I know I haven't been around much until recently, and I apologise to everyone for my unannounced absence. Over the next few months I will be uploading my works and catch up on my deviantWATCH, so be patient.
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And now, for a not-so-little rant on something that I need to get off my chest.
I'm not sure how many of you may have heard of this particular deviant, but apparently, he has become very infamous around the internet's trolling circles for his God-awful Sonic fan-artwork and his extreme ego.
If you know who I'm talking about, you might want to skip this journal. If you don't, or are interested in my rant, read on.
This person, who goes by the username of =
twisterfiendish around here, has produced nothing but awful artwork and attracted a lot of unwanted drama and attention to this web site in general and himself in particular. He goes around declaring imaginary "wars" on the trolls who keep attacking and feeding him, while at the same time making a lot of user accounts here. Lots of people, myself included, have (nicely) given him some advice on how to improve his own art while learning how to avoid unwanted attention, only to be shut out by him.
The worst part of all of this is his inflated ego. He compares himself to people like Albert Einstein, thinks he has a lot of skill, hallucinates himself as a deviantART administrator, and worst of all, on what most believe to be his old account, ~
chasethehedgehog,
he is adamant that photography and poetry is not art, and considers it cheating as an artform (dig deep into the comments while you are there, too).
And somehow out of this mess he manages to not only get a subscription, a paid account, for this site, but he has actually managed to open his own CafePress account to sell products featuring his "artwork".
Don't believe me?
See for yourself.
I could have simply ignored him if not for the fact that the more I think about him, the more I find him to be an insult to the many truly talented artists around this web site who don't get enough exposure for their talent, and to the objective and aim of this very web site called deviantART. I have a few deviants on my watch who don't get much exposure and recognition around here despite their amazing talent, such as ~
Azrafael (as of this writing, he has 36,151 pageviews), and this awful idiot with an ego that's larger than the known universe has over 110,000 pageviews (as of this writing), for all of those awful "art"?
This is just one of the many truly amazingly-talented people on my watch who, for some reason, don't get enough exposure around here for their talent. Another one, ~
blayrd, has (of this writing) 35,508 pageviews.
And these are examples of what she does.
And what has this twisterfiendish moron done to deserve more pageviews than these two talented people?
Do not click if you are allergic to bad art, if you still want your eyes, or if you do not want to run the risk of being unable to unsee something more horrifying than death and destruction combined.Outrageous? Indeed. An insult? Definitely. An insult to this web site? Can't agree more.
It just irks me that someone who uses Paint (and not even the one in Windows 7, which is actually half-decent if you know how to work it) to scribble garbage to pass off as "art", someone who's hopelessly addicted to the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise (giving more moderate and restrained fans like myself a bad name), someone who decries photography (
) and poetry (*
FlowingWinds a.k.a. Hawkie, you reading this?), can stay around here for so long and eclipse the real talents.
To have someone like him around and freely run around with his brand of "art" while causing so much unwanted drama and trolls to swarm to this web site is a desecration of the very objective of this web site, which is to promote and showcase good artistic talents. With twisterfiendish running around and attracting all sorts of trolls from all over the web, it demeans, dilutes, and ultimately ruins the objectives, the meaning, the impression and image, and the branding of deviantART. Not only that, but it is an insult to the many artists who join this site to showcase their talent and to learn from each other, only to have their talent eclipsed by garbage like these.
Heck, even the many desktop customisation screenshots around here appear to have more effort put in than the garbage twisterfiendish churns out. Yes, it can really be argued that this form of art is "cheating", since most of the time you are taking elements made by others and mix-matching them (like making salad), but many of the better ones often involve some degree of modification by the person who's making the screenshot, hence there's a certain degree of originality in there. Some of the best ones even involve not only artistic talents but programming and design talents as well (
see this deviantART news article for some excellent examples). In a way, desktop screenshots can be considered a discipline belonging to the branch of interface design, which is quite a complex form of art in itself.
Twisterfiendish's by no means the only such person on this web site. There are countless others like him - too numerous to mention here - who churn out bad art while attracting trolls to this site; both together do nothing other than to spam up this web site with useless filth. Twisterfiendish is but one of the more notable examples.
Is this what deviantART has become nowadays? A web site for bad art and for trolls?
Whenever I look at all of this, I try to comfort myself in knowing that there's still real talent to be found on this site. But when I look back at twisterfiendish (and people like him) again and see that he's still around and has not banned from deviantART for all the trouble he has attracted to this place, I do really wonder if this site has lost all it's meaning.
It seems like deviantART had completely lost sense of where it is going by allowing such people to run around like this. People-wise, deviantART has really degraded from when I first joined this community. While I have come to know more genuine artistic talents, this has kind of become more and more difficult in recent years (oftentimes you will either need to look in Daily Deviations or have some pre-existing connections). In contrast, bad art and people like twisterfiendish are popping up everywhere like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and it appears the deviantART administration doesn't seem to care much about such people or their garbage among real talents and quality artworks on this site. Ultimately, this dilutes the quality of deviantART as a whole, and makes us less of a web site to find quality and more of a place to dump garbage.
What does this mean to us, people who are actually talented (even on an amateur level), and who either create artworks as a profession or just to share the results of their talent to the larger world, people like you and me?
It will mean that we, along with our works, will only get less and less exposure on a web site that is supposed to help expose talents like us, while garbage like those made by twisterfiendish will only continue to push us out of the picture. We will find it harder and harder to get ourselves seen and heard around here, as more and more people come here either to dump bad artwork or to laugh at (and troll) the people behind those "art".
It will mean that we will find it harder for us to find people to appreciate and - this is important for amateur and student artists - to critique our artwork or to give us merit where merit is due.
And it will mean that deviantART will become less of a place for artistic talents to gather, known less as a place for authentic art and artistic talents, and more of a place that's filled with drama, trolling, and horrendous art.
Ultimately, it's the small-time artists who use this web site as a platform to promote and improve themselves that will suffer as a consequence of all this. They will find it harder and harder to use deviantART as a serious platform to showcase their artwork as they try to cut through the garbage being thrown their way, and they will find it harder to attract the right auidence to their artwork as more and more people, seeing how even the most awful garbage is being accepted around here, will find this place to dump even more garbage whist attracting more trolls to come here and do nothing but spam up this place and create a lot of drama in the process.
Is this what deviantART really wants?
Maybe I should digress. Maybe I'm blowing up a small matter into a gigantic wall of text here that's higher than the Burj Dubai.
Then again you must realise that this concerns the very core principles and objectives of deviantART. This matter - small and insignificant it may seem - is shaking the very foundations that deviantART is built on.
Which is why I care. Because I use this web site as a place to showcase my own artistic talent while discovering the artistic talents of others. Not as a place to find bad art and to laugh at them, or to troll the pathetic creators behind these pieces of garbage. Though I'm but just a small-time hobbyist, if even I do not care, then nobody else will.
I admit I have trolled twisterfiendish myself here, but when I realised what I was doing, the whole situation started to sicken me.
deviantART must take action, and take action
now, to weed out such garbage and trolling. The administration must realise that this is chipping away the core and foundations of this very web site, and that if allowed to continue, ultimately deviantART will become nothing more than a glorified 4Chan.
I really hope someone from the administration reads this the whole way through, and not just skim, but actually take the time and initiative to
read it properly. This concerns the direction and the future of deviantART; more importantly, it concerns the very core objectives and foundations that deviantART was built on.
Filler Entry: Artists who deserves your time
:
(painting, photography)
(graphics design, 3D art)
(3D art, digital painting)
(3D art, pencil drawing, digital painting)
(digital painting, sculpture)
- he does portraits of missing children in order to raise awareness on the issue. Go to his deviantART page and give him your well-wishes - he's one artist that's truly deserving of your time.
Neutral
Outraged
Shitty
Tired
