Drawn Together
With their queer artists' collective Boys Be Good, Christopher Cunetto and Jason Edward Tucker are finding that there's strength – and artistry – in numbers
Boys be Good: Tucker
(Photo by Todd Franson)
MW: How do you respond to the notion that everyone’s an artist now? Everyone. You can buy Brushes for your iPhone and paint like a master. You can take a picture with Instagram and apply a filter for a dazzling effect. Everyone can shoot video and cut together a movie. Everyone is an artist now, potentially. Does that diminish what genuine artists do in any way? Does it distill your purpose?
CUNETTO: The really good work comes when individuals are able to use the tools as tools and not as an accessory. You can use Instagram as a tool and get great images, or you can use a filter on Instagram as your end product. You can use your iPhone to make a movie, and you can use the built-in tools to make it look nice, or you can use that application to make something that transcends the leg up the technology gives you. That’s how art evolves beyond technology.
MW: Don’t you also find it interesting that a hundred years ago this wasn’t the case? Think about it. An artist was an artist. Some people would pick up charcoal and draw and some would just light it. Are we living in a more creative world these days?
TUCKER: I think, yes, we are living in a more creative world. But I’d also say we’re living in a world that’s more accepting of creativity. If you can create a pretty picture that’s one thing, but if you can create a pretty picture that becomes something bigger than just a pretty picture, then it’s something entirely different. Culturally we have expanded creatively, but not necessarily in the amount of artists that we’re putting out.
CUNETTO: Being a human requires – and has required forever – a lot of creativity. But with the Internet and media, visual literacy has increased a great deal. Our ability and desire to create and consume images and sounds has also increased. So there’s a difference between the need to be creative culturally or politically to survive, and the desire to make images to entertain and educate and emote. Those things, I think, have always been there, but they’re magnified because we have so many different strong and diverse tools to do those things with.
I will say, and this is something even I struggle with in my practice, that images seem so instantaneous. You can consume them instantly. But when I’m making images, it takes a lot of fucking work. It takes so much time to render these things, to decide on the colors and the compositions and the forms and the arrangement. It takes a lot of work. And I think artists struggle with the ability to consume images so easily but the difficulty with which you encounter making them.
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