For Private Viewing Only:
what happens to the art that no one sees?

For the first few years of art school, I had an Instagram account dedicated exclusively to my work. This was presented to me as a practical necessity. If you wanted to be an artist, you needed a website, an Instagram, some kind of living portfolio that could prove you were continuously making things. I liked it at first. I liked that my friends all over the country could see my work as soon as I finished it.

But eventually the audience started arriving too early. I would be halfway through a painting and already imagining the photograph of it. I thought about whether the composition would read clearly on a phone screen, whether the colors would catch someone’s attention as they scrolled. None of this was particularly conscious. I did not stand in front of a blank canvas and ask myself what my followers wanted. But their imagined response was undeniably on my mind. At some point I realized I was making paintings partly for their eventual documentation. The work had acquired a second life before its first one was even finished.

So I stopped posting most of it, and what surprised me was how strange that felt. There is something almost perverse now about making something with no intention of showing it to anyone. It feels similar to traveling somewhere beautiful and taking photographs you never post, or hosting a party where everyone looks wonderful and somehow nobody takes a picture. Nothing is actually missing. The event happened. The painting exists. And yet there can be a sense that an opportunity has been wasted.

This impulse is not limited to art. We photograph meals before eating them. We record concerts we are standing inside. Even hobbies that seem defined by their privacy acquire an audience eventually: the journal becomes a Substack, the knitting becomes an Etsy shop, the reading list becomes Goodreads, the morning run becomes a map. The distinction between having a life and producing evidence of one has become very thin.

For most of human history, most beauty disappeared without documentation. Someone arranged flowers on a table and nobody photographed them. Someone spent an afternoon choosing exactly what to wear to dinner and no archive preserved the result. Bedrooms were decorated, cakes elaborately iced, letters written, paintings made and hung in houses where perhaps twenty people would ever see them. These things did not necessarily feel incomplete because they failed to survive.

Art has always had an audience problem, but the problem used to be different.

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, the overwhelming majority of which were never published during her lifetime. Her work was not entirely private, she circulated poems among friends and correspondents, and the exact extent to which she desired publication remains contested, but the audience she actually possessed was extraordinarily small compared with the one that eventually inherited her. After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered the manuscripts that would form the basis of Dickinson’s posthumous reputation.

Hilma af Klint took the delay even further. Beginning in the early twentieth century, she produced enormous abstract paintings decades before abstraction became canonized through artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian. She showed some conventional work publicly, but much of the radical work for which she is now famous remained largely unseen. Before her death in 1944, she stipulated that much of the work should remain unseen for twenty years after her death. Her paintings would not receive a major exhibition until decades later.

Both stories are tempting because they seem to offer us an almost impossibly romantic alternative to contemporary creative life: the artist making without reception, protected from the contaminating gaze of the audience.

But that is not quite what happened.

Dickinson sent poems to other people. Af Klint imagined her paintings installed in an elaborate temple that was never built. Their work was withheld, but it was not imagined as permanently invisible. Perhaps the strange thing about their work is not that it lacked an audience. It is that the audience could arrive later. Creation and reception didn’t have to happen in the same afternoon. That distance is increasingly difficult to maintain now. Making something and showing it have collapsed into adjacent steps: make, photograph, upload, refresh. A painting can begin accumulating judgments before the paint has dried. A sentence can have readers before its writer has decided how they feel about it. Visibility becomes part of the creative process itself. This matters because being seen does not simply happen to art after it is finished. It can change the thing being made.

The moment we imagine another person looking at something, we begin trying to look through their eyes. We ask whether the reference will be understood, whether the sentiment will seem excessive, whether the image is flattering, whether the joke will land. We borrow the values of the audience and use them to inspect our own work.

Sometimes this is useful. Other people save us from self-indulgence. An audience can demand clarity where we have mistaken obscurity for depth. Art is communication, at least some of the time, and communication requires the possibility of being understood. But privacy allows something else.

When nobody is going to see a painting, it can be ugly for longer. It can fail without becoming evidence of failure. It can contain a private reference that would be tedious to explain. It can be sentimental, embarrassing, technically unsuccessful, obsessive, derivative, cruel, unfinished. It does not have to justify itself immediately. The same is true of writing.

There are things I write that I know I should probably never publish. Stories involving people who did not volunteer to become material. Things about exes and difficult relatives. Entire essays whose strongest sentences depend on somebody else’s worst day. Sometimes the ethical problem could be solved fairly easily. Change a name. Remove a detail. Wait several years. Let everyone involved become sufficiently distant versions of themselves. There is a seductive thought that follows: the work could be good if I were only willing to be worse. So I leave it alone.

For a long time, this bothered me. An unpublished essay felt stranded somewhere between writing and diary entry. If nobody ever encountered it, what exactly had I made? The internet has encouraged a peculiar answer to this question. It tells us, quietly and repeatedly, that making something is only the first half of an action. The second is making it visible. Perhaps this is why secrecy now feels slightly unnatural. A secret is information without circulation. It violates the logic of a system built to move everything outward. But maybe circulation is not what gives a thing its reality.

There is an intimacy created by withholding. A painting nobody else sees remains uncorrected by anyone else’s interpretation. A sentence left unpublished belongs only to the person who wrote it. A beautiful dinner without a photograph does not become content later. It disappears into the people who were there. This is not necessarily purer. Privacy is not automatically profound. Most things nobody sees are probably nobody’s loss. And truly audience-less art may not exist anyway. A diary has at least one reader: the self who returns to it later. A private painting anticipates the future person who might uncover it in an attic. Even destruction creates an imagined witness; burning the letter only matters because somebody could have read it. Perhaps every secret contains the outline of a listener.

Dickinson had correspondents. Af Klint had the future. The work I refuse to post still contains the awareness that it could be posted. Once an audience becomes imaginable, it may be impossible to remove them completely. But there is still a difference between imagining an audience and surrendering something to one. Withholding creates time. It gives the thing a period in which it can exist before it begins being interpreted, measured, praised, misunderstood, reposted, ignored. It allows the maker to encounter the work before learning how everybody else encounters it.

Maybe this is what we have lost more than privacy itself: latency. A period when something has been made but has not yet been disclosed. The painting in the studio. The photograph sitting in the camera roll. The paragraph no editor has read. The party nobody documented. The beautiful thing that happened and then ended without leaving behind proof. A secret nobody hears does not disappear. For a little while, it belongs entirely to the person keeping it.