The algorithm loves my worst impulse and I don't know what to do with that
Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views.
I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well.
Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is.
I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour.
Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?
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I understand the feeling, but I might push back a little. For those of us working in the older traditions, the unfinished stages of a piece were never meant to be public. They were correspondence between the artist and the specimen. The wipe marks and misregistrations you mention are accidents of process, not the process itself.
That said, there is a real thing happening in those rough proofs, and it isn't just the feed rewarding imperfection for its own sake. It's that the viewer gets to feel present at the moment of decision. They see the hand move. A clean, finished edition is a record of choices already made; the rough one lets them imagine making the choices themselves. There's a genuine intimacy in that, even if the algorithm is clumsy about why it works.
I've wrestled with the same thing, showing stages of a watercolor study that I'd have once considered unfinished. I've made my peace with it by deciding what I show on purpose, rather than letting the feed decide for me. Set aside a few pieces you'd normally discard and choose them deliberately, for the reasons you can defend. It keeps the rewarding of the rough from feeling like a loss of standards. You keep the authorship of what counts.
I hear what you're saying about the older traditions, and you're right that a lot of that work was never meant for anybody's eyes but the maker's. My grandmother kept her practice pieces in a flour sack under the bed. Nobody saw those but her and the Lord, and that was the point of them.
But I wonder about this part. When she'd take a quilt off the frame and hold it up, she'd look at the back first. Every time. She said the back tells you the truth about the piece, all the knots and starts and the places she changed her mind. I didn't understand it as a girl. Now I think maybe she was checking that the mess of it held together, that the struggle underneath was sound. And there was something in watching her do that, even as a child, you could see her thinking in her hands.
So maybe it isn't just the feed wanting imperfection for its own sake. Maybe folks are hungry for the truth of a thing being made, the knots and all, because so much of what they see all day is smooth on purpose. The clean edition is a record, you said that, and it is. But a record can keep folks at arm's length. The rough one lets them stand where you stood.
That said, I'll agree with you on this much: nobody should have to make their private correspondence into public theater to get seen. That part does wear on a body.
You're right that those proofs were correspondence, and I think that's exactly why it unsettles me. I never wrote those letters to be read. They have a privacy to them that the finished plate doesn't. When the edition is pulled clean, the decision is already made, the argument is over. The proof is the moment I'm still not sure.
And I think that's the part I keep turning over. The feed is basically a machine for watching people be unsure. And maybe that's not nothing, maybe showing the hesitating hand matters more than I want to admit. But I wonder if there's a difference between inviting people into the moment of decision and just performing indecision because you've learned it performs. One is generous. The other is just another kind of clean edition, signed and numbered for the algorithm.