Essays / Exhibition news / Publications

Masking failure?

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I gave up on this piece about two years ago. For reasons that I can’t remember, the initial promise over these two images soon disappeared. After recently going though the archive of older work, I came across it again and then thought of an experiment. The original intention of images can so often be mistaken these days, constant recycling and the porous online world allows for essageration to appear on a daily basis. Another thing was that I have always been told to avoid describing your work at all costs, but the current trend is to do just that, using thirty hashtags or less most of the time. What if I were to utilise these common practices with something that (in reality) failed, then see how it compared with a legitimate piece of work...?

Would a higher number of tags, likes, new followers, comments etc, with relation to this image, subvert the purpose of a work or what is actually means.

I posted this failed image about a week ago and explained the experiment. Usual posts after this amount time reach around thirty likes and result in five or six new followers. This one after a week ‘outperformed’ most of my actual work by about twenty percent across all categories…

Is this purely down to publicity? Timing?? Probably, but it makes you think about the perception of any given image, even if it’s rubbish in the first place