Everyday Canvas

Fans, Media, and the Artist

Prompt: Do you think artists should connect with their fans via social media or leave up the wall between performer and audience?

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Connecting with fans via social media or not is up to the character and personality of the artist and their capacity of how much stress from the fans they can take. Each artist in any field will have to decide on that for himself.

As authors are artists, too, some love the action the social media provides, while others like Harper Lee and JD Salinger hate it so much that they even stop publishing. Even if we don’t have access to these authors’ later writings, I am sure they must have written on the sly. I can’t say what they did with what they have written for themselves, but one thing I am quite certain is that they have written, since we all know how writing is a bug and the kind of bug that it is, once it gets into one’s bloodstream, no antibiotic except death will kill it.

I can understand any artist’s dislike of fame because it would mean giving up all kinds of personal freedoms for them. Those of us who are private people at heart would be annoyed by being stalked, being continuously mentioned in gossip columns, or being unable to have a quiet stroll on the streets and the park.

Especially authors, since they are all people watchers, do not like to be noticed or hassled by the rude tabloid media, especially when they are gathering information and doing research. This may be why some of the artists of any field opt to live on foreign soil.

Where writers are concerned, one question they must hate has to be: What are you going to write next?

I mean, who knows? Writers sometimes write on a whim; other times, they search for something to write. Heaven forbid if the media catches them during that research and holds them to the subject they are researching. Sometimes, a research is just a research and the writer may or may not use that information, if he gives up on this particular project.

Putting anyone on the spot is a very rude activity, I believe.