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Part two, sorry. The fact we can come up with two fairly different interpretations of his work, however, I hope can illustrate that there are many ways a piece can affect someone. What is triggering to one, might help another through their trials. Telling someone to keep it to themselves is destructive to the artist, and those that might take comfort, and find empowerment, from seeing another combating their demons. Sorry to add to, I'm sure, a few messages. It's an important subject, for sure.
Being socially aware and keeping art private/tabooing topics are not the same things, and I don’t think I ever said anything that would state the opposite. I completely agree with you. And actually, I never defined the concept of being socially aware at all. So if we’re only talking about the suicide gif case, then being socially aware would be to post a clear trigger warning, that would be fully functional, so that you’ll only see the gif if you make a conscious decision to. In Musa’s case, I saw the gif in my dash among all the other posts, and because I was using the Tumblr app, the gif wasn’t hidden, although I think Musa did hide it in the web version. In the app, it looked like a suicide gif with suicide related tags below. Like hello good morning here’s a cat, here’s a feminist post, here’s a graphic suicide attempt gif. You see the problem here? It’s an app problem.
If you’re going to be public, be socially aware. If you don’t want to be socially aware, don’t go public. There’s an option to post privately, there’s an option to draw things and keep them to yourself, drawings don’t stop existing when they’re not public. Don’t justify or explain your social actions with your ability/freedom to do them — 1) no one ever questioned that, 2) it’s not a valid reason, it’s a condition and 3) it’s irrelevant to the problem. And don’t say that your personal blog isn’t a public space. If other people can see it, it’s a public space, regardless of what you want it to be.
