The feeling was mutual
I set out to collect other people's art. I did not expect so many of them to turn around and collect mine. More than twenty artists in this gallery have, and they said so out loud.
Gul Yildiz →
There is a moment that keeps happening that I still have not gotten used to. I collect an artist I admire, and a while later my own notifications light up because that same artist has just collected me back. It is not supposed to work that way when you think of yourself as the person on the buying side of the table. But this is a smaller world than the outside imagines, and the table has two sides.
What they said
When it happens, people tend to say it plainly, and I kept every one. An1 wrote, Thank you so much for giving this piece a safe home, Aaron. Ceren posted, SOLD. Blooming Decay is now owned by @pengwinpants. I feel very honored. Thank you, friend. Kristopher Shinn, deadpan: Absolute chad, @pengwinpants, already collected 4 wonderful pieces from Still Kyoto. aida wrote, Number 19 collected. Happy to see my work in @pengwinpants's collection. mizuyokaii thanked me under a nickname I did not know I had: My Dark Comet, My Shadow has just been collected by @pengwinpants. Thank you so much, Flynn Rider. lorenipsum: High by the Beach, and many editions, collected by dear @pengwinpants. Means a lot. rocketgirl told her followers an oil painting was heading my way for my birthday.
And then it reversed
The stranger, better half is what happened when I started making my own small editions, the SERENIA drops on objkt. The artists I had spent a year collecting showed up in my mint feed. DeltaSauce collected twilight_falls_01 and willow_bridge_01. Gul Yildiz took two editions of Crimson Shimmer, then Florida Sunset, then mossy_grove. An1, Ken Matsumura, boredjosei, monikanft, 1dontknows. People whose walls I had studied were now hanging mine.
Why this is here
I do not think this reciprocity is a footnote. It is the actual shape of the thing. This was never a one-way market of me pointing a wallet at strangers. It was a circle of people making work and trading it and telling each other, in public, that it mattered. That record scatters and disappears on the timeline. Here it stays. More than twenty artists collected me back, and they said why. I wanted their words kept next to the art, because the feeling was mutual, and that is the part worth remembering.
