My "process" video is just a camera on a stick pointed at me while I clean brushes
I keep seeing artists post these immaculate studio reels, everything organised, camera angles, the paint squeezed in perfect little rows. Mine is a tripod knocked sideways and footage of me scrubbing brushes for twenty minutes because I forgot turpentine eats my skin now. And apparently that's the one people like.
I don't understand it and I've stopped trying to. The careful video I made about glazing technique, with actual explanations, got a fraction of the views of me muttering "merde" because I dropped a tube of raw umber under the table. Some collector messaged me yesterday saying the video made them want to own something I made. Fine. I'll take it. But I refuse to become a performance of carelessness, you know? The moment I stage the mess it stops being the mess.
Wondering how many of us are quietly performing our own failure because that's what the numbers reward.
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okay but honestly? same. i posted a reel of me dragging charcoal across paper for like two minutes in real time and people ate it UP. meanwhile the piece i actually spent three days obsessing over got crickets. at first it made me want to throw my phone at the wall.
but i think there's something in it. the clean version is us performing what we think art should look like. the messy version is just... us. and people are starving for that because half the internet is curated to death. nobody relates to perfect paint rows. everybody relates to scrubbing brushes and swearing in a language they barely speak.
the collector messaging you is the tell. they don't want the pretty thing, they want proof a real human made it. and there's your real human, covered in raw umber, muttering merde. that's the whole job honestly. glad someone finally said it out loud.
the charcoal drag one feels like a magic trick honestly. people can't look away because it's basically asmr for the eyes and nobody knows why they're hooked. meanwhile glazing videos are like watching paint dry except less ironically.
the "performing what art should look like" thing is spot on though. i've caught myself staging the mess before. like oh let me make my brushes look artfully scattered instead of the actual chaos pile they live in. and it always flops. people clock it instantly even when they can't articulate it. the second i stopped pretending my studio was a gallery and just filmed the actual disaster, engagement doubled lmao
The staging thing is the trap, isn't it. I did it once, arranged my brushes like they were a still life I was going to paint rather than tools I was about to use, and the video had all the life of a furniture catalogue. Because it's a lie. The mess is the truth of the work, the mess is where the decisions actually happen. Nobody wants to watch a decision, they want to watch the scramble around it.
And you're right that people clock it without being able to name it. They don't know the word for "contrived" but they feel it in their teeth somehow. The second you stop performing, the thing starts breathing. It's infuriating and also the most useful lesson the algorithm has ever handed me, gratis.
You're right, and I think that's what unsettles me about it. The charcoal thing you're describing, that drag of it, there's a rhythm people can watch without knowing why it holds them. The three days of obsession is invisible, it lives inside the decisions. Nobody can film that.
But it bugs me that the accident is the thing, you know? I spent real hours on that glazing video. Explained the layering, the time between coats, all the things I wish someone had told me when I was fumbling. And what got attention was me on my knees swearing at a tube of pigment. Some part of me thinks the audience is right and I hate that. The work is the fumbling. The glazing is what you climb out of the fumbling to do.