WAY L A N D’ S T I K TO K K I NG Mr. Behm Finds Online Audience
Andrew McDonnell H`20 English teacher In the earliest days of social media, the self-deprecating way of saying you were popular online while not wildly influential in your day-today life was to state, “I’m huge on the Internet.” Online fame was the sort of insubstantial notoriety that rarely meant anything in the real world. The line between that day-to-day and the virtual has grown increasingly fuzzy, though. Students at Wayland are more likely to rattle off the names of YouTubers, gamers, and social media stars than they are to know more than five film actors. Thus it is nearly surreal to discover a rising social media star on Wayland’s faculty. Justin Behm, Wayland’s artist-in-residence and co-chair of the fine arts department, opened a TikTok account in mid-June. Students had been encouraging him to join the short-form video social network since December, but as he recalled, his response was the reflexive one of most adults encouraged to join a new online sensation. “No,” he recalls saying, “TikTok is garbage.” But then around February, he started enjoying art and music videos he found there, and in June, looking for a creative outlet during pandemic-induced isolation, the art teacher opened an account and began posting videos as he sculpted and threw pottery in the Wayland art studio.
Four months later, his videos have over ten million views and his channel has 134,000 subscribers. It is gratifying to see someone as talented as Behm discover a new audience for his artwork. His pottery is unbelievably intricate, often combining elements of coral growth into disparate objects and human 7
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figures. In his words, his art explores “the power of imperfections and spontaneity as well as man and his ability to transcend his own limitations.” On his TikTok, he continues this artistic exploration, but he is also clearly having fun. In addition to showcasing the creative process and skill required to compose his trademark coralloid pieces, he takes audience requests to sculpt everything from “the smallest mug possible” to “the largest mug possible” to clay figures of popular cartoon characters. He also composes video responses to a variety of questions. One viewer asked Behm, who was born without a right hand, to sculpt his “missing” hand. Obligingly, he did so, only to realize that he had accidentally made himself a second left hand. The video concludes with Behm laughing riotously at his own mistake. It garnered 750,000 views. The popularity of that video and some of his other lighthearted
