This post is by guest author, Mark Edward Adams.  This article has been edited and published with the author's permission. You should submit an article and share your views as a guest author by clicking here. We've promoted this post to feature status because it provides great value to the FineArtViews community.  If you want your blog posts listed in the FineArtViews newsletter with the possibility of being republished to our 20,000+ subscribers, consider blogging with FASO Artist Websites.  This author's views are entirely his own and may not always reflect the views of BoldBrush, Inc.

I was reading an editorial in the Huffington Post called "Artists and the New Normal" by Robert Maynord. The idea behind the editorial is that artists who post pictures of their work on social media are oftened harshly criticized by other artists. This leads to a negative atmosphere that does not foster creativity or self confidence of the artist.

I disagree with this view. In my experience, the majority of the response is overwhelmingly postive to artists posting pieces of their work. I just looked at my personal Facebook page and scrolled down through all the pictures of paintings and sculpture. Out of the dozen or so pieces I saw, I did not see a single negative comment. In fact, some people had over 100 likes for a single painting.

Social media mirrors your own social circle. Most of the time your friends are not going to criticize you in a public form. The real negativity arises from the different tribes of artists and when they interact on a public forum.

If you spend enough time with different artists, you will hear a lot of rants. The realists detest that the abstract artist lack techincal skill and the abstact artists think the realists are stuck in the past. The hipster artists hate the commercial galleries as greedy while the established artitst think of the hipsters as amateur coffee house artists. The list goes on and on... However, if you would talk to just the realists, you would hear glowing praise in the public arena for each other. The same goes for the other tribes.

So while I do think that Robert Maynord is correct that there is negativity in the art world, I think if you look a little closer you'll see it mainly between the factions. The different tribes support each other strongly.

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Editor's Note:  You can view Mark's original post here.