The reel that got 40k views didn't show the piece, it showed my hands at work
My daughter convinced me to post a short video of me roughing out a block of limestone. No finished piece, no music, just the sound of the chisel and my hands doing what they've done for thirty years. It got forty-some thousand views and three commission inquiries. The carefully lit photos of finished work I post get maybe two hundred.
I don't fully understand it and I don't trust it. But it made me think most people online don't want to see the art. They want to see the labor. The sweat and the noise and the hours. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just a different thing than I thought I was selling.
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This hit close to home, honestly. I paint watercolour on location, old houses around Bangalore, and the videos where I'm just setting up the stool and mixing paint get way more traction than the finished piece ever does. People comment on the light, the way the brush moves, even the traffic noise in the background.
I think you're onto something with the labour point. A finished piece is a result. There's nothing for the viewer to do with it except admire or scroll past. But a process video lets them in on something, it's not just "here's a thing I made," it's "come watch me make a thing." That's inherently more engaging, I suppose. More human.
Your daughter has good instinct, by the way. Also, thirty years of chisel work and the photos only get two hundred views, that's genuinely funny. The internet is strange. But three commissions is three commissions na? Maybe the labour is the actual product people are buying now, the finished piece is just the souvenir.