The digital world we exist in has transformed how we understand visual art and creativity, paving the way for new so-called creative industries. Yet, is the potential exposure it provides worth it to the ‘starving artist’?
The arts sector has long been underfunded and under-resourced; the starving artist trope exists for good reason, and being an artist has always been a labour of love. Now, the sector is shifting to adapt to a digital world. Your ‘classic’ creative careers still exist - the poet, musician, painter, virtuoso - but they are accompanied by a flurry of skilled content creators and graphic designers, visual artists combining their talents with digital skills.
Digital literacy and graphic design are creative skills in high demand, they’re paving a new way for artists to curate their careers, and perhaps more frankly, to earn reliable incomes. Still, there are two sides to every coin. Social media holds a monopoly on marketing for artists. If you want to promote your work, to book a gig, to sell your art, to gather support, the reality is you now need a social media presence. Not just that, your social media must be engaging, it must be relevant, and often, it requires acquiring a whole new skill set for budding artists.
I spoke to Sam, a BIMM graduate trying to forge a space for his indie-pop band Oh Ryan in the music industry, on the dynamics that social media brings to his life as an artist. He currently works in a theatre in Germany, producing music and doing sound design for shows as they come and go. Last year, when he still lived in Dublin and was focusing on Oh Ryan, he recalls using social media “almost every day” to promote his creative work. “I don’t enjoy it,” he adds.
He admits that in today’s world it’s imperative to have an online presence, especially if your aim is to make an income or streamlined revenue from your art. However, Sam sees Instagram, and the work that goes into promoting your art there, as a creative job in and of itself. “It's not as simple as you just take a photo of your work and post it. For your Instagram ads, it has to be creative and interesting and addictive.” He adds that balancing his creativity between creating his music and promoting his music is a challenge, “I feel like you take away too much [time] from the creative work itself, and it's suddenly like you're spending more time making Instagram ads than you actually are making creative works.”
The dichotomy of social media is that it's not only how people access new art, it's increasingly a legitimate way of consuming it. I ask Sam if he thinks his creative process has changed to adapt to the digital world, if the necessity of having an online presence plays a role in the type of music he creates. “Yes, in some ways. In some ways, no,” he says, adding “By what I mean in some ways, yes, is that for my own band and musical purposes, when I write a song I often think, where are the hooks? Where are the catchy moments? How can I get people to engage with this online? You're thinking of how this song will be accompanied visually, as opposed to the song just being a song by itself. However, for commissioned works, where I would be writing for a theatre show or circus show or things like that, the answer would be no, because the piece of music or the work is more designed to just be, it’s not designed to be promoted on Instagram.”
Essentially, it comes back to how we consider creating content for social media as a creative skill in itself. Sam describes the marketplace that social media offers as “saturated.” He argues that for social media promotion to be truly beneficial, you either have to invest a lot of money to push ads, or you have to be creatively skilled enough to produce professional and engaging content that will succeed organically.