Art, Attention, and the Misjudgment of Intention
I was recently told that the reason my works receive so little engagement is because people assume I’m posting just to get attention. They believe that I perform out of narcissistic desperation, so they get wary and avoid my posts. As non-experts in psychiatry, they have diagnosed me as an intense spotlight-seeker. That’s a shameful misreading. And frankly, it’s very irresponsible.
If sharing one’s artwork is inherently attention-seeking, then what do we call the millions who post daily about their meals, their outfits, their opinions, their pets, their heartbreaks, and their triumphs? Are they exempt from scrutiny because their content is more palatable, more familiar, and more socially acceptable? Am I truly the only person on the internet who wants desperately to be recognised by posting digital artworks?
Come to think of it, I really don’t care about that accusation. I'm not saying it doesn’t sting; sure it does! But it misses the point entirely. I believe that all artworks deserve to be shown and to be seen. Not all visibility is about vanity. It’s part of the artistic process. Artists create for an audience, whether that audience is imagined, intimate, or vast. The act of sharing may look like a cry for attention but it’s a actually just a gesture of connecting.
It’s hypocritical to claim that artists create solely for themselves. Yes, some do. But most of us, whether we admit it or not, create with the hope that someone will look, listen, feel, and respond. We don't fight for fame, but for resonance. We fight for our minds to be seen, our emotions to be understood, and our visions to be felt. That’s not attention-seeking. That’s the human condition.
There are truths inside us that language alone cannot carry. So we turn to color, to texture, to movement, and to metaphor. We invent images, compose sounds, shape stories because some things must be felt before they can be named. To call that “craving attention” is to flatten the complexity of artistic passion into something petty and performative.
We should understand that art is not a showcase of ego. It’s a transmission of soul. And if the world is too mediocre to recognize that, and be too quick to judge or too slow to feel, then there's really nothing I can do about it. Nevertheless, creativity should not stop just because people think we desperately want applause. People will always have the tendency to judge based on the standards they impose upon themselves. Maybe a little bit of empathy on my part is needed. .
