Grains of Sand and the Existential Pause

It happened a couple of years ago, actually. I happened to be minding my own business, working feverishly on my website. When I say my website, I am refering to my current website, several incarnations previous to the present. There have been several re-designs, all designed to lure the unsuspecting art lover (read buyer) to the fertile art purchasing shores. Need I wax more honest?

Relevant content, an oxymoronic term bandied about on the e-waves is certainly a goal to shoot for, and I, like many webmasters, have shot it fulla holes myself on occasion. The occasion you may ask, dear reader? Already hit that with a glancing blow. Relevant content is what the searchbots, and therefore, search engines, and those who search (you hopefully) are searching to find.

I dreamed of Robert Terrell art sales...one or five a month. My brain began the math. The internet is viewed by so many per month, and if I can get so many "hits" and one hit out of a thousand is interested and out of each interested...perhaps the math is starting to paint a picture of how I leave my day job like Houstonians fleeing Hurricane Rita (but faster than 2 mph!).

So now you have more background than any sane person with a scroller mouse would ever read, unless they are, perhaps, recuperating from a workman's comp issue. Or may-hap my story continues to entertain the e-travelers...

So I continue to part two...where I started...

I was busy with my web designing work...plotting my attack on the e-world of art, when I began to notice certain websites. I was in the process of hunting certain types of websites to link to. Reciprocal sites. I link to them, they link to me. We all form a web of relevant websites (there is that important word again) and our Google pagerank rises. This brings more traffic, and of course more fame and fortune. It's a good theory, especially if you are owning and running the biggest search engine in the known universe.

The sites I was finding were not what I was looking for. One in particular stood out. It's named Top 100 Gallery Sites in Russia. I will never forget that website. I logged on and poked around a bit. As I viewed the various artists, a new understanding of the world began to dawn in my little artist pea brain...It was not pleasant, and my brain hit the Existential Pause button.

An Existential Pause is that moment when something in your brain stops dead in its tracks...usually just for a moment...because you have just realized that your world-view has collapsed like a deck of cards. The old paradigm had changed for good (or less-good). This was happening to me while viewing the Russian website, as my brain did its moebius-math flip...not a pretty sight if I had eyes.

I began an internal dialogue...If there is this site in Russia, there are probably who knows how more. This site has several Russian galleries on it, and each one has approximately 35 or so artists on it. And I know that many artists don't have websites. And many artists don't show their work. Many artists are dead.

This new paradigm was just getting started. I didn't get to enjoy the Existential Pause for too long, I'm sorry to say. In no time at all, the math began spreading worldwide. "I am sure that there are such websites like this in China, and artists that don't have websites, etc. And the same in India, and Japan, Korea, Australia, and so on and so forth."

Well, to make a rather long story shorter, which I shouldn't, it hit me like a tsunami surge that I am merely a grain of sand in the world community of artists. Art talent is not unique, rare nor particularly special. There are MILLIONS of artists worldwide.

For a while, this was quite depressing to me. I began to doubt myself as an artist, and wondered why I should bother to paint. But of course, I am an artist because I am an artist. This explains nothing...but to artists it explains everything.

With so many artists in the world, some known, but most working in semi or total obscurity, who really makes the rules of art history? How many Picasso-types have existed and worked in obscurity only to fade away? I am sure that many art critics and historians would take certain issue with these questions. I only know that surfing long hours on the internet will definitely bring one to a new understanding of the enormity of the art world.