Art at the Crossroads, Part One 0 comments

For a long time now I have tried to argue that the maintenance of my various social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) should be considered work. After all, maintaining a social media presence—a phrase that makes the bile rise in my throat—is an easy and free way artists can gain a wide readership/viewership for their work.

But aside from the ill feeling I get after spending a whole morning liking, sharing, blogging, and re-blogging, I also feel a strange sense of disconnectedness from the work itself—the actual art that I’m making; in my case a book manuscript of a couple hundred pages.

I think the way I feel is what Marx calls alienation and estrangement from labor. Because my job is to be the producer, the marketing department, and salesman of the work, my time and attention are constantly divided. I would even go so far as to say my very habitus seems divided by the shifting of aesthetic gears it takes in order to be able to make my work sound relevant and interesting to others.

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