Tagging art as ‘me’ or ‘kin’

I personally don’t think artists have any right to allow/disallow people to say any specific things about art they release publicly. If you’re putting your work up you’re opening it up to critique, or any other response people have to it, including a kin response.

I say that as an artist myself.

I can understand wanting to disallow it only for the reason that “this is me” might make people think that the art is a commission drawn for them. But if there’s no chance of misunderstanding that, people can say what they like. I can say the Mona Lisa is me but people don’t need to pay attention to that, and no one has to take my claim seriously.

If something is so deeply personal and sensitive, that you can not handle a particular reaction to it, whether its criticism or intimate identification with it, it should only be for you and your friends. You shouldn’t put it up in a public forum if you can’t handle a reaction to it. Once work is public its public. That doesn’t mean people can steal it. But it means they can say what they like about it

With a forum like tumblr, its entirely possible that thousands of thousands of people will see any scrap of art that you post. Someone famous could reblog it and suddenly its on 10k plus dashes, and you have no way to control that. And you have no way to control how those people react to your art.

Honestly, I wish tumblr had a friends-lock mechanism, or a group mechanism like LJ used to so we COULD have private/gated communities for smaller distribution. But until that happens, tags are public, and anything posted to them is posted in a public forum, for public consumption.

Saying someone can’t tag your art a certain way is like  like making a tv show or commercial, and saying people can’t say what they want about it. Just because its probably smaller scale doesn’t change it. Just because you didn’t get paid to draw it doesn’t change that.

Honestly with all the hateful remarks Ive gotten about my art in the past, I can certainly understand wanting more control over your work, but I personally don’t think its either feasible, or in the long run, desirable to control reaction to public works. Toward that way lies censorship.

That being said, you don’t have to be *happy* about anything someone says about your art, either. But you can’t stop them.