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A human artist is constantly learning, constantly practising, constantly seeking out ideas, making decisions, showing their work. they are changed by the process of creating, and that is an inherently social act. there is no escape from the relationship between creator and creator and audience and creator and audience.

Look at Bill Watterson. He produced maybe the most beloved comic strip in the english speaking world, then went up a mountain and cut himself off from the world for 30 years. This month he announced a new project and everyone went apeshit. Not because he's The Best Technical Illustrator Ever To Grace The Earth. Not because he's a vessel of divine inspiration carrying the greatest ideas the art world ever saw back down the mountain to humanity. It's because we loved his work, and we loved the man we imagined sitting at his drawing desk telling us little vignettes about childhood and nature and imagination and frustration. It's because we can read the cartoons he drew in college, and see the unpolished edges and the disheveled students he'd later recycle into Calvin's parents. It's because he chose not to license his creations for merchandise, or to play out their stories past the moment he felt they were over. It's because he went up the mountain and we respected his absence for thirty years, and when the time was right he came back.

We've been talking about algorithms in indie art circles for years at this point. It didn't start with AI image generators. Social media has eaten up so much of our community real estate online that being an artist on the internet has been made inseparable from being a social media professional. When people talk about 'how to make it as an online artist' now, the vast majority of the advice that picks up traction is concerned with 'how to please the algorithm'. Make sure you post on a regular schedule. Make sure you hit peak times and then boost your content for your secondary audiences. Don't use certain words in image descriptions. Use at least three hashtags but no more than five. Images with faces in them work better with the autocrop. Here are the dimensions to work in to ensure your art isn't resized in the feed. Here are colours that always pop on a phone screen. Here are the most popular genres for a webcomic. Here are the layouts for a cover image guaranteed to catch people's eyes. Here's why you should switch to a vertical format. Here are the keywords to use in your titles. Here are the top ten plot tropes. Here is the cookie cutter. Here is the cookie cutter. Here is the cookie cutter.

Not all of this is bad advice, but much of it has become the dominant advice for anyone who is frustrated that their latest painting only got seven likes and wants to know how to beat the system. People have bought in so hard to the idea that The Algorithm is responsible for one person's success and another person's failure that it has become the primary lens through which a lot of online artists view their work. People talk about this shit the way kitchen table entrepreneurs talked about The secret in the 00s. And it doesn't work!!! Not by itself!!! You can't transform yourself into an art machine and win, because an art machine neglects relationships. It doesn't matter what an art machine drew in college, because the art machine just draws what it's asked for. You rob yourself of the narrative of your own growth. You rob yourself of the friends you make when you talk to the seven people who liked your painting (not because of its aspect ratio, not because of the optimal colour palette, not because it hit their dashboard in the ideal window between lunch and the afternoon shift) because you made it and showed it to them.