Putting the 🫀 in Art

The art of personal branding without hating yourself

Still from a short movie “Cold and Silent, like a heart” I made with Francisco García Nava

I, like you, have judged people for their branding. You know who I’m talking about. People whose email signature might as well be a full CV. People who use language like “award-winning (fill-in-the-blank).” People who manage to fit every accomplishment they’ve ever had in the 220 characters allotted to their LinkedIn header. People who are on LinkedIn at all. These efforts feel corporate. Trying too hard. Desperate.

Conversely, I have judged myself for being too corporate, square, and blatantly self-promotional. Especially after seeing the IG profile of an artist I admire (one, for example, with over 150K followers and a resume I would kill for) with a bio that only reads: Artist. Or sometimes nothing at all. How did they rise to such heights without the trappings of self-aggrandizement?

The answer usually is: cool factor. Their brand is anti-brand. Too cool to appear like they are trying, even though they probably manage their brand more obsessively and tyrannically than the biggest tech bro on LinkedIn. That isn’t a judgment even though it sounds like one. Really what you should read between my lines is envy.

Earlier this week I attended a personal branding seminar courtesy of my literary agent. The seminar was solely for authors on his roster. I was excited because it was free and only an hour and my husband agreed to feed and dress our daughter that morning so I could attend. What I learned is not as important as the fact that I attended at all. For at least an hour, instead of passively dealing with my branding anxiety by judging myself and everyone around me, I grabbed it by its ram horns and rode it.

My biggest takeaway from the seminar was that my personal slogan (“putting the art in vulner-art-bility”) sucked. I learned this two ways. One by saying my slogan out loud and stumbling over “vulner-art-bility” as though it were some latinate terminology for an obscure eel species. I couldn’t believed I’d never said “vulner-art-bility” out loud and realized how clunky it was. This despite proudly featuring the motto on my IG bio for several months.

When I first conceived the “vulner-art-bility” slogan, I remember chuckling to myself. How clever to invent a saying—and a word to boot—as if it were something people said all the time, when it definitely wasn’t. Hindsight, however, is 20/20. Now I can see that my cumbersome slogan had a bad, subtly self-sabotaging attitude, which stemmed from my resistance to have a slogan at all. After all, having a slogan hadn’t been my idea. Melinda Hill, the comedian and social media coach I worked with for three months last fall, encouraged me to think of one and add it to my IG bio. I rolled my eyes when she suggested it—slogans were for diaper or soda companies, for fast food chains, not serious artists and writers like me—then tried to think of a catchphrase that wouldn’t make me hate myself. I was paying Melinda too much money to not follow her advice. “Putting the art in vulner-art-bility” was the best I could come up with. A slogan that mocked itself with its not-a-thing thingness.

The second way I learned that my slogan sucked was from my break out room companion—a middle aged author with glasses and wild hair who self-identified as a Jewish contrarian—who flatly told me he “didn’t get it.”

Rethink slogan — more readable, I wrote on a yellow legal pad following this un-subtle assessment. Then it came to me: “Putting the heart in art.” I did not come up with this slogan. It was a phrase Melinda had rattled off back in September after I’d describe my larger mission as an artist and writer to connect with others through vulnerability. I’d cringed after she’d said it, deflecting her suggestion with an inauthentic smile. “Putting the heart in art” was too cheesy. It rhymed for god’s sake. And it was too earnest, which automatically rendered it not smart or cool. I felt this way despite the fact that I am hopelessly, batshit earnest.

By the end of the personal branding seminar, something had shifted. I was willing to let go of being a smart ass around branding. Of trying to be both uber-professional and too cool for any of it, which ultimately made my branding efforts clumsy and illegible—particularly when it came to slogans.

The next day I updated my IG profile.

Putting the 🫀in art 🥀