69. What If Your Best Work Needs Less Sharing

If making the work is water, content is food coloring, and once it's in there's no getting it back out. One of us never expected what his video channels would bring: a feeling that an audience is waiting, like a plant that dies if nobody waters it. He had begun them partly as an archive of his own life, the kind he wishes he had of his father's, even a staged one. Vivian Maier took her pictures while working as a nanny, which makes us wonder whether a day job keeps the water clean. Offered an imaginary patron's $100,000 a year, one of us would take it and still wonder whether the content plant had died by the end. The other laughs off the idea that universal basic income will set creativity loose, since conflict seems to be part of what makes people make things. The conversation started when one of us was drawn at once to one photographer's book, then felt something missing from new work by another, who also makes social media content. Near the end, one of us describes what he calls is-ness, a scene that simply is what it is, like the light and dust on an estate-sale end table that morning, or two telephone poles on a hill above a ditch of dirty snow. We close on how hard that is to say, and how much our language leans on the image of a line. Mentioned in this episode: Vivian Maier, Alec Soth, J.D. Salinger, Garry Winogrand, Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art? -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com