gloamingdaydream

1. Tell me how you first got into the artstagram community.

Eli : Hmmm, I’d say it was around 2020ish. But that was far less ‘artstagram’ and more ‘rapstagram”. I was really into Shawn Cee and Fantano, and as I got deeper into rap, I forayed into looing for hip-hop pages on Instagram. Some of the first pages I distinctly remember are hip hop district and smuckersbytyler. I actually made a rap account with a buddy during Covid, called goodkidsmaadreviews. Pretty garbage account, but everyone starts somewhere. Eventually I found Mark (RTW), and from there found Lirish and Bird and many others in the community. I remember connecting with Evan (Cracksinmyvinyls) in 2022-2023ish, and he became my first friend in the community. From there I got added to “The Ulysses Council” with you, Oisin, Gose, and Paul. Eventually I got added to Valid Chat and the rest is kind of history. It’s fun to reminisce on all of this. It’s weird to think that all of these different people helped introduce me to this world of art and now I talk to many of them daily and have made some real friends along the way.

Elliott: For me, my interest in it was born out of the COVID-era RapTok community that got my taste out of the ‘nothing but Lil Uzi’ phase. One TikTok account in particular that I liked named ElPsCousin / unrealbybladee (@gabesartlog on IG) made the switch over to Instagram and checking his page out led me to a bunch of other amazing accounts. I eventually started blowing up @rapthoughtworld’s DMs, before he added me to a chat in 2022 where I met some of the people I still talk to today. I don’t know if I’d really say I’m “in the community,” given that I don’t have a dedicated account for art where I post reviews or my thoughts, but just getting to talk to people who are so passionate about it every day is so wonderful.

2. What is your current artistic philosophy? What role did the community play in shaping it?

Eli: I’m not entirely sure if I have a distinct artistic philosophy because I think art serves a broad spectrum of purposes. I think in a nutshell, art exists to reach beyond ourselves. But I also think art is special when it reach deep within ourselves, so like idk. I love the Baldwin quote that says, “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.” I think art is one of the only vessels where true empathy and understanding can be achieved (reference dissolving boundaries, AT fields, etc.). But I also think art is at its best when it creates the unconceivable; I couldn’t explain exactly why Helpless Child is one of the best songs ever, but I am also extremely sure that it is. It is divine in ways that I couldn’t adequately explain.

The community has played a pretty instrumental role in shaping my outlook on art. It’s essentially responsible for my entry point and the vast majority of the works I choose to engage with come from the community’s (particularly Woke members) recommendations. Even if I were to say all of my opinions on what makes good art are not informed by the community at all (which would be a lie), the works I experience are informed by trusting the perspective of the community I choose to surround myself in.

Elliott: I don’t really know if I have one, at least not concretely. I’ve said before that art is the circumvention of individuality through shortcuts, the opportunity to step into someone else’s lived experience and understand their consciousness, but I don’t really know to what extent that defines what art is good. I don’t think I ever want to define what makes art good, because that would force me to re-evaluate it later when I (hopefully) find something that I know is good that doesn’t conform to my “criteria”. I want to let art be art and try and meet it where it stands.

3. What made you agree to do this interview? And what made you want to make a co interview instead of a singular one?

Eli: Interviews are fun. I like talking and figuring out what I think. I often don’t know my thoughts on things until I begin to verbalize them so interviews are an efficient means of helping me figure out what I think.

How could I not want to do a co-interview with Elliott Russo? The Woke has decidedly said that they can’t really tell us apart, and I find myself sometimes feeling the same. Our souls have really begun to merge as our boundaries have dissolved and we form one being.

Jokes aside, Elliott has become a close friend of mine over the past several months (?), idk I’m bad with time. It’s a little crazy for me to say that because I don’t think I ever would have considered an internet friend a true friend as I have a pretty high threshold for what I would consider a friend. But beyond similar perspectives on art and life, we have gotten close and had pretty personal conversations. He’s become someone who is really important to me and that I’m really blessed to have as a part of my life. We actually met irl back in October, making him the first person in the community that I actually met. And he passed the irl vibe check and it wasn’t weird or awkward at all! I guess I’m kinda just using this question as a way of explaining why Elliott is important to me, but yea he’s a genuinely awesome dude and I’m happy our paths crossed. We will be getting quite fucked up come the Boston Marathon in April!

Elliott: Eli shot me a text asking me if I wanted to do one with him. That was good enough for me, I didn’t think too hard about it. I guess on the co-interview part, if we were gonna do one it was always gonna be together, people literally joke about us being the same person. We pretty much agree on everything, we’ve met in real life, and I talk to him literally every single day. I don’t think there’s a single discernible difference between us to most of the community. It would feel weird doing one of us without the other.

4. What would you define as an artist? Would you consider yourself one?

Eli: An artist is anyone who creates art.

I don’t think I am one. It’d be cool if I was. I like to think there’s some degree of art in the way I write about the things I love, but no I wouldn’t say I’m an artist.

Elliott: Same as before, I don’t want to place a limit on who is or isn’t an artist. Far from me to tell someone they’re not an artist. But for the sake of making this somewhat interesting, I guess if I were to start with something and chisel away at it, the first definition I would start with is “someone who expresses themselves creatively”. But then I would say that not all artists either end up expressing themselves, nor do they end up doing so creatively, but because bad artists are still artist, we need to make room for them. So then we’ve got “someone intending to express themselves through a form, regardless of outcome”. How that ends up delineating itself from something like philosophy … I don’t know. Maybe philosophy is just uncreative art.

Anyhow, whatever an artist is, I definitely wouldn’t categorize myself as one. I’ve never really had any desire to write about my experiences, because, right now, I’m just focused on living them.

5. Same question but for art critics.

Eli: An art critic is anyone who intentionally critiques art.

Idk if I’d consider myself one. I guess by my definition Id probably have to say yes. But I also don’t take myself super seriously. I like writing about art I love because I love the art, not because I want to be some kind of arbiter of truth.

Elliott: This is a much easier one, which I guess means I have a more boring answer. A critic, in my mind, has two goals: to ascertain quality and to communicate it. Anyone who does that is a critic, regardless of how seriously they take that task or how good they are at it. In this way, I’m one of them.

6. What is your fondest moment with art?

Eli: The most potent memory I have with art was an extremely emotional time in my life when I listened to Aeroplane and it clicked as the best album of all time for me. I’m not going to go into detail about what was going on in my life in that moment, but it was extremely cathartic.

I vividly remember bawling my eyes out in the shower about 30 minutes after I finished Ithaca from Ulysses.

Elliott: I’ll say when In the Aeroplane Over the Sea finally made sense to me in March 2022. I was listening to it obsessively trying to figure out why everyone thought it was anything more than the weird album about missing Anne Frank, and one day, it finally all made sense. That was nice.

7. Is there anything you’d like to talk about that I haven’t brought up?

Eli: Everyone should read Moby Dick. I’ll be done in the next couple weeks and it may be the greatest ever work of art.

Read more, listen more, think more. Art is one of the most powerful things in the world, and I just want everyone to be moved by it to the degree I have. Art and friendship are the two things that enrich my life the most, so I think everyone should art and friendshipmaxx.

Elliott: Nah.