So I’m reading about a cool-sounding little “art” project a woman did where she made an Instagram account specifically to post every image suggested in a funny song. The title of her post about it is
“I recreated [so-and-so’s] [song about a certain kind of influencer’s social media feed]”.
It sounded cool to me because the way she hyped it;
“I decided to do an interactive adaptation of the lyrics”
So it sounded like she was going on a real life scavenger hunt for all of these quirky things (that the song was making fun of) and was going to experience them and share snapshots from the way she experienced them in her personal life and location.
Turns out she mostly just used royalty-free images off Unsplash.com for her ambitious art project. On one of many misspellings of the song title since a bunch of other people had the same idea she did (FIRST, *before* she did) so the usernames matching the song title in dozens of permutations were already taken. She describes finding and registering an account name for her super unoriginal concept as “the hardest part of this art project”. It’s … I don’t … wow?!? So I guess we should all give more credit to trolls, catfish, sock puppets and fan accounts for actually putting way more effort and creativity into their handles and that making it through the exceedingly difficult obstacle courses of registering them on SM sites.
As someone who started self-producing content and blogging in 2001 (before Twitter or YouTube or Instagram or camera phones like we have today existed), everything post-Tumblr smacks of this bullshit. Bitches think they’re fucking “curating” shit when they just snatch and steal and repost stuff according to a theme.
The bar for what people apply words like “art” and “interactive” and “evergreen” and “create” to IS SO FUCKING LOW AND STUPID, the words don’t even mean anything anymore. Which really devalues the work of people who ACTUALLY DO CREATE STUFF or at least put in a modicum of effort, and make themselves vulnerable in the meantime.
It’s especially offensive when the whole point of this is to make fun of women who post frothy foam designs on their fancy coffees, etc. Okay … yeah, that shit is insipid and overdone and maybe sort of begs to be mocked, but what the fuck is wrong with you that you’d waste time looking up and downloading images you have no personal connection to and have the audacity to call it an “art project”? “Recreate” implies actually … creating something. Not just finding creations that already exist. Like … put your own fucking spin on it (maybe do a goth version, or bokeh-fied version, or dirty realism version, or middle of the night version, or even AI art version). Otherwise, why even bother? And how can you possibly BRAG about it under the premise of DEMEANING WOMEN WHO ACTUALLY DID MAKE CONTENT FROM THEIR OWN LIVES? Sure, fucking complain to your fellow lazy bitch friends about how silly they are if you want to, but WHAT THE FUCK MAKES YOU SUPERIOR?
She also brags about her planning and execution in rolling out the posts so they would appear in the same order as the song lyrics, meaning she had to (wow get ready to be blown away) POST BACKWARDS. Well fucking congratulations, asshole. Influencers and content creators regularly do that kind of admin and planning WHILE ACTUALLY CREATING THEIR OWN CONTENT. They frequently line up their content and schedule it down to the minute to roll out according to when it will perform best, to tell a coherent story, to ACTUALLY BE ENGAGING AND ENCOURAGE FOR-REAL INTERACTION, etc. It is A LOT OF WORK. No matter how “basic” you think the actually is. So fucking insulting. At this point you’d think she’d give the people she and her comedian-idol are making fun of some fucking props, like “wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be! AND I’M NOT EVEN MAKING ANYTHING!!!!”
I am actually tempted to do this project for real-for real. And I think the reasons I want to do it double as the reasons I have such a strong adverse reaction to this woman’s insulting lazy-ass unfair-credit-taking mock-up; three of my “signature strengths” are *Love of Learning, *Curiosity, and *Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence. So to me, right there are three fine motives for really and truly RE-CREATING all of the things listed in the song. To have a window into someone else’s life and values, find beauty in it and mutate it to reflect YOU and where you live or at least a different aesthetic or doing it all on a budget or for free, and to see my own life through different eyes. What would one of these “basic bitches” do in my shoes, where I live, with my tools and budget. And you don’t even have to come up with a list of things to do; the list is made for you, and you get to go forth and discover how it would look if you did it (and whether it really is so fucking easy and laughable to do this shit, and IF SO actually have researched it to have data backing up why it’s all so lame or whatever … like even just “wow this was really soul-sucking pretending to be this person with such standardized routines and visions” or “man if you are poor it is impossible to do this shit”).
The only reason I can think of that she did this and wrote about it is if Unsplash paid her to. Which opens up a whole other piece of less-judgey and actually-worthwhile critical-bitch thinking: is sponsored and commissioned content better or worse than content created by folks promoting their own brand and products (and/or egos)? And why do people get SO MUCH FUCKING MADDER AND JUDGIER when IT IS CLEARLY “self”-promotion that creators directly get paid for FROM THEIR AUDIENCE versus shit that’s shaped and molded by a sponsor with much less transparency, consistency, and authenticity?
To be fair, she does throw in some humility at the end, calling the end result “trivial”, but I couldn’t tell if the end result she’s referring to is her IG art grid or the less-than-stellar number of followers and likes she got.
I may be extra-resentful about this one for a couple of reasons; on top of being the kind of creator who has worked very hard making my own super-personal content (and feeling like I have to apologize for trying to be compensated for it AND being judged by bitches like this who just sit on the sidelines fully-dressed “curating” shit and writing critical think-pieces, laughing at women who showcase their own lives, faces, and bodies in their work), the whole reason I saw this lame-ass “art project” write-up is because I liked something else she wrote and subscribed to her … and noticed that she has really excellent placement on the site for writers where I found her AND has accomplished MORE WINS in contests than anyone else I’ve seen on the site. It made me think less of what I read of her before and really liked; even though I’m pretty sure that other piece was really funny and well-written and self-created, THIS piece made me think NAH — she made that shit up and was being phony and probably didn’t even really earn all her wins. She’s just one of the site’s darlings (and I didn’t even know they had darlings; I still don’t, but BECAUSE OF THIS PIECE making this one writer come off as an overrated untrustworthy fraud, that is what I think now). A lot of her posts, now that I look at them, look like they're hyping the site in ways that make her wins look highly suspect (but it's very possible she is just doing a good job of creating the kind of specific content people on the site want to read, and/or that her well-earned wins got her some sponsorship maybe).
The whole thing makes me feel disillusioned. It’s not that I had such high regard for the quality of writing on the site — that’s not even it; there are a lot of rank amateurs, and that’s part of what makes it cool — it is that SHE IS BRAGGING ABOUT THE (NON) WORK / “ART” SHE “MADE” ****MAKING FUN**** of a whole bunch of other people’s real (and personal) work. It’s fucking gross.
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