Humans love magic, most of the time. We perceive something to be magic when the cause and effect of some event isn’t immediately obvious or deducible to us. We say things like, “How did they do that?” when a magician makes a coin disappear from one hand and immediately appear in the other. It’s ‘amazing’.
Hiding the cause and effect of an event has its benefits. Who doesn’t enjoy the surprise when a performing magician levitates their assistant with nothing but a wave of the hand? Surprise is something worth paying for. We love the challenge of trying to work out how it was done. Magic that does no harm, or is there for us as entertainment, is something to be celebrated.
Like magicians, artists can also make magic. There have been plenty of times where I’ve gazed upon a painting, awestruck at their ability to create a particular effect. Amanda Hyatt, Joseph Zbukvic, Alvaro Castagnet are magicians in my mind. And they’re good at guarding their secrets. Their secrets are worth something so people pay handsome prices to attend closed-off workshops in the hope that one or two secrets will be revealed.
Perfecting magic tricks take time – years. It requires privacy for true practice; we cannot safely fail if there is any element of performance to our practice. And yet, the social media machine calls. In a bid to take advantage of the algorithms we’re prompted to post every day (or at least 3 times a week). The power and pressure of ‘fuelling the feed’ is an anathema to making true magic.
I see artists online, many in children’s publishing – the most giving of all art industries – expose their cause and effect for free, over and over and over again. They post highly-produced videos, sharing their secrets and methods. Walkthroughs, sketch time-lapses, materials etc. Yes, it’s incredibly engaging content, and the social media gods reward them for that; but what’s the cost to their practice in the long run? And is the value exchange fair? I’m not sure that’s clear.
The best, most revered magicians are the ones who don’t reveal their secrets. They’re the ones who are making magic and audiences are showing up to be surprised and delighted, precisely because they are kept in the dark. Magicians (and the best fine artists alike) manufacture and understand the art of surprise, there’s value in keeping things a little private sometimes, even if Instagram or Twitter give us stats to try and prove otherwise.