003: The White Pube: Should more artists rage bait online?
Gabrielle de la Puente talks shitposting on instagram, the weight of digital attention, and the financial allure of being annoying online.
After seeing The White Pube reckon with their digital presence as critics and artists on instagram, I asked Gabrielle to write about her understanding of what it means to create and critique art online for a Discontented column. You can read and listen to her thoughts below, a measured and articulate reflection on Cody Senn’s illustrious career, the economics of being polite, and the biggest group chat out there; social media.
Am I too polite? I recently had to archive a group chat on WhatsApp because one person kept sharing mundane comments about their life. Fifteen people busy going about their lives were receiving notifications every single time this one kid inflicted their mundanity on the rest of us. Sometimes they even asked why nobody was replying. It was awkward, and relentless, and also completely fascinating. I would never demand that kind of attention even if I was craving it, because I wouldn’t want to embarrass myself. I would never shitpost because I wouldn’t want to be annoying; I would much rather leave my shit on the shelf for people to discover of their own accord. But as a full-time writer, these are very inconvenient personality traits. I’m currently approaching Self Assessment season and reckoning with how little money I made this year, and I don’t think I can afford to be polite any longer. I think it’s time for me to be annoying in the world’s biggest group chat: social media.
I tend to do what most artists do: I put all of my energy into my craft, and then, when it comes time to share that art with others, I’m sorry but my energy has been spent on the bit I actually care about. I wish I cared about both parts of this equation, making and sharing. There is so much to be gained in sharing art. There’s the external validation from the audience potentially liking the thing; the artistic development that comes from critique; the neat completion of the creative life cycle in which sharing art makes me feel ready to move onto the next idea in my head; and there’s the slim chance a patron-type might see what I’ve created and ask if they can keep me like a pet. They might bankroll my writing. They might roll me out as a guest at dinners to say artsy things. I could have it all! Unfortunately, I’m not involved with any writer’s workshops or studio groups where I could demand a captive audience pay attention to my writing. So like many artists, my default vehicle for sharing my writing is Instagram, an app where posting feels like spitting into the wind.
“I would never shitpost because I wouldn’t want to be annoying; I would much rather leave my shit on the shelf for people to discover of their own accord.”
Since I began writing 8 years ago, I have accumulated 91K followers, which sounds like an impressive number that doesn’t deserve spit-into-the-wind metaphors. The truth is, 91K people may well have chosen to follow me but only about 13% of them might see a given post. I say the ‘truth’ but I don’t trust the stats. I was getting more likes, messages, and genuinely interesting conversations for the exact same content when I had 3K followers back in 2017. The app has changed for the worse, and it’s to the point where I often think about deleting my account and starting again to see who cares enough to re-follow. I might prefer it. I suspect large scale-anythings inhibit meaningful exchanges, and that’s all artists want: to make things and to have conversations around their work. Instagram is a disruptive force between those two wants. Artists can’t find the audiences they depend on, keen fans can’t find the people they want to support, and artists can’t even find each other for solidarity.
I have watched some users devise ridiculous strategies in order to beat the algorithm, in an attempt to be seen and heard. Take Cody Senn for example, an artist in the US who paints celebrities, asks people like Kanye and Ice Spice to respond to his work, and then destroys their portraits when he is inevitably blanked. Everything Senn does is geared towards increasing his engagement on TikTok. He paints celebrities because the celebrity’s fans will immediately support him; he wants the subjects of the paintings to reply, so fans dutifully tag the person in question over and over again; and he destroys the paintings in an increasingly absurd fashion because viewers can’t believe an artist would destroy their own hard work. I can. His posts weren’t getting nearly as much attention before he brought fire and axes into the mix. Senn isn’t destroying anything to contribute to contemporary discourse, as Michael Landy once did when he destroyed all of his belongings in the 2001 performance Break Down, or in 2010 when he created a huge skip in South London Gallery and invited the public to get rid of their own art. Senn is just destroying work to get attention.
“Artists can’t find the audiences they depend on, keen fans can’t find the people they want to support, and artists can’t even find each other for solidarity.”
Senn’s behaviour is reminiscent of news outlets using hateful and misleading headlines in order to rage-bait readers into clicking on the articles, where the outlet reaps the ad revenue, and then return to social media where users complain about how misleading the outlet is being — therefore increasing engagement ad infinitum. Senn destroying his artwork is pathological in the sense it is not made to be seen in a physical exhibition, but only made to farm engagement; like YouTubers planting typos and mispronunciations in their videos so that viewers will urgently comment corrections. If someone used these sly tricks on me in person, I would tell them off, or walk away so they didn’t waste any more of my time. None of it is polite — but it doesn’t have to be. It only has to be effective.
Cody Senn irritates me, if that wasn’t already clear. He is a white man whose most gratuitous destruction has been applied to images of Black women, and I worry what the popularity of his videos says about the world. I also get this sense that he is jumping the queue. I called Senn an artist but that was me being polite again. I think he is actually a content creator. There is nothing wrong with content creation, but it is draining that social media expects artists to be expert content creators when they already have their hands full being artists. It is difficult enough to make any kind of art in these conditions — and then I think, if he can do it, and if the person in my group chat can be so shameless, and if social media is supposed to help us connect but there’s this algorithm keeping us apart, shouldn’t I be more actively spiteful in how I go about sharing my own work? This is a depressing conclusion but I don’t want to accept a life in which the loudest men get to do what they want for a living. Given the state of my finances, maybe I am going to have to start being a dickhead on the Internet if that’s what it takes.
I want to write, that’s all, and to be honest, I want to write more than I want to be polite.
This is a depressing conclusion but I don’t want to accept a life in which the loudest men get to do what they want for a living. - agreed this defo should not be accepted and thanks for making and sharing