And that could hurt his bottom line. People there for the drama may not be paying customers. They may essentially be internet trolls.
That's the magic of the "attention economy" - the people that get emotionally invested in the dramas surrounding you are better than "paying customers", because they check their brains out and switch to ingroup/outgroup mode - at which point you can sell them absolutely anything whatsoever. In contrast, paying customers are just annoying - they have opinions, and aren't going to give your person the time and sustained attention - the kind of following that both you and the platform you're on can effectively monetize through friction (i.e. continued ad exposure).
Right now this seems to be the generic recipe for printing money on social media:
1. Become an influencer and work at it until existing influencers treat you as one of their own;
2. Start engaging in the semi-regular, petty, totally not scripted fights with your fellow influencers;
3. Sign a deal for putting your name on some random bullshit commodity product, like idk. eyeliners or perfumes or makeup kits, and watch money roll in.
4. Optional: bonus points if you can turn that deal info a story of two influencers having a falling out over who gets paid for the bullshit product from point 3. You can milk that kind of thing for years, all the while selling your audience the same or different flavor of bullshit with your name on it.
> In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all.
edit: oops I see in your other comment you quoted that part!
What's more amazing to me is that the artist doesn't even seem to understand what a critic _does_ - like what is the critic doing? He's not "gatekeeping" (what gate? the artist is famous, getting rich, and has a gallery show!) and not jealous or a 'hater'.
Like I understand that artists traditionally dislike critics, for obvious reasons, but usually they know the purpose of criticism. As the author says he is trying to both put the art in context of other art and to consider how social media figures into the art.