Einigeln

“Therapy works for a lot of people, though entertainers have it easier than most. Instead of having to pay someone an hourly fee to feign interest in listening to them drone on about their lives, a canny performer can reel in an audience, unburden themselves, and receive adulation as well as a nice payday simultaneously.”

Bob Dylan

What is art about? The personal, many might say. But art is also public – it strives outwards, wants to capture, wants to move.

There is a tension in that in a time where we are renegotiating the role of the personal and public in our lives. As the internet makes the public bigger – should we share more or less?

It is an honest question I haven’t figured out for myself, yet. (Of course, the question is personal, as in, has to be answered individually.) “Oversharing” is a definite problem. It’s a privacy risk for those who do. It’s possibly weird for everyone else. I don’t care about a stranger’s breakfast or trauma. “Instagram is not therapy,” you might say. Isn’t it, though?

After all, where did the idea come from that everyone of us has to deal with our issues on our own. That our public self must nicely and silently integrate with “the public”? (In a time where the powerful live out their neuroses, mind you! Maybe that is a big part of power in the first place?)

Sharing about my life instead of street life in the last weeks was a challenging experiment. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

But maybe that’s what art is about. To give The Inner a form that can live on its own in the public. Is that why some say artistic work is like giving birth? Because it’s a part of you but also not?

And maybe that’s my problem with stranger’s sharing their traumas: It’s “content,” not art. Art needs an audience and a context, content just The Algorithm.

What do you share? With whom? Why?