Dance monkey, dance!
Getting your work or products seen on the internet seems to require extraordinary effort these days. Besides fighting ever changing algorithms that require a PhD in psychology and film editing, there’s the battle to capture a two second attention span of professional scrollers that make Goldfish somewhat redundant.
I know I suck at making “reels” but sometimes I think I need to put on a mankini and juggle fireballs while I paint with my left foot in order to get the algorithm to like me.
One of the biggest complaints I see from other artists is that they just want to show their work, not become fulltime “content creators”, but listening to the milliard internet marketing gurus promising more reach if I buy their “Ten steps to sell your products on Instagram” e-books, the only way to get your work in front of new people is to follow a set of arduous self-promotional rules.
Most of it is about “hooks” (gotto snag those fishies!) where you have to make the person want to (take the bait) and carry on watching. Even worse yet, you have to keep the dopamine hits coming – gooood luck with that – for the average TL;DR (Too Long Didn’t Read) watery-eyed web swimmer, I can just see their little index flippers twitching spasmodically at the horror of holding back on the Great Scroll!
To be a successful Goldfish Hunter, you need to become one with the omeoba. Lose all sense of pride, toss logic into the ocean until common sense becomes plankton, and wear self humiliation like a drunk walking out of a Chinese Tattoo shop thinking he wrote something profound across his chest – we all know how those turn out – what should’ve been “Be the light you want to see” you’ll get the Mandarin version stating emphatically that “Sexy chicken is tasty for life”.
My most unfavourite success is the “slow artist reveal” where they start with the back of the canvas then spin it painfully slowly to reveal the painting. The update on that tittilating trend is to cut it just before the reveal and show a “process” video of how they made it before showing you the final result. Of course, Barbie dolls in bikini’s tend to find the most patient of all internet viewers, no matter what abomination is presented on canvas in the end.
When I first saw this viral disease happening I was expecting it to cut to a Rick Astley song – one of those “Gotcha!” moments. But no, I’m not even afforded the joy of an old 90’s meme (it was brilliant in those days, because on your 2400 dial up modem it took an hour to download the 5 second video and cost about R2000 on your Telkom bill).
So, if you’re an ugly, old, grumpy fart who groans every time he get’s up from a chair like me (because the cat stopped the bloodflow to your legs) then there’s very little chance of getting “Sexy chicken time” from anyone on the internet – you have to go the serious route:
- Become the Authority
This requires deep, phylosophical rants in black and white video on what you should or shouldn’t do in the art world – be the absolute authority of art matters. Stuff like “Why galleries ignore your emails” (because they’re stuck up dickheads) or “Is art really art when it’s not art” dialogues which are so ludicrous and nonsensical that people nod their heads in agreement because they think they might just be too stupid to understand what he’s saying (Bullshit baffles brains).
- Turn your skill into a product
Doesn’t matter if you can’t draw a stick figure and you’re colour blind, because selling art courses is a fantastically profitable idea (said 3.1 billion of the 1 billion artists on the internet). The best part is that the videos never date, and once you’ve put in the initial hard work of filming yourself painting and jibberjabbing about the quality of each stroke, you can sell the same video over and over again – start your own goldfish dairy, essentially.
- Use your goldfish bowl
Beg. Let the mascara run, baby. Tell them you’re going to be living out of your Datsun at the end of the month if someone doesn’t buy your painting. Use your iPhone16 to document the last few squeezes of your remaining two tubes of paint while sobbing over a second hand canvas you got at a thrift store. Surreptitiously sweep the camera past an almost empty tub of peanut butter and some moldy bread – the empaths will spot it and start a go fund me to raise money for you.
Or, you could just write silly stuff like this, scream into the void and hope for the best!
*No goldfish were hurt in this diatribe (well, they wouldn’t remember anyway).
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