on the presentation of art

24 Nov, 2024

One of the the things I have always found fascinating when people post art on the internet, be it stories or drawings or photography, is to look at the accompanying text--you know, the about section, the blurb, the bit that is there for the artist to communicate with their audience. It's interesting not because it often contains valuable or interesting information, but because people take such a varied approach to it. Given that I have been reading webcomics for the bulk of my time on the internet, and given that webcomics update frequently, it's to be expected that most of my experience with these has come from webcomics, and you can see a variety of approaches there. From laconic text that offers no insight to what's going on on the page, to the artist talking in great detail about what's going on and providing insight into the process, or providing their own commentary on things they think worked or didn't work . . . the thing is, there is a blank text field there, and people feel compelled to fill that field.

For this post I actually went back and looked at my old fictionpress account, which apparently still exists¹; my earliest about texts on that website were very straightforward descriptions of the story. This was twenty years ago, give or take a few months; the things I posted online after that, for the longest time, I would often accompany with some self-degrading commentary. You know the type: "Not really happy with this one, but here's a new story," or words to that effect. This is astonishingly popular, and it still sometimes takes a conscious effort not to qualify things. But then I heard some advice, which went something like this: the only thing you're doing by saying you don't like the art you're sharing is inviting your audience to agree with you. It feels like you're providing some shelter from criticism, but really you're inviting it. You are priming people to think of it negatively before they've even had the chance to engage.

As one might hope, my relationship with art has changed in twenty years. I don't particularly like offering any information that is not present in the text; I want the text to stand on its own, and I want to see what people have to say if all they have to go by is the text. So I will only seldom offer even so much as a description of a story when I'm presenting it.² This includes things like the little background bits of worldbuilding; if I want the reader to know something, I will communicate it in the text. ³ To me, the text is everything.

But there are so many other ways to approach it! It's fascinating to me how many people are more than happy to chat away in their about text about background details of characters and little worldbuilding bits that just haven't come up in the story yet, while I'm over here wondering if mentioning one of the core themes of the story in the meta text is providing too much information to the reader. I don't think their approach is wrong (the only wrong approach is the self-deprecating one), but it is something that I could never bring myself to do. And I think it tells you a little something about the creators. It's hard to imagine someone as weird and aloof as I am being so chatty and warm in the about section; it's hard to imagine someone who is extroverted and gregarious writing such a cold, impersonal introduction as the ones I do.

But it is something to think about, as an artist: there is a blank field next to whatever you share, and there is room in there to do something interesting.

I would like to leave you with an anecdote. A while ago, an internet acquaintance invited me to submit some poetry to an online magazine which a friend of his was editing. That magazine liked accompanying their poems with author's statements, so I wrote a statement which described the themes and very carefully did not provide any information that was not present in the text, so I used neutral pronouns when talking about the poem's narrator and the poem's object.

The magazine's editor, I learned later, is the sort of conservative dipshit who finds the use of they/them pronouns offensive, so he just decided to change them without telling me. I have always found this supremely funny, not least because in this particular instance the neutral pronouns were just my attempt to not influence the reader into assuming information about the characters that was not present in the text.

Next time someone invites me to submit something to a magazine I'm doing some goddamn research first. For obvious reasons I won't be linking to the magazine in question, but I will be linking the poems (only one was accepted but they were meant as a diptych).