So I want to talk about this poster briefly (it’s from Michèle Provost’s installation at the SAW gallery)¹.

Mainly, I want to talk about why I dislike it.

The text on the poster was “Words will always be this clumsy approximation of something that can be best explained through drawing.” I’m not including the actual photo, because it looks terrible.

The first time I saw the poster it wasn’t even at the show – it was on a picture my friend took of the installation on her phone so she could tell me about it, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of art style pretty heavily lately, which has come with a lot of brain tangents.

For example, I was thinking about what actions society inherently considers to be artistic. Obviously, this kind of implies a whole “what even is art” discussion that I don’t really want to have right now. But for example, we seem to view any drawing as an exhibit of artistic skill, whereas getting up on a stage and talking at people is only seen as an art form in certain circumstances.

I feel like the word “creativity” has become so twisted, like it’s been simultaneously corporatized and filled with arbitrary connotations concerning “quality” and “external appeal” (however the hell those are defined now) and it’s become like one of those resume buzzwords that you use not because they actually mean anything, but because they look and sound fancier and because everyone else is using them.

I wasn’t “trying to be creative” when I was a kid, I was just messing around. And I feel like that meaning has been lost, like somehow, over the past several years, we’ve collectively decided that yeah, people should be putting themselves out there and trying stuff but like, only the glossy version of trying stuff.

I was chatting with one of my friends yesterday, just to check in, when our conversation moved from small talk to the topic of being artists on Instagram. We’re both pretty unknown on Instagram, and I suspect she’s just as unsure as I am about how much of an audience she actually wants for her work, but the discussion was still mostly about how “well” we were doing. And as of right now, she’s doing much, much better than I am, despite the fact that I have had my account for about two and a half years longer than she has. To be fair, she is a much better artist than I am, which totally accounts for some of her success. However, not all of it can be attributed to that. At all.