{"id":4848,"date":"2020-01-29T15:25:49","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T21:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4848"},"modified":"2020-01-29T15:25:49","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T21:25:49","slug":"dangers-of-talking-about-your-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4848","title":{"rendered":"Dangers of Talking About Your Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jjoMEw2RYlA\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been mulling about this topic for several years, since leaving Adventure Time and since the release of Forming Vol II, when I went around doing comic conventions, giving presentations and sitting on discussion panels. This was right before the time when the internet began to perfect itself as the relentlessly democratic, all-seeing eye of cultural criticism and before we as artists and writers felt obliged to develop rock solid defense strategies before presenting our work to the public. At the time I was desperate to have my work seen: to sit on those lucky panels where I could thirstily explain my process and the personal experiences driving my stories. Now I&#8217;m not so sure it&#8217;s worth it. I&#8217;m starting to believe that the inner workings of an artist should be kept relatively secret. This information should only be shared among peers, close friends, family and passed along to dedicated students.  <\/p>\n<p>I have a couple reasons for this. One stems back to the time I was dating a girl who had just graduated from Cooper Union. For those who don&#8217;t know, Cooper Union is an art school in New York. It&#8217;s one of those heavy theory, anti-craft schools where you&#8217;re looked down on for making figurative art. They&#8217;d rather you hang a turquoise chain on the wall, accompanied by an essay on Foucault&#8230; you get it. So I was hanging out with a bunch of Cooper Union kids for a while and I felt like an idiot around them. They&#8217;d be going on and on about Marx and I&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Uh yeah I like neon gradients and Jack Kirby&#8221;. I&#8217;d already begun feeling skeptical about the idea of talking about my work, but being around these kids really brought this into focus. 3\/4 of them were never going to be able to make a living off of their art. The only way to legitimize their life pursuit would be to enter the academic job feeder program. By developing their theory muscles, they could participate in the art world caste system and use that to leverage careers in criticism and theory. So this idea of being able to talk about my work in that bourgeois, culturally-gated kind of way always felt phony and in service of a perpetually insecure academic economy. <\/p>\n<p>Secondly, in present day we are living in a world where what you create can be checked for defects by anyone with a computer or smart phone on the planet. Anyone with an internet connection has the power to contribute to cultural analysis. This collective brain is infinitely more powerful than a single artist&#8217;s ability to reflect on themselves. And because this super brain is made up of millions of loud, bored, interchangeable people, it operates with nearly no accountability or moral consistency. We live in a climate where creators are held accountable to cultural guidelines that are constantly shifting, contradicting and enforced by hordes of faceless voices who are trying to get some shine for their participation in The Conversation. Most of the time we go about our day, posting drawings on Instagram with only the slightest anxiety that something we said or drew might get the microscope treatment from some boob with nothing else to do that day. Hopefully whatever they noticed about your work doesn&#8217;t generate viral steam and start putting that &#8220;problematic&#8221; stink on you. Like I said, most of the time we&#8217;re pretty safe from this on the daily, unless we do something really dumb or intentionally provocative or both. The stakes get raised when we produce less casual artistic statements such as films, books, albums etc&#8230; that are meant to be taken a focused offering to be savored and discussed. <\/p>\n<p>Back in the day this discussion was the job of the critic, but as a result of comments sections and audience scores, I really don&#8217;t know where the critic stands anymore. I guess critics were always just high profile fans, but the fact that there was only room in the newspaper for a few voices to analyze people&#8217;s work allowed for a clear barrier between artist and audience. The critic was the middleman between the creator and the spectator. The spectator could have their interpretations, separate from the critic, but generally they could only voice their opinion in letters to the critic, not directly to the creator. Now artistic value is determined by an aggregate of every dumbshit&#8217;s opinion on the planet, and theoretically we are beholden to their feedback. So what to do? <\/p>\n<p><em>During the Middle Ages scores of writers&#8211;members of secret political or religious organizations&#8211;published books containing ciphers. Secret writing became a fad; every European court had its own diplomatic cipher, and the intelligentsia vied with one another in devising curious and complicated cryptograms. The literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries is permeated with ciphers, few of which have ever been decoded. Many of the magnificent scientific and philosophic intellects of this period dared not publish their findings, because of the religious intolerance of their day. In order to preserve the fruitage of their intellectual labors for mankind, these pioneers of progress concealed their discoveries in ciphers, trusting that future generations, more kindly than their own, would discover and appreciate their learning.<\/em> &#8211; Manly P Hall<\/p>\n<p>I believe that secrecy is making comeback. The free information ideology of the internet is beautiful and useful, however it also seems to be an enemy of the introspective and dream-inspired process of making art. Hence the idea behind the Temple and the Lodge private blogs. I think I&#8217;m done with doing interviews or speaking on panels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been mulling about this topic for several years, since leaving Adventure Time and since the release of Forming Vol II, when I went around doing comic conventions, giving presentations and sitting on discussion panels. This was right before the time when the internet began to perfect itself as the relentlessly democratic, all-seeing eye of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4848"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4850,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions\/4850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}