A thousand words to say nothing.

That surmises far too much of the art championed in online spaces, pictures that paint a thousand words and all of them say nothing. Repeated visual punchlines about social media as pills we’re addicted to, so exhaustedly redone they’re verging on becoming meta comment on themselves. Lightroom presets and black mist filters, the controllable and purchasable Kinkade pipeline for millennials and Gen Z. The epileptic gifs and endless memetic iconography dance somewhere between Warhol and Hirsts worst ideas and interpretations.

None of it really says anything. Some of it tries, some of it is just the outcry of youth, of learning, and the necessary stumble and crawl before the walk and run. But obviously I’m not here to lambast the explorations of those learning and growing. No I’m here to poke holes in facades erected above their station, to rub some of that gilt off and reveal the plaster casts beneath.

What I'd really like, what I think these online spaces need, is for us all to ask more questions. "why did you choose that visual over another? Did you mean for the greens to be so jarring? What were youre feeling and how did they shift throughout this works creation?"

Now of course the answer may be that the artist doesn't know, that the thought process was more subconscious and instinctual than that, but that still gives you insight in to the work and its maker. That lets you see their process as one of instinct, and the work as the effect of that instincts cause.

Maybe the artist answers in a way that shifts the art in your view, perhaps it unlocks some piece of irony in the work, or a vitriolic message youd rather not champion.

And dont think that these are just questions you should expect others to ask of your work, you as artists should be asking questions of your work. You should figure out what it says, and yes maybe all it says is a wordless, a cry of anguish and pain, a tear of joy run errant on the page, maybe it exists because all words failed it and so the art came forth to give voice to feeling that normal language could not. But you will not know unless you ask. Unless you take the time to sit with a work, to see what it tells you, to ask it questions.

Now you do not need the artist there to ask these questions of an artwork, you have AI and every encyclopaedia at your fingertips, what's more you have your eyes, your mind, and your life's emotive experiences. Perhaps in asking why that artwork makes you feel so forlorn you realise it is something deeply personal, maybe the model looks like a lost loved one, or the scene brings back a lost childhood memory. These questions arent just for the art they are for you.

But you do live in a time, and work in a space, where you can ask direct questions to artists, instantly. And similarly artists you live in a time and place where almost any artwork is open to your interrogation if you wish. So you should use those opportunities, figure out who's actually saying something, or if you have something worth dedicating a thousand words to.