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Exclusive Interview with Award-Winning Artist and Actor Dave Vescio – Part 6 | Antisocial Media
In Part 6 of our exclusive interview, we delve deeper into the multifaceted career of Dave Vescio, an award-winning artist and actor celebrated for his provocative work and candid opinions.
PART 5: Exclusive Interview with Dave Vescio – The Journey Never Ends
Dave’s regular interactions with his social media followers, where he often addresses individual inquiries and even criticism, piqued our interest in his views about the potentially dangerous influence of social media on the art world. True to form, Dave shared his refreshingly unfiltered and thought-provoking perspectives, challenging conventional views and sparking meaningful reflection among our readers.
“Social media industry needs to be *unionized just like the film & TV industry* and everyone who creates video content needs to get paid for every view they get because the social media companies are all getting paid for every view you get. That’s for sure. They’re slowly becoming trillion-dollar companies because of us all.”
You have many fans with whom you engage regularly on social media, demonstrating humility by responding to individual inquiries and even criticism. Is social media important for you? What role has it played in your art career, and what are your thoughts on its significance for contemporary artists?
I have always felt that when someone takes their precious time to comment on one of your social media posts then you should say thank you for that. I do that with a like and/or with a comment. The same when someone DMs me, I will DM something back to them. This is no different when someone smiles and says “hello” to you in public, you smile back and say “hello” back.
But I’ve also realized over the past 17 years of doing social media (I was one of the first ones to use social media aka MySpace back in the day) that most people do not like, comment, or even DM back. It’s a strange world we live in. Strange indeed!
As for your questions, yes, I do believe social media was very important for emerging artists and maybe mid-career artists to make themselves known to the world. To my knowledge the first ones to use MySpace were musicians and standup comics.
I learned how to use MySpace because a musician taught me the way and then a standup comic took me to the next level. So, social media totally got the word out about who I was as an actor to tons of people, and it helped get my film & TV acting projects seen by the masses all around the world as well.
Now, is it significant for contemporary artists today or for that fact any kind of artist? Before the covid lockdowns, I would have said a “YES!” to that. Today. I am very, very wary of social media these days. For four primary reasons:
1. Cancel culture has destroyed a lot of artists’ careers on social media. I know lots of artists who had to take down their art because it breaks some kind of code of conduct. What are we living in a Puritan culture all over again? Have these people not read “Fahrenheit 451” at all? Especially, since, we all continuously see real life porn or real-life graphic images of these wars in Ukraine and Palestine all over social media these days. To me it feels like social media has declared a war on artists.
“Canceling artists is NOT freedom”
By saying, you either create this kind of art that *we approve of* or face the consequences of losing your social media accounts for good. That’s a very, very scary road that these social media companies are traveling on. They are literally re-educating (aka brainwashing) our culture into something else. No different than the past regimes did when they cancelled artists in their own time periods. Canceling artists is NOT freedom. It’s the opposite of freedom.
2. Generative AI (GenAI). GenAI is totally stealing art across this whole world. Scraping websites of artistic content, and then, convincing governments to pass laws to make this all legal. In the juried art show circuit, most of the artists that have mid-level careers have literally stopped posting content on their social media pages in the past two years. I suspect it’s because of GenAI. GenAI is a threat to most 2D artists these days.
“GenAI is a threat to most 2D artists”
3. Reddit admitted this past February of selling their users’ generated content to a large AI company. I suspect every single social media company will do the same (if they haven’t already) or create their own AI company with our generated content instead. So, I truly believe if you’re an artist who doesn’t want their art scraped to the highest bidder. It’s probably time for you to break away from these social media sites for good. We do not live in the same world when social media was created in the early 2000s for the innovators and the early adopters to use and slowly make themselves known to the world.
4. Last, but not least… social media is getting us all to work for FREE for them and making them tons of money off our hard work. All I see every single day is social media users spending hours per day to create video content for their friends and family to see. In Hollywood, all of us actors get paid to act in created films, TV, and video content.
“Social media is getting us all to work for FREE for them”
We social media users don’t get a dime for our video creations. But the social media companies are getting richer and richer by the day by placing advertisements next to our created video content (no different than what network TV does on TV channels). But those cast and crew members of those TV shows and even the cast & crew members of those commercials are all getting paid to work.
So, this social media industry needs to be *unionized just like the film & TV industry* and everyone who creates video content needs to get paid for every view they get because the social media companies are all getting paid for every view you get. That’s for sure. They’re slowly becoming trillion-dollar companies because of us all.
So, my days on social media are slowly coming to an end. I suspect I will be off social media for good within the next year or two. It’s not the same as when I joined MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter over 15 years ago. It’s a totally different beast today! The rules have changed horribly and not for the best. Not even close.
What currently inspires your art?
Life, death, decay, & rebirth. That has always inspired my art for the past 25+ years. That has always been my *through line* for all the different artistic mediums that I have chosen to study and become a professional at. Culinary art & pastry art deals with killing plants & animals and reshaping it into a rebirth (which in an essence gives us humans life again).
When I was a TV photojournalist for CBS News, I specialized at covering natural disasters & manmade disasters, and when I was a film & TV actor, I specialized at playing movie villains. And now, as a contemporary artist, my art deals with life, death, decay, and rebirth as well. It’s what I have been searching for ever since I saw my first dead body at the age of 4 and I saw a motorcycle rider die right in front of me when I was 7 years old. And I have always asked “Where did they go? They were just right here, alive and kicking.”
So, I am always trying to figure out the ancient questions that we humans have always asked ourselves. Where do we come from? Why are we here? And where do we go next? That has always inspired my WHY? for doing art and I suspect it always will. By finding new artistic mediums or new artistic genres to work in to find more meaning to it all, and maybe one decade I’ll finally have all the answers to my most important questions of all.
What also inspires me is the competition of it all. I LOVE to compete. If I’m not competing against myself or against others, I do not feel good about myself. I feel like a slacker. I feel lazy. And it’s not ALL about winning. I can feel good losing to others as well. It’s all about “Did I give my best effort with the information that I had at hand?” If not, then I got to do better or get better information, so, I can do better next time around.
“I LOVE to compete”
And the easiest way for me to get better information is to study the best of the best. The ones I admire the most. By putting my art next to theirs and seeing what’s the difference between the two of ours. I learn so, so much by doing this, so, I constantly do this. So, that totally inspires me to create more and more as well.
The last thing that inspires me is to shake things up. To try out new ideas and see if I like it or not. Magic tends to happen when you’re willing to try new things in new ways. I have accidentally come across my current way of doing things because it was just an accident when I first tried it out. I got an idea, tried it, and “wallah”, magic happens! 
Do you spend most of your time in the city or in nature?
Since I live in Hollywood which is pretty smack dab in the middle of Los Angeles County, I must travel by car for at least an hour or two to just get myself out of this gigantic county. LA County is the largest county in the United States. It’s about 40 miles by 40 miles in length and we have about 10 million people living in it. There are only ten states in the United States that have a bigger population than LA County. So, it takes a while to truly be out in nature.
Sure, we got beaches and mountains. But those tend to be covered by tons of people. When I say the word *nature* I think of national parks in the middle of nowhere or anything that is nature-wise in the middle of nowhere. That’s quite a distance for us LA people.
So, I spend most of my time in a city surrounded by concrete in every direction (aka the concrete jungle) and I try to go out into nature and spend anywhere from four to six weeks per year in the middle of nowhere.
Truly allow myself to feel the Earth beneath my feet and see nothing in sight but God’s creations in all different directions from north, south, east to west and up into the sky and deep out into the Universe as well. It’s a fantastic feeling indeed! But I would say most of my contemporary art is created in cities, towns, or ghost towns. The rest is created in the middle of nowhere.
Can you describe your experience collaborating with other artists or creative professionals?
My introduction to contemporary art was with the blue-chip artist Paul McCarthy. Shoot, he’s the reason why I became a contemporary artist. Paul totally opened my eyes up to what film art and art in general can be. Paul totally pushes art into the outer limits. The guy is totally fearless, and he is a genius as well. There’s a reason why he is a blue-chip artist and why the rest of us artists are not. He was born to do it, and I respect the hell out of him!
As you know, before I became a contemporary artist on my own in the summer of 2020, all the other artistic mediums I ever worked in were all collaborated art forms. That’s all I ever knew to do was to create with others. But, when I started to create my own contemporary art, I decided to do it all on my own. I want to create art, that I want to create, and then, find people in this world who truly love what I create.
“Freedom is the most important thing to me in the whole wide world! Without it I rather be dead…”
Will I ever collaborate again? Most likely I will. But only time will tell… But, right now, I LOVE creating my own artworks on my own. It’s very, very liberating and it totally feels like freedom to me. Freedom is the most important thing to me in the whole wide world! Without it I rather be dead and trust me I don’t want to be dead just yet. Many more decades to go! 
Part 7 is Coming Soon!
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