I am not your vessel
Occasionally I make reels and comments with somewhat declarative statements about art, meaning, purpose, ego, etc. Last week I commented on a reel made by an artist named Taylor Morrison. He has a popular account called @weopen with over 100k followers and the majority of his content are short videos where he offers his critique of artwork found on other people’s instagram accounts. Now, these people seek this critique, it is not Taylor going out of his way to scour the internet for work he is critical of and then blasting those people. No, these are people who RUSH to his website regularly to buy one of his “dungeon keys,” which sellout quickly when offered and give buyers a chance to have their work discussed or eviscerated on Taylor’s page. As far as I can tell Taylor likes to assess the work based on how it shows in the grid-you can’t seem to choose which work he’ll talk about. I don’t watch them all and I’m late to his account so I’m looking at his following from an outsider perspective of sorts. It’s a bit cult-ish. But I do watch many of reels and I sometimes comment. Lately, I can’t help but notice that the majority of his commenters are male and many don’t particularly appreciate my comments, even if Taylor, who follows me back, does.
Yesterday, one of his followers really tanked my afternoon with a comment that claimed I was less human because I approached art from a cerebral perspective instead of an emotional one. I suppose I allowed myself to get sucked into comments I would ordinarily ignore because everything has been so bad lately, I’m looking to level. I’ve got fighting energy so if you come at me right now, you’re going to get a battle. This guy really pissed me off. I made several attempts at articulating my rage in a reel but knew this couldnt be condensed to 90 seconds and still hold the water I needed it to. This small dick energy guy, who claimed my perspective was elitist, invalid, and subhuman, managed to distill down for me so much of my recent rage about how white men move through this world through this one interaction. He first claimed I’d missed the point of the art because I was too busy being a critical elitist. He claimed I was too busy judging that I couldnt feel what the artist was saying. This lack of feeling made me less human. The assumption that because someone disagrees, they fundamentally misunderstand what you’re saying or are less than you, is an assumption I am up against constantly with men it feels like. I am frequently in the position of being mansplained to by men I am smarter than. I almost ALWAYS understand what other people are trying to say, before they’ve even gotten to the point, and I often simply disagree. At this point in life, in perimenopause, I won’t be swayed to set aside what I know to be true in order to make someone else feel better about their own inadeqacy. The lack of allowance for this is astounding because underlying my disagreement is defiance, lack of compliance. I have been threatening men with my daring disagreement since I was a child. I have always been a woman behaving badly.
Assuming that because someone thinks a work of art is bad, means they’ve misunderstood it, is such a misunderstanding of whose responsibility it is to create the meaning in the work. It’s my contention that art is a visual language that communicates something. There are driving forces that compel a person to make, and when you study art formally they push you to find what compels you so you can master it. Many amateur artists who don’t want to be judged or ask themselves hard questions reject this notion that art should be understood on an intellectual level. They argue it’s against the purity of expression to pick apart the art as meaning, especially when it’s abstract. But really all art is an abstraction of reality and to deny we have reasons to make is to deny our free will. Expression is a form of communication, even at its most raw. My critique of the art in this particular reel Taylor shared, and of many of the artists buying these dungeon keys in general, was they seem to think the making is enough to warrant praise or admiration. They seem to mostly be under the impression that the unconscious form of making is superior to that of the conscious attempt to understand. In doing so they are creating a hierarchy themselves while denying the academic hierarchy of formalism and psychology I am trying to apply to the art. I got accused of catering to audience desires and making work just to please the market, all because I suggested an artist should have a sense of responsibility to their viewers to communicate something clear, to have a perspective and something to say before they ask others to listen. Many of the commenters misunderstood my point all together and that misunderstanding is demonstrative in itself. That I was personally attacked again and again, all by men, sheds a deeper light on what happens when women stand their intellectual ground with men who are not even smart enough to grasp they are in over their head.
I have come to the conclusion that the role white women have played for white men in history is to be a validation vessel for the toxic masculinity and problematic primal thoughts and behaviors of men. We are decorative porcelain vases standing by to hold all of the emotions men cannot process or take responsibility for, all of the mental load that makes them feel badly about themselves, inadequate, or failures. We swirl it all around, stirring and justifying and pour it back out for the man in a big tall glass of affirmation that tells him even though he’s awful, we will love him, thus continuing the patriarchy and industrial war machine. If and when a woman realizes this is what she is constantly asked to do, she may question it. As a child I did. I asked why I had to hide the fact I knew the answers. I asked why the boys were allowed to get away with things the girls were not. I asked why boys were excused from being expected to be better. I demanded to know why I had to make choices and decisions that diminished myself in order to make them greater. But when a girl does that, when a women does it, we are taught again and again that to the man, we are still just a decorative porcelain vase. If you try to break free from this role, if instead of validating, you choose to challenge the fragile male hiding behind a macho wall, he will ALWAYS pick up the hammer at his side and smash you to bits to remind you that he has the physical power. This is what I have learned as a woman in this world. Our job is to make men feel good about themselves and when we don’t, we are punished. It’s worth noting that when many white women wake up and realize they don’t want to be a vessel for men’s mediocrity, they often turn black women into vessels for their own inadequacies, expecting them to do the same emotional and mental labor and validation they have performed for the white man. This is why there are white woman loudly asking where Kamala is right now. They cannot do right on their own without someone else being there to direct and take the hit from those hammers first. White women have always done to black women what white men have done to us.
My initial comment on the reel Taylor posted had over 50 responses, including my replies. They were all men and only one was kind. It took Taylor stepping in and telling the commenter he wasnt allowed to call people less than human on his feed before the guy backed off and then admitted he was actually a friend of the artist Taylor had critiqued and was attacking me in defense of his wounded buddy. He apologized to Taylor. He told me he saw my points and wished me well. He did not apologize to me, just justified his behavior with the emotions our engagement had surfaced. He framed the entire thing as if his 5 hateful comments to me could just be erased from my brain because a man had now scolded him, as if the two hours of my life where I felt attacked just for existing didnt matter because he felt better now. He used our interaction to get to the bottom of his own feelings. By the end he felt a catharsis, he felt better having beaten me up. This is the role of women. To be the punching bag and then be happy when the beating is done, thankful he saw his mistake before real damage was done. We shouldn’t keep mentioning it because then we are making a big deal out of nothing, which is so female of us to get all emotional.
I had taken some screenshots of the engagement yesterday but not all. When I went back today to get it all I couldn’t find the comments. I am bad at stuff like that or it was deleted with all evidence he was a true dick to make himself feel better. No need to make amends, just project, deflect, do damage, feel better, and repeat, the white male way. I will add that Taylor did send me a note expressing regret this exchange took place and he is not at fault for his followers BS. He often agrees with me in the comments so don’t go attacking his account now.