When the method becomes the work, does the work become meaningless?

Creatives perform free labor for the masses.

Every time I open Instagram or TikTok, I’m bombarded with process porn. By process porn, I mean showing a video of the creative act, cleverly edited or from start to finish. Someone is carving clay, another is pouring paints on a canvas, someone is woodworking, and another transforms their face with makeup into a movie character. It’s the creative counterpart to “get ready with me;” it’s never “I’m ready.” All of this process porn—this content—isn’t the actual work that’s being created, it’s the journey.

For some creatives, the journey is deeply personal—an emotional, almost sacred process. For others, it’s just another day at the office. But there’s a third group that sees the journey as the way to algorithmic success. Feed the content machine with a steady stream of #sosatisfying, #grwm, or #asmr, and maybe you'll catch the algorithm's eye.

If you go viral, then maybe you will gain followers.

Maybe you will make a sale. Often, you won’t.

Self-surveillance

I worry that the consequence of our enjoyment of satisfying videos is turning creatives into content machines.¹ They fear that social media is the only way they can make sales or network, thus producing more and more process videos to please the algorithm. The more they produce, the more they need to one-up their previous video. The further down the road this goes, the further away they (and we as viewers) become from the work itself. Perhaps, even driving the artist further from their work, too.

I’ve never felt the need to set up cameras to capture my process. It’s messy, emotional, and unpredictable—it’s my version of “me time,” a much-needed break from screens (aside from hitting play and pause). That said, I know plenty of artists who document their work. I get why they’ve become so popular—I really enjoy watching those videos. But, sometimes I wonder if we’ve shifted too much focus onto the process, to the point where it’s overshadowing the final work and its ability to stand on its own.

It has also turned us into self-surveillance machines, setting up our workrooms, our studios, our desks to ensure good lighting for filming, to be camera-ready, to think about other things beyond, simply, the work.

In the early days of social media, I remember always saying, “wait! I need to take a photo first!” at dinners, events, on vacations, to take a picture or a video, only to realize I’d interrupted the moment and our presence (and enjoyment) within it. At some point, I stopped performing and now focus on capturing moments for me to enjoy, privately.

There’s a creative state known as “flow,” in which artists lose track of time, completely absorbed in the process of making. For me, this is a precious, personal, and beautiful moment. I can’t imagine interrupting it to make sure I take a photo. Breaking creative flow could be detrimental to an artist.

Packaging ourselves and determining value

Rebecca Jennings wrote a piece for Vox about self promotion earlier this year about how the act of promoting and marketing oneself resulted in creatives needing to be concerned with building a platform vs. having a platform. She calls the shift from art maker to business manager “the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.”

This leads me to a bigger question not about what happens to the work when we do this, but why we are doing this?

Why are we performing our valuable, creative labor for an audience for free, letting them consume everything about our artistic practice if they are not buying the work?

I can confidently say that, in part, some folks are making sales, and/or gaining followers that could lead to sales. Community is being created, or I should say “potential clients” or “future customers.” There’s nothing wrong with this, but only a small number of folks are benefitting, but the majority are not.

Views, comments, followers, likes ≠ sales.

Opportunities ≠ sales.

Others may say that their process isn’t of any value, so who cares if they’re performing for free? The end product is what counts, and I also agree with this in theory but… in practice? My creative labor and the final work are interchangeable—the labor is part of it—and therefore, both the work and labor are baked into the value of the final work.

By showing the labor, are we devaluing the work? Or, if the labor is what goes viral (not the work itself), then is the labor more valuable?

How we value ourselves and our art is very personal to each artist, but if we want it to have value, does showing the process to a large audience have an effect on the value? Do mystery and intrigue contribute to a more valuable piece? Maybe, but demystifying process and making art more approachable and accessible through sharing benefits everyone.

Going back to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” technology is considered an expedited form of mechanical reproduction that further devalues art’s “aura,” changing our engagement with it from contemplative to a distracted form of appreciation. Process porn is this exact visual consumption—Benjamin’s “exhibition value”—that exploits the artist and the art.

“Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” —Walter Benjamin

In this brave new, performative world we have further decontextualized the art into its parts—paint, canvas, wood, resin, fabric. I want to believe that seeing the process fosters a greater appreciation for the final work. However, these process videos aren’t always created with this intent; there are opportunistic people out there exploiting whatever it is that gets views, without a care about what they’re making in the end… the final work is a lackluster sum of its parts, a gimmick, a visual hodgepodge of satisfying techniques.

Everything has become “5 minute craft”-ified.

Therein lies the problem with performative social media—it's not created for art’s sake; it's made purely for the audience to consume. It doesn’t usually foster appreciation for the hard work or emotion behind the final product. Instead, the process becomes the product.

If the process is the star of the show, and the dopamine is #sosatisfying, the final work itself doesn’t matter. We’ll scroll on to the next.

Thanks for reading! Unsquare is a regular feature written by Jaime Derringer about creativity, business, leadership, and technology. Please support my creative work and subscribe to Blob!

1. Arguably, there can be an upside to regular documentation to feed the machine, specifically for artists who have a hard time getting started. Feeling the need to make something for an audience can be a forcing function for an artist to hold themselves accountable to a daily or weekly practice. As they say, showing up is a big part of the battle.