#179 - What If All Online Advice (Including Mine) Were Wrong?
During World War II, the American military examined the places where surviving planes were shot.
Source: Wikipedia
(This is going to be about drawing, I promise!)
Initially, their instinct was to strengthen the parts that had most bullet shots with steel plates, but one clever person realized you had to look at it the other way around: the spots where you didn’t see damage from bullets were the parts where the planes that had crashed were shot!
For example, maybe when a plane got shot in the area of the gasoline tank, all the gasoline leaked out, and the plane didn’t return. It didn’t survive. And so you didn’t see planes with bullet holes near the gasoline tank. These were the planes that hadn’t survived.
Survivorship bias: the bias from only seeing the entities that survived and not learning the lesson from the things that didn’t survive because you don’t see them.
The army fortified the areas where they didn’t see bullet damage on returning planes with extra steel plating.
Survivorship bias.
How does it affect us, artists? Well, we listen to a lot of advice from artists who are online. But what if the artists who are NOT online, the ones who stay off-grid, the ones we don’t see online, are right? They are (maybe, we don’t know!) getting up in the morning, leaving for their studios, having an enjoyable day in the studio painting, or maybe visiting museums or fellow artists. Gallerists represent them, and they have collectors who are fans of them. They have worked on series for decades.
They can do all that because they don’t waste time on social media.
Instead of listening to artists who are active online, we should try to do as the artists who are not online and create our body of work in the real world.
You never hear anyone say this because the people who would be saying this are offline, and we’re only listening to online people.
But maybe the artists who are staying offline are right?
We don’t know because we can’t see them due to survivorship bias.
Ten years from now, the social media landscape will have changed unrecognizably, and all the work you put into creating social media posts will be for naught. What lasts is the tangible body of work you made as you went offline. That’s when we’ll walk through museums and see all the work made by people who had the sense to stay offline and in their studios.
Online is surprisingly ephemeral. Things are constantly disappearing.
Eventually, all social media content will have disappeared, and all we will see—again, due to survivorship bias—is art that was made and is presented off-line.
You can be there now! Go off-line and create art, and ten years from now, you will still have something to show for it.