Remember StumbleUpon? For those of you who don’t know what StumbleUpon was, it was a site that would send you to a random website every time you clicked the “Stumble!” button on the main page. And then from there you would be suggested similar websites to discover. Sort of like a bigger & broader webring. It’s been defunct for years because, let’s be honest, the amount of sites a vast majority of people want to/have been forced to visit are very few. Slowly but surely the “internet” that most people think of today has been relegated to The Big 8; Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Amazon, Netflix, and Instagram. Obviously more sites beyond these 8 exist, but finding new and interesting sites outside of these big 8 is getting more and more difficult and enticing for the general public. Tech corporations have “optimized” and consolidated everything into their own Babylonian walled gardens. Everything is about SEO (search engine optimization) and branding and “content creation” and minimalism and the HGTV-ification of everything.
This is why I see the importance in silly personal webpages. I’m sure most of us over the age of 25+ remember the heyday of Geocities, personalized deviantart pages, fan rings, webrings, obscure forums for every type of niche and media, and of course, MySpace profiles. Remember when you could have a personal background for Twitter? Now you can’t even do that. Every tumblr used to have their own theme, but now newer tumblr blogs stay as the default mobile-optimized layout, because people either don’t know about themes, or are too apathetic to change and mess around with their blogs. Even with Neocities/Dreamhost/SpaceHey, which are full of people who are working towards rewilding the internet, these are still sites you have to make an effort to find, because they are intentionally kept buried and hidden from the general public to make The Big 8 forever relevant. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
One of my favorite museums ever is the American Visionary Arts Museum, located in Baltimore (a fitting city for this type of museum to be in imo). The whole point of this museum is that they only exhibit “visionary art”, which is defined as “art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without any formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.” A whole museum dedicated to outsider art.
Even though I personally felt that I needed art college, I know many, MANY fellow artists via conventions and zine collabs who never went to art school at all, and yet create some really fucking phenomenal art. When I tell people I’m an illustrator, and that I make art for a living, I get a lot of responses of “I could never create art, I can’t even draw a stick figure!”
(I also get a lot of ‘why would you major in art? Art doesn’t make any money’ responses but this ain’t about that lol)
And I always want to tell those “can’t draw a stick figure” people this: what makes “good” and "worthwhile" art is subjective. For example, my dad fucking loves Rothko’s Chapel in Houston, so much so that he dragged me and my brothers there once while we were in town visiting family. I personally think the chapel is full of shit and boring, cause to me it’s just a bunch of purple canvases in a regular church, but for my dad and many others, they feel something when they’re standing in that chapel. The same can be said for many other types of art. Campy direct-to-video movies, low budget itch.io video games, self-published books sold at comic conventions, etc. It doesn’t matter if the art you create looks 100% perfect when you first set out to create it. So long as you have the passion to create it, and the willingness to get better at your craft, anyone can make a great piece of art. And if you're lucky people will even begin to notice it and give you an audience!
Obviously this can also swing way too hard in the other direction, where you get art that is so presumptuous you end up with an empty gallery with flickering lights in the MoMA or Jeff Koons or Ahish Kapoor. Trust me, some of the shit I saw at art college was so pretentious the entitlement could power an entire electrical grid. I think the only thing that makes “bad art”, is when your entire point of the piece is to convey a message or emotion to an audience, but you make the method of communication so complex and deep that barely anyone outside your own art circle understands what the fuck you’re trying to say. If you make art that is made to reach an audience, but refuse to make it approachable to said audience, you are not doing a good job as an artist.
And then of course, there is the "everything is content" side as well. This side of "art" has become more and more prevalant in our SEO riddled world. The kind of stuff you see that's on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/Disney+/whatever subscription service you're looking at, whose only reason for existance is to pad out a library so that there is a never ending stream of ~content~ for buyers to consume. This kind of art isn't art, it's a product. Something that is made by a company with the direct purpose of getting you to consume it just so said company can track how well their stuff is selling/how good their buyer retention is. I feel like my stance on this type of stuff can be best summerized by this RedLetterMedia video where Mike, Jay, & Rich go down a list of ready-made horror movies that are clearly only there to pad out a streaming libary and trick viewers with keywords.
However, to an outside observer, they can usually tell when a piece of art is coming from a place of passion VS a place of pretentiousness/product. I’m of the opinion that the most important thing about art is genuinity. It’s the reason we feel so charmed by an 8 year old showing us their drawing of their dog or whatever. Like yeah it’s a giant wobbly circle with stick legs and a lopsided oval head with eyes, but goddamn if little Jimmy didn’t have fun with it. And that passion gets more evident to the artist and the observer when that determination to continue creating gets stronger. There is no better feeling then suddenly realizing you have the skills to create in reality what you envision in your head. It’s for this reason that I really like the Art Decider twitter. I think that guy really encapsulates what I mean.
And this extends to webpages. Even the most haphazard Geocities pages with broken links and uncentered text have meaning, because that shitty webpage meant something to the person who created it, aka the artist. Why do you think there was such an effort to archive as many geocities sites as possible when Yahoo announced they were shutting the service down in 2009?
Even if it visually looks "bad", the heart and passion you put into a piece of art will always show through.
