Crap Art

This idea comes from the book Geography of Bliss*.

Making artwork or videos that are crap is the same thing that crap is used for in farming: fertilizer. When I worked at an organic-ish farm we used chicken poop to help the plants thrive. I liked to call it dew because that’s nice wet drops of water on plants instead of the doo that it was.

Sometimes you’ve got to wade through the crap, to get to the good stuff. Keep creating, keep making, find what new paths your work takes you down as you continue to follow yourself into the rabbit hole that is creation.

I’ve heard TikTok compared to playing the lottery. Post a lot of videos, which equals buying tickets, and eventually one may hit the jackpot, or go viral. I’ve found this to be incredibly true on my Instagram and YouTube pages. I’m not the god of viral videos, nor do I know how to appease them. But I do play to the god’s of viral videos to help boost my performance as an online artist. The flip side to this is I make a lot of crap for them. Every once in a while I’ll make a short form video that I believe is one of the best, most beautiful, and worthy of attention videos. It goes out there alongside all the other ones that aren’t such high quality content, and for the most part, my favorites get ignored. That’s ok. I’ve learned to keep a collection of work I’m proud I created to revisit when I’m doubting myself as a creator.

The same thing goes for any field of creation. I’ve made several paintings that I’m not happy with. In fact, there’s a guitar I painted…