The Noble Pursuit of Promoting That Which Is Not Mine

Every once in a few days, I come across a stunt pulled by an artist that makes me sigh and repeat, I hate contemporary art. I’m certain I’m not alone in my temporary, but all too often, moments of disdain for what I seem to have dedicated my work-life to. I’ll give you a couple of examples:

A while ago, there was a social media campaign among Iranians on social media against capital punishment. As I was scrolling through IG, I noticed an incessant number of posts published from the account of an artist I knew. The posts were photo documentation of a performance he had done some time ago about the same topic. He stands on a bloody platform in the performance, his eyes covered with a rope hanging from the ceiling around his neck. The work, ridiculous in its overly literal representation of the issue, wasn’t what made me unfollow the artist and then bitch about him for hours. What made me spiral was that he kept posting reshares of others praising his work, courage, sense of justice, etc. He had swiftly moved from promoting the cause through his art to promoting his art through the cause, joining the many artists who seem to be lost while navigating the fine line between the two.

Again on social media—where I seem to get most of my observations—I came across something even more obnoxious. An artist acquaintance of mine had made a post about a friend who had recently passed away. The post went something like this: “I’m_so heartbroken about the news of my friend’s passing,”_followed by, “Here is the link to a stellar review my friend has written about my work.” Is this how artists are mourning now? Oh, my friend is gone, but look at how much they liked my work, how amazing they thought I was. Maybe mourn for a minute before promoting yourself, will you? If I was his friend, I’d be haunting him for some time. How dare you use my untimely death to promote your mediocre art?

Don’t get me wrong; I am a firm advocate of artists shamelessly promoting themselves through whatever personal platforms are at their disposal. It’s not every day that we receive the recognition we feel our work deserves. If we don’t acknowledge and promote our own labour, who will? We all have to do what we can to survive in these cutthroat art scenes. Many of our contributors in NO NIIN are those whose work we have spotted through social media, and I’m grateful for their generosity in showing their works for free on a public platform.

As artists, we often have a sad tendency to be a bit self-absorbed and make everything about us. Most of the time, it’s harmless, but there are times when our actions make us symptoms of the unfeeling art and cultural scenes we live in, where the struggle is everything and every single value you hold dear is turned into a currency and later consumed by some miserable institution until all meaning is sucked out of it. We are taught to value competition and to embrace the hustle. And just maybe, if everything worked out, we’d make it. Isn’t that the capitalist wet dream?

Concurrent with the launch of NO NIIN’s first issue, an ongoing Open Call was launched, where we highly encouraged our readers to write to us and express their interest in writing a review for a specific upcoming exhibition/event/seminar in Finland. Or write to us if they have someone specific or a collective in mind who is active in the arts scene in Finland and whom they would like to interview. We’ve also published the rates of our payments to make sure our readers know we are not asking for volunteer work. One year later, we received maybe three or four submissions from artists interested in writing reviews of another artist’s work or having an interview with them. It’s been quite a disappointing revelation to us to see the art workers in this scene show such little active engagement with other artistic practices that are not theirs. What we’ve received plenty of is artists asking-in some instances, demanding that we find someone to review their show, or have an interview with them, even if they themselves refuse to dedicate their time to doing the same for another artist.

I guess there are a few unsolicited pieces of advice that I’m trying to jampack into this little editorial: 1) Promote your work through your opinions, your values, your attitude, and your integrity. 2) Promote the values you advocate for in your artwork, not when they’re trending but when they’re not. 3) Care is something we all deserve, so let’s make an effort to show it when we can.