They Have To Ignore You
Having haters is half of it—and no, the other half isn’t fans. Supporters are their own category, their own thing—I’m talking about a second component to your detractors. There’s the haters, and then there’s also the ignorers—and the two groups work together in tandem, like good cop and bad cop. One cannot fully harm you without the other.
A quick digression just to say that the only bad thing about haters by the way is that they rob the uninitiated of proper context for your art. It’s essentially a disinformation campaign—their idea is to meme their shit takes into virality, causing more people to hold them than ever would normally. It’s a Kuleshov Effect type deal, where your hater wants to get there first, priming whatever tabula rasa is walking towards your creation. A hater’s takes are often fucking bonkers, of course—but that doesn’t matter. They are words said with confidence, and such, have the capacity to fool.
Ignorers are just as bad as haters, if not worse—their goal is to make sure nobody sees your work. They do this by imbibing it, but not reacting to it in any way. They may even watch, read, every single thing you make—and they will never mention you or any of it whatsoever. It’s a weird, and odd, and creepy fucking thing—and yet nobody talks about it. Haters are attention-getting, and ubiquitous as an annoyance. Ignorers get no attention whatsoever—of course, by design. One could call them a ‘silent hater’, if one wanted to term them something that might make the phenomenon of them more known.
Artists are like the diamond industry—they live or die by engagement. That’s an absolutely painful pun, I’m sorry, but it popped into my head and I had to write it. It’s true, though—artists hate being trees that fall in the woods and no one hears them, but even worse than that is knowing that the forest is full of creatures that are just pretending they don’t hear you. That’s what ignorers seek to foster a world of—in fact, like haters, they hope their behavior catches on, becomes seen as the unspoken ‘thing to do’ in regards to a particular artistic nuisance such as yourself.
I’ve noticed it with a lot of artists I enjoy, of various mediums—I’ll be like ‘why doesn’t anyone talk about so-and-so?’ and the answer is always ‘I don’t know’, even amongst people that enjoy their work. The truth is that it’s deeper than a simple ‘I don’t know’—it’s more an ‘I don’t remember’. Nobody can place exactly when the buzz, the discourse, the conversation ceased, but it did—and ignorers were the cause. Haters are almost the distraction, the ‘hey, look over here!” while ignorers do the more lasting damage.
I don’t know what the answer is other than to simply shine a light on them, put a name to it, make it stick—educate civilians to the occurrence such that they become less susceptible to it. I do believe that that’s how it goes away, at least for the most part—ignorers do what they do because it’s all they can think to do. It’s all they have—they don’t have any backup ideas or plans. Really, they don’t even have any thoughts or opinions—just hatred, jealously, envy, in their bones. Human beings that have voluntarily made themselves like ghosts—kind of like in Scooby Doo or whatever. Ridiculous.
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