something true about looking.