Most Tried On, Not Adopted, Mildly Trolled

If you follow me on Instagram, you'll already know of the recent hubbub caused by one of my posts a few weeks ago. (And if you aren’t following me, why not? Lol.)

Anyway, I have a running series that I post on the last day of a show called "Most Tried On But Not Adopted." The premise isn't really about the piece itself, but the phenomenon where one thing becomes the star, tried on by nearly everyone, admired, coveted, held up to the light. And then… it goes home with me. And it's a completely different piece at every show. You'd think it would always be from one of the front cases, but it's not always, and it's not always something new either. It's the weirdest thing to see everyone who comes in hone in on the same piece, over and over, oftentimes not even a "showstopper."

So I usually post all of this in small bites as captions on my reels, but I guess this past time I wasn't specific enough, and it opened myself up to not just criticism, but a genuine internet troll who wouldn't let it go, and things spiraled from there.

As a disclaimer, I'd like to just get it out of the way that my skin is pretty thick after years standing in my booth listening to people's reactions to my work. And if you aren't aware, art school critiques are pretty brutal, and prepared me for almost any kind of criticism the public can throw at me. At the time, in my late teens and early twenties, all those hurtful critiques where everyone sits around a table and dissects your hard work seemed unnecessarily brutal, but I now see was like bootcamp for the rest of our lives, lol. People say the darndest things to my face, from less than a foot away, and I've learned to shrug it off. My work, at my price point, is not for everybody. That might be a bit of an understatement. I don't make my work to have something for everybody anymore, as I've discussed in the past.

So when this random guy started to attack not only my work, but my prices and my business, I had to decide how to handle the situation. I let it go at first, but then I noticed people trying to defend me in the thread, and I realized I had to address the elephant in the room, because the whole thing was starting to blow up.

But, yet another side note, because of this random jerk's comments, my reel was getting way more views than my videos normally get (ahem, a testament to the algorithm favoring interactions), and in turn my website was getting way more traffic from social media than normal. So I decided to run with it, and purposely highlight the criticism, because not only did it not hurt my feelings, but this loser was helping me be seen, lol.

Lessons were learned. From now on I might continue to be overly specific in my captions, and when you do see me harp on something, it’s probably because it’s helping me, and not because I’m in a corner crying, lol.