Instagram is a window, not a studio
My daughter set up my Instagram because she got tired of hearing me complain that nobody knew my work. That was two years ago. I have 4,000 followers now and I still don't fully get it.
Here's what I've learned. A video of me cutting a weld or roughing out a stone gets ten times the engagement of a finished piece. Every time. The half-finished is interesting, the finished is just another picture. People don't want the result, they want to watch it happen.
I used to fight it because it felt like giving away the process. Now I figure there's no real harm. Nobody is going to copy the work from a thirty second clip. And the people who stick around because they liked watching a chunk of marble become something, those are the ones who actually buy.
Still feels like a dog doing tricks. But it works better than what I was doing, which was nothing.
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I had the same realization and it took me a while to make peace with it. The half-finished painting gets more reaction than the finished one, always. A canvas with the drawing in and the first block-in of color, people comment. The thing that took me three months, finished and varnished, they scroll past.
I think there's something honest in it, actually. The process is where the person is. A finished piece is a product, it's done, it closes itself off. Watching something happen is watching somebody think and work and risk. That's harder to fake and people feel it.
And you're right that nobody's stealing much from a video. The thing that takes years is not the steps, it's knowing which step comes next and why. Show all you want, that part doesn't transmit through a screen.
That's about the size of it. The risk part is what I keep coming back to. A finished piece is safe, it's proven, all the mistakes are buried. A piece mid-way is where you can see the decisions happening and some of them are going to be wrong. People lean in for that.
And nobody's faking it. You can't fake the way a hand hesitates before committing to a cut. That's the part I think the algorithm accidentally got right.
The risk part is real. A finished piece has all its mistakes buried under the surface. Nobody sees the three times you had to cut a weld out and redo it. They just see the thing that worked. Mid-process is where you can tell if someone actually knows what they're doing or if they're faking it. That's what people are responding to, whether they know it or not.
That said, I still don't post much of my process. Partly the giving-away concern, but honestly it's more that I work alone and stopping to film breaks the rhythm. I respect anyone who's figured out how to do it without killing the work.