Recently I stopped reading a lot of blogs and sites that focus on art, art as business and giving advice to artist even though I’m very curious about those subjects. Many articles  posted on such sites offer advice on marketing, branding and (self)promoting your work both through social networking and other means of connecting with “audience” and clients. Now, to be quite honest, at this point, just a thought of self-promotion, social networking, creating an online presence and branding makes me want to scream. Whenever I read an article on how to promote and market your artwork I feel horrible. I feel like total failure at self-promotion (especially when it comes to social networking) and here are few examples why:

I can’t bring myself to have a Facebook account- seriously, I never had one and from everything I read and heard about it it seems like a machine for privacy violation. I don’t really care that supposedly “everyone has one” or that is supposedly “a necessary tool for self-promotion for artists“. And, yes I’m one of those people who believe that Facebook is a tool for collecting personal data on people and sharing  and selling them to who-knows-who without our knowledge.To me, it doesn’t seem right to support that company.

I don’t want to have fans or followers- I deeply respect people who take time out of their lives to look at my work, visit my blog or flickr, send me e-mails, comment or communicate with me in any other way. I deeply respect people who appreciate and support my work in any way  and I also respect those who constructively criticize it. I don’t like ideas of  fandom and following because they automatically presume  that one is on receiving end ( receiving attention, admiration) and one is on the giving end, and that someone is better than others.

I don’t really want to share too much of my private life- even though I read numerous advice that I should in order to give personality to my work and make people more interested in it.

How much sharing is enough? We are encouraged to share our lives on blogs, Facebook and Twitter, our daily snapshots on instagram, our photos on flickr, our inspiration on tumblr and pintrest, our portfolios and CVs on behance, linkedin, our videos on youtube and vimeo…list goes on and on…  and we are being convinced that’s the right way to promote our work, if we don’t do it, we are not being relevant, competent and we’ll get overrun by competition because in this globalized world, as artists, we’re not only competing on local level but on world level. At least we’re lead to believe that because when you’re convinced that the rest of the world is your rival you become motivated by fear, anxiety and feeling that you can never do enough, give enough and be enough. So to overcome that you feel you need to share more, promote more, build a better brand and buy more things even though none of those activities make you more creative, productive and satisfied.

At which extent are social networking sites and gadgets that are presented to us as valuable tools actually useful? I can’t help but wonder: are all this means of connecting, networking and self-promoting ( and advices on how and why to use them) actually helpful or it this just clever marketing strategy at work- making us buy into consuming more products.

Also, I wonder have we created a culture in which we believe that we have to share everything, our thoughts, ideas, pictures etc (often without being too selective about them) and that by the very  fact that we are sharing  we deserve to be liked or followed? Even if we don’t create anything but simply share (re-blog ) work of others we still believe that we should be liked, followed, admired. It’s not my intention to underestimate anyone. Hey, I’m first one to admit I over share at times and I’m definitely not selective enough when it comes posting my work. I just have a feeling that we are creating a culture in which quantity  is more important than quality, in which we let our egos run wild and we expect that our every thought, snapshot, tweet is valuable and should get attention and if doesn’t we feel bad or less worthy. Am I completely off with this one? I hope I’m wrong.

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Sometimes I feel, in a world where we are constantly encouraged to share more, I want to share less, become more selective about what kind of content I share even though, judging by common belief and advices that would make me less competitive. But my intuition tells me the more I buy into  an idea of competing , the more I’ll get caught up in scarcity mindset, not believing  there’s enough for everyone, the more I’ll be afraid, the more my creativity and energy will drain and I won’t be able to produce valuable work that is worth promoting in the first place ;)

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How about you? Do you thrive at social networking? How do you promote your work?