93 - Second Conversation with Paul Heaston
a new episode of the sneakyart podcast!
👋 Hello, readers!
I am delighted to share the new episode of the SneakyArt Podcast with you. Paul Heaston is a good friend, fantastic artist, and - despite what he believes - a deep thinker. I enjoyed picking his brain in this conversation.
In this week’s issue, find -
🎙 Links and episode description
🚀 Quick explainer of the new episode format
💭 Best ideas from the conversation
🎙 Ep 33 - Second Conversation with Paul Heaston
In this episode, Paul and Nishant discuss specific ideas around being solo independent artists in the creator economy. As a Second Conversation, this episode naturally builds upon their first conversation (Ep 2 Drawing Lines with Paul Heaston). They discuss balancing work and play, and finding the ikigai, or beautiful intersection, of the two.
Being a trained fine artist, how does Paul perceive the evolution of the freedoms afforded to artists, and the responsibilities incumbent upon them in today’s time? Considering that “all content is just more content”, they discuss sharing work across multiple platforms, and the impact of meme-culture to explain how we reach across cultures and nationalities to interact with a global audience.
Listen to the conversation on your choice of streaming service:
Spotify | Apple | PocketCasts | Google | Web | Gaana
🚀 What is a ‘Second Conversation’?
As I explained in Insider Post #18:
The basic idea occurred to me when I realized that after 30 episodes (and 30 conversations!) I have become a better listener and speaker. I consider the increasing length of the episodes to be a direct indicator of deeper conversations with better ideas. While being proud of this achievement, I also felt like I had short-changed my early guests, some of whom are friends in real life, with conversations that were far too short.
Thus, second conversations were in order!
The early guests are very dear to me, because they agreed to appear on a podcast that had no listeners, and was exclusively audio while speaking about a visual art. Some of them registered their skepticism about whether audiences would be interested in just listening.
But not only guests, I feel those early conversations also short-changed the most important component of the equation - you, the listener.
And this is the thought which defines the structure of the episode as follows:
Introduction to second conversations
The First Conversation in its entirety (in this case, Ep 2)
Segue into the Second Conversation.
This structure turns Ep 33 into a 3+ hour experience, in keeping with the tune of recent episodes. I hope you will enjoy listening to it in this particular way!
💭 Best Ideas from the Episode
🐱🐉 Paul explains why - although a lot of dinosaurs are now known to have been feathered - they remain feather-less, leathery creatures in popular imagination
This has to do with the tremendous power of Hollywood, for both good and bad. Paleontologists and paleo-artists know that a lot of popular dinosaurs were actually feathered, and are peeved at Jurassic Park for continuing to depict dinosaurs as they did in the early 90s (for reasons of cinematic continuity). At the same time, few things have done more for the cause of paleontology as the Jurassic Park films!
👨🎨 We discuss the term ‘creative entrepreneur’ and how it differs from simply ‘artist’
What responsibilities and powers does the former offer to the latter? I argue that being an entrepreneur of your own work is not only essential for today’s artist, but in fact it is a tremendous boon that would make any artist of the past tremendously jealous of us.
🌱/🏗 The ‘Gardeners v Architects’ framework, as discussed in Issue #74
Thinking about career growth as either organic or deterministic, I pose a question based on a discussion I had in Ep 29 with Koosje Koene. Paul posits that it need not be a binary choice - careers can be deterministic at the micro level, while being organic at the macro level.
🤳 We talk about how social media has changed over time, and what Instagram’s shift towards video content means for us
“This [phone] is another instrument in the ‘making of’ process, it’s not part of the making of the art. But it is … because the art is now not the page with the drawing on it but it’s the video you upload to Instagram. So, the phone is one of the art-making tools because you’re not uploading a drawing, you’re uploading a video of the drawing. And the video is the art piece.” - Paul Heaston.
🎥 I make an impassioned plea in favour of TikTok
My argument is that Instagram incentivizes scrolling, such that people do not spend more than 1 second on any post. Instagram also has a hit-or-miss instantaneous algorithm. If you do not succeed immediately, you are buried for good.
TikTok, instead, incentivizes people to watch videos of 15-60 seconds. Such user behaviour is a huge boon for any artist or content creator compared to other social media.
I can confirm that since this recording Paul has joined TikTok and has thousands of fans on it!
🍕 We talk about memes and trends
In continuing the conversation around TikTok, I liken the trending videos of today to jpegs of yesteryear, like Success Kid, Overly Attached Girlfriend, or Bad Luck Brian. Memes worked because we knew the format of the joke being delivered. Knowing the format helped us mentally acclimate to the content. Get into the mood, so to speak. Memes were an incredible form of Internet content because their context did not have to be explained, but was immediately absorbed across various cultures and geographical boundaries.
This same logic works today as TikTok videos. With the musical hook in place, the viewer settles in to watch the video, less likely to scroll away because they understand the nature of the ride they will be taken on. The result: you get deeper, more consensual engagement!
🎺 Insider Update
Did you know SneakyArt Insiders were able to listen to this episode last week? Early access to certain episodes is one of the privileges I offer in exchange for Insider support. To see some of the other content available exclusively to Insiders, visit here.
Supporting my work is easy. And just for this week, I’m going to make it a little easier! Hit the button below to grab a special discount. Offer valid until Jan 27.
🎱 SneakyArt Roulette
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Thank you for your time and attention. I will see you next week!
