41: Gone Analog

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life, not as a means of making a living.” - Robert Henri

The first daffodil of spring in our yard. It sprouted a couple of days ago!

Hello lovely, groovy people! This will be a candid one, for I am feeling very unburdened by conventions and self-censorship as of late. I am working on something, turning a tide that I think could also save others a lot of time, strife, or struggle.

For the past two years, ever since discovering the truly sinister algorithmic operations of our popular social media, I have contemplated what leaving my most major artistic platform, Instagram, would mean for my art business. 

I have often felt the phrase “art business” to be an oxymoron.

I have often felt Instagram the prescriptive place to share image-based artwork over others like TikTok or Facebook.

I have often felt the urge to delete the app for long periods of time, and did.

Last year something changed. I decided to give it a good hard go, to go all in on posting every single day, making reels, researching marketing tactics, editing tips, lighting adjustments, dynamic movements and hooks to “stop the scroll”. I made content calendars, kept a hook bank, researched my top performing posts, and tried to find what they had in common. I signed up for all of the free PDFs, marketing classes, courses, etc., with many of them inevitably unfolding to be pyramid schemes: no surprise there! “Run, don’t walk, girly pops!” The real girly pops don’t run an MLM in my opinion, but alas, we are all living under capitalism so maybe my frustration is misdirected. 

Me, today, feeling literary in layers. No, my turtleneck is not choking me (this is an affirmation).

I did all of this in a bid to see if Instagram was necessary to my marketing--if it was even as effective as I had believed it to be, or had been told it was.

In conclusion, for me, it wasn’t. 

From 2023 to 2024, I gained exactly 5 additional custom requests. I more than doubled my custom artwork revenue because I gratefully received larger individual projects and increased my average hourly rate from roughly $50 to $71. 

This is all from data I have been tracking more and more conscientiously since 2019 with spreadsheets, graphs, and statistics to show me where my business actually stands quantitatively, not just how it feels. More than half of my clients were returning customers! Almost all of them I know personally or have at the very least met in person once. If you are one of these people, god, thank you. You are part of the reason I persist!! 

When I think about it, the only small businesses I ever actually patronize are those that are run by people I know, trust, or deeply align with on a personal level. I always found it hard to communicate and build a community that feels that way without meeting me, especially when I was limited to the 5-7 second reels perpetuated by Instagram’s algorithmic preferences. Maybe I was boxing myself in unnecessarily? But no, something like that is not what you make it, not when it is specifically engineered to favor certain emotions or content themes. 

Instagram is not what you make it, it’s what they make it--the ones programming the algorithm.

“On the Big Social platforms, creators don’t own their community. Those relationships are ultimately controlled by Mark Zuckerber, Sundar Pichai, the Chinese Communist Party, and Elon Musk. On those platforms, with some fringe exceptions, the only way creators can make money is through a share of the platform’s ad revenue or through deals with brands that want to sell stuff to their audiences. Those conditions determine what kind of creative work gets made, how it is shaped, and who gets the rewards.” - Hamish McKenzie

I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

In Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, he harps on the fact that social media algorithms play into our “prestige bias”: “Platform designers in Silicon Valley directly targeted this psychological system when they quantified and displayed the success of every post--meaning likes, shares, retweets, and comments--and every user, whole followers are literally called ‘followers’.” 

Maybe I was falling into this, maybe I was refreshing my Instagram at stoplights, between conversations, rewatching my own videos over and over in a kind of trance, searching for some kind of intangible reward that only came every so often in the form of a new custom art request via dm. I am not above admitting my weakness. I am not ashamed of something that has happened to 99% of us under the grand experiment of early social media.

I would be hard-pressed to prove that my increased Instagram visibility drove those 5 new clients to reach out to me over the past year, or the few others to go as far as to peruse my online shop and purchase something. Who knows what led them there. A beautiful combination of factors, to be sure!

And so, as Robert Henri once succinctly explained, “I am interested in art as a means of living a life, not as a means of making a living.”

I have recently posted to my Instagram account that I will be reclaiming much of my time that I previously spent making daily reels, promoting my work via the app, etc., and spending it instead on building a local community of artists and events. I share all of this with you in the hopes that it can help other creatives who feel frustrated with socials. Track your progress and see if the time you’ve invested into growing your accounts is actually paying off, or if you’re inadvertently just paying to play a game you never wanted to be a part of.

Heck, maybe if I love being off socials, I’ll eventually switch to a flip phone haha. 

Thanks for reading, as always, stay groovy!  

-gab 

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