pakicetus

at the end of the day i think the online digital artist community has for a very long time operated on a set of like unspoken handshake rules generally enforced by social pressure which (despite being positioned on a moral & pseudolegal plane) have very little overlap with what is legal or illegal (de facto or de jure) but which have Everything to do with figuring The Artist as a universal would-be petit bourgeois auteur, reflected through these rules' emphasis on (1) the moral necessity of The Artist's unwavering & eternal power over their own art (& its reception) as articulated via informal pseudo-IP mechanisms (no reposting, dont tag as me/kin/id, dont use as your pfp, dont draw my oc), (2) the moral mandate toward Constant Self-Improvement (generally meaning adopting more of the conventional signifiers of "Good Art" eg realism) (admonition of "tracing" even for practice, artists who do things that are "not conducive to improvement" being fair game for mockery), & (3) attempting to induce in observers (often through guilt) a social pressure to further the ambitions of such artists ("you need to reblog/share, not just like", "you MUST commission 1 million artists immediately", "it's rude to express anything other than praise for any piece of art")