Hey Tamsin!! I am very happy this resonated with you :) I totally get what you mean about art and ideas, it seems there is a lot of confusion on this field in the art world. I always thought that artists who choose conceptual art as their medium are artists who simply don't have the craft or skills, hahaha. Obviously it's not true, but I just wonder why anybody with the skill would chose to wipe it out of their lives and practices, if it's the most beautiful part of the arts to practice it. At the same time, it seems there has been a bit of gatekeeping in relation to ideas from conceptual artists: the fact that you prioritize ideas over perceptible material elements doesn't mean that the artists who prioritize perceptible material elements over ideas in their work don't have any idea behind. A landscape is also an idea. A copy from reality can be also an idea, and a pure abstraction can have an idea behind too! I just hope you never give up to the world of ideas, either to the perceptible material art :) Cheers!
We too struggle big time with two of the points you raise in your text: immediacy and content. Too much of the first and too little of the latter.
Those notions however seem to be baked into the current (contemporary) art ecosystem. Galleries want shows of new artists to sell out immediately and push the prices up towards more profitable levels. Generally, that implies work that is less 'difficult', images that are understood at first sight, at the expense of what you call 'art' and 'beauty'. Many artists are happy to comply. Last year, a gallery here in Brussels sold out the first ever show of a 28-year old artist on opening night. The cheapest price for a painting was 35k€. About 3 works in the show were indeed spectacular. Most of them were just average.
You mention the difficulties of representing art on Instagram.
We're struggling with another IG trend that you haven't mentioned: Instagramable shows and the enshittification of exhibitions. Kusama is an amazing artist (especially early in her career) but I have developed a polka dot and infinity room allergy. James Ensor is not my favourite artist, but he's an exceptional post-impressionist painter. The show in Antwerp was so much about 'experiencing' the visit that you lost sight of the art. The result: 450k visitors...
To end on a positive note, I see a lot more focus—both from collectors and leading galleries—on older artists and the estates of deceased artists. I have a feeling that collectors are seeing the brevity and financial risk of 'Instagram art' as well.
Thank you for your attention and insight, I really appreciate your comment. I know very well what you mean about entshitification of art shows and horribly curated exhibitions. I agree 100%, and as a viewer you have to constantly watch out which galleries you end up visiting. Some of them have fallen into this immediacy trap and the result is palpable, although you need artistic sensibility to spot it. And I think they fool many viewers... Well, audience is also to blame. Everyone seems to be in this loop and quite comfortably enjoying their consumerism. As for Yayoi.... My god, she is such a good artist but the Ives Saint Laurent facade was simply insulting... I wonder how much she personally contributed to it, or if they just set it up telling her -trust me, this is the good shit nowadays. It was tacky as fuck, stupid bullshit and fastfood art. It's interesting how you can enshitify any kind of great art into that tacky and cheap look. As for galleries as speculator agents I haven't mentioned it on the essay cause there will be so much to say and such a long text, but 100% agree. The truth is, everyone wants to get really rich really fast now, but whatever goes uphill so fast, will have a crushing downhill around the corner. Sometimes they bring artists to exhaustion, and suddenly they are not the market's darling anymore. It's the end of their careers, they should watch out cause in a matter of ten years many times they simply go back to zero. I would love to write about all this things too. Stay tuned and again thanks for reading!!
Art as Commodity is always a problem. Then we get to what is even currently being defined as art. If one were to actually break down the attributes of most of what floods the feeds? And the worst part is they are sure what they are doing is ‘art’ and there’s no one can tell them it’s not.
Basically it’s Art by Populism. Just like it’s turning into governance by populism.
@Rogue Art Historian plz chime in as a historian here. We really have nothing in art history that compares to the ‘👍🏻👎🏻’ meter for setting the quality of aesthetic— or do we? My first thought is the gladiators being given the thumb to determine their fate in the ring of lions. But on second thought I am thinking back to the Academy which set standards— to a degree by popular opinion—or was it royal decree?
Art by populism is a great definition. Now, wasn't pop art originally an attempt to make art popular, meaning, for the regular people? There is a question going on here about intellectual elite vs. economical elite. Does popular art become populist art when it faces the easy taste of "the people"? What a debate! I want to write about these subjects but for the moment t's a bit mushy in my head.
Agreed there is a lot here to process. Have to break it out into pieces.
Populism ><Pop Art
Let’s start with that and this phrase:
“Making art ‘popular’ and more for the people”
Pop Art was a response to Abstract Expressionism (AE). So once again we see one movement bounce off another—basically what dada was to the intellectualized promise of modernism and rational art. Indeed, to your second point, people were tired of not being ‘intellectual enough’ to ‘understand’ or see the value in AE so Jasper Johns and crew decided to shove commercialism down our throats ‘as art’ and it stuck. If we track all the postwar movements, each of them wants to tear down the limitations and definitions of ‘art’ they had been fed. Pop Art is basically the cherry on top by injecting irony and humor. Art wanting to laugh at itself. This reminds me of The Controversy of the 🍌as Art.
We loop once again. The distance in time between dada and pop is about the same distance in time from pop to the banana. This suggests a cycle of about 50-60 years. If we go back the same amount before dada we hit the cusp of the controversy of Monet rebelling against Realism. So we start to see a half century cycle for revisiting some form of rebellion that turns a page in art history.
All this to say, we can complain about the shallowness of content and definition of art (back to my TikTok article) but we have to admit something is shifting. From 10,000 meters up we can look down to see the needle on the compass is moving. To what? That is the question.
I have my theories. Some of them I begin to work out through my essays. I am always proofing the system to see where it bends. There is no doubt in my mind historians will be pointing back to this decade as the root of the next ‘thing’. The tools are appearing, the practice is ramping up. Remember that experimentation requires trial and error. The messaging systems point toward creatives flexing their muscles amidst craft and commercial enterprisers. My guess is peddlers of some art or another have always existed. Because we only get the narrow view of those who ‘made it’ we really don’t know how flooded the streets were with copycat Vermeers, Pissaros and Picabias who everyone thought were tepid.
Wow Karena, I'll need to reflect on all of this... Very very interesting point, the 50 years shift. I had never noticed it so blatantly. It makes me wonder about so many things. I'm gonna think think think and I'll get back to you, also in relationship with Yayoi Kusama cause she is such a good example of this debate about pop, populism, ethics and aesthetics...
This is such a great comparison. Gladiators facing the 👍🏻/👎🏻 judgment feels eerily close to the algorithm-driven validation of today’s art market. But the Academy? That’s where it gets interesting. It was a mix of royal decree and a self-perpetuating elite dictating taste. The Salon had its own gatekeeping, but even then, populist sentiment (or outrage) played a role; think of the Salon des Refusés and the birth of modernism.
What’s different now is that the algorithm isn’t just the gatekeeper; it is the taste-maker, reinforcing trends based on engagement rather than artistic merit. The Academy at least had a theoretical foundation (however flawed). Now, we’ve got a system where visibility = value, and that’s a very different beast.
But it's only 👍 without the 👎, cause there are not dislikes on Instagram. So even if you are being eaten by lions you may think everything goes perfectly well....😂😂
Wow, while I've been away this has turned into such an interesting discussion!
My interest in art has always been matched by my fascination for its economics. We occasionally buy when we like something, but we don't consider our purchases as investments, nor do we consider ourselves collectors. Other than a short stint as a partner in a gallery, we're not commercially interested either. The business of art is purely an intellectual interest.
If you stick to the rules of supply and demand, art should be free, because there are no limits to its supply. We all know that art is not free, and that—for artists with a certain level of success—supply is artificially limited so that it doesn't meet demand and pushes the prices up. If you want to buy a Claire Tabouret you'll have to smooch for years with Perrotin, buy some lesser known artists, and work your way up to get the chance to buy one of her works. One of the lesser quality works, that is, because the better works are immediately spoken for by earlier buyers.
I don't think the masses decide on anything.
I think that there are 2 main players that decide 👍/👎:
1) the curators of the leading non-profit contemporary art centres such as Wiels, Kunsthalle Zurich, Palais de Tokyo, Pirelli Bicocca, SMAK, PS1... They stick their neck out showing new artists with potential to a select audience. Because there's no immediate commercial objective, artists can go pretty wild within the curator's framework. Interesting stuff.
2) the leading galleries that either pick up artists from the non-profits, or find and promote new artists that produce similar work. This is where art becomes business. From here on, new trends and artists start to trickle down into the middle and lower end of the market.
I think Joe Bradley is a good example: first exposure in 2002 PS1, then a medium sized gallery in NY before moving to Gagosian, Hufkens and now Zwirner.
Joe Bradley lookalike work is everywhere now. Unfortunately, it's often more "content" than quality. As this happens, algorithms start to pick up this trend and spread it even more.
Counter-intuitively, this potentially damaging effect is offset by reducing Bradley's output and exhibitions, while increasing prices.
Everyone's a winner at the top end of the market.
There's no winners at the middle or the bottom.
But art isn't the only segment where this happens...
This is so much of what I have been talking about and feeling lately.
I’m a chef, not a painter, but I feel the same devaluation of my genre of work/craft (let's retire content) on Instagram. I feel strong armed into turning everything into a reel. Your "random splatter" and "acrylic paint drip", is my cheese pull (at its most inoffensive), a manicured hand cracking through chocolate shell into a creamy mason jar of protein packed ovenight oats with ASMR, an extreme closeup food porn shot of something rich and indulgent, or worse, fake indulgent. (Surprise! It’s cottage cheese, collagen, and monk fruit.)
I've been a professional chef for 25 years. When I started on instagram it was sharing a static photo (so I taught myself how to shoot and edit food - which is not something I actually care about as a chef) but didn't mind. I enjoyed connecting with people, sharing recipes and inspiration. Then it became all about the leaving reciprocal "that looks so tasty" type comments for other people to boost your place in the algorythm. The time suck of that is so embarassing in retrospect. Now, it’s about editing, lighting, and producing slick, professional videos just to get a shred of reach. I went to cooking school, not film school. Like you I tried paying for adds a little bit in the begining and got more likes, but nothing of substance in return for my money.
Everyday I want to quit instagram but I keep it as a place for my recipes for the followers who use them. I still try to post now and then, to remind people that I am on Substack where I feel better....
"The best idea is to leave it as a portfolio excerpt and abandon its rotting use. Now my endeavour is to drag all the people I collected there over the years to my newsletter." THIS EXACTLY!!!!
Hello Emily, thanks for your wonderful comment, you made me laugh so much with the cheese!!! My god, what we have to do....🙄 It's simply ridiculous. I find funny this feeling we all have as if this was sudden. But it's been getting worse and worse over the years and we complied enough... I'm just glad I stopped thinking "it's just me", and that everyone needs to talk about it. So here we go, we will find the way to communicate without acrylic dripping and cheese strings! Hahaha. Cheers
Thank you for this. I’m not in the art world, just a beginning painter, but as I became interested in painting, my Instagram feed filled up with artists. After a few months I started to wonder why so much of it left me indifferent. I kept thinking I just wasn’t finding the work that made me actually feel something. I gave up last week and came over here.
Hello Tracy, thanks for your comment. It's difficult to find the community that fits you, especially in such conditions of an app. Substack is definitely warmer, although the art world hasn't arrived just yet. But I believe many artists could benefit from the structure of Substack. Substack is gaining traction since the USA elections. Maybe it's a matter of time that the art world finds it. In any case, on Substack you will find conversation, debates going on. Good luck for your new profile and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :)
Thank you for such a coherent exploration of many of the impact of IG and other social media on art. As a photographer, it feels that these effects are why there is increasing emphasis (perhaps a return to?) on making books, which provide an opportunity to develop a meaningful collection of images contained within a theme or concept that can be enjoyed slowly and repeatedly.
Yes! Thanks for your comment. I have a friend who is a photographer and believes the only way out -or return as you say- to materiality for photography is photo books. In a book you ad other elements to play with, like time, rhythm, seriality.... And slowness as you say. Instagram has been even more harmful for photographers than for painters, at least at the end of the day, I produce a real object with it's materiality. Anyways, I believe photographers should start to print again, I know many of you never stopped it, but I mean... Art needs materiality, in my opinion, something you can see and touch, palpable, real, in the physical world... Thanks for reading!
The same thing, this flattening effect of immediacy, is happening in the world of music. It started before social media, but social media have turbocharged the process. You are right, it rots our brains--literally. Babies raised without complex stimuli literally lose the neural connections necessary to process complex inputs. It's a vicious cycle.
I would love to read about the flattening on music in the last decade, I also got a cook saying with cooking it's the same. it's interesting how artists from other fields are seeing themselves identified with what I say regarding painting, so we are all having the same shitty experience there.. if you write something about this, let me know :)
I agree so much with what you say, and the exact same problems exist in Photography because of Instagram. The platform has basically indoctrinated a whole generation of photographers to go for simpler, minimal, pleasingly aesthetic images, that most turn out to be hollow.
Not to mention this madness about having a “style” so that you are recognisable, which I find boring and repetitive and harmful to the concept of creation.
Hey, thanks!! I would love to read what you have to say about this subject from a photographer perspective, you must suffer Instagram even more than painters. Photography has gone for such a perversed phase...! There's a lot to analyze there. But I didn't feel with enough knowledge about photo to include it in my essay. I hope we can talk and you write about it too :)
I absolutely agree! I’ve always pondered that about style, sometimes feeling inadequate about my work because I try so many different things. It made me feel juvenile because I didn’t have a “style” like what I was seeing others doing. Now I realize it’s what makes my work more interesting. It also drives me crazy to see magazines putting photos on the cover that are just plain awful artistically and don’t even get me started technically. Not to say that a photograph has to be technically sound, but it needs to be balanced artistically in some way to compensate.
Yes! I totally agree, thanks for your comment. First of all it's great that your work is variated and experimental and can be many things with many different "styles", even though IG is not the right platform for it. Second, my god you are so right about magazines covers!! It's as if people who choose them hadn't seen an image in their lives. We might be witnessing a generational jump there too. Sometimes it feels that magazines are run by old people try to play cool and young. Anyways thanks for reading!
Well said and on point. Although…my Italian friends (over 50) still use “bello” and often. Has there been a generational migration from this simple word that fills the mouth so perfectly?
Ja, apparently in Italian bello is used more often than in Spanish, a woman in another comment told me. In Spanish even older generations lost the regular use. Thanks for reading!
Such an honest read. And I couldn’t agree more! My creative language constantly changes and my process is the key to everything, and yet there’s no room for sharing that on instagram. Thank you for sharing your words!
I'm glad it resonated! Yes, if your work changes it's impossible that your profile on Instagram spreads out. Here though is another deal. Thanks for reading, and welcome to Substack :)
I just hit Substack, leaving IG for good, that place is an absolute cage, not a good place for image makers, not anymore, tnkyou for the effort of writing this pice.
Hey Angela, thanks for your comment. I'm glad it resonated. As you see for the amount of comments and likes, many people are thinking this... It's funny how it feels so sudden, although it took us years and years to arrive at this point. Substack is a good place to begin with alternative spaces
It is strange how it seems so sudden. I’ve been feeling this way for years, but I had reluctantly bought into the idea that it was necessary as a place to share my art in this artist as self-marketer era (ugh!) and just couldn’t make the break. It’s become so unbearable though. Now I feel like I have to cleanse and restart my brain after the years of rot so I can get back to real conversations.
Yes, I also had many moments when I questioned it along the way but also thought it was just me. It turns out, everyone is fed up now, so we need to start talking about it now. Yesterday I got into my IG and realized I had 600 posts there... It made me think of the amount of hours I gave to the app, thinking I was giving it to the people. Ugh, so embarrassing now... The good thing is, this is real conversations already :)
Wow, you just wrote about everything I’ve at one stage or another thought about Instagram and the deluge of imagery to be found there.
Everyone is an artist these days it seems, without understanding what an artist actually does. That isn’t to discredit learning artists or defend the traditional gatekeepers (at least social media has dismantled this to some respect: I have no wish to return to the hawking around of my physical portfolio to disinterested commercial gallery directors), rather it’s more a comment on arts education and the way our capitalist society has devalued the arts (except for the top few at the top of the pile).
Hey Greta, thanks for your comment! Yes, we don't want to discredit learning artists, we all are just in this loop of information atomization. Young people just do what young people have to do: look at how it's done in the period they work and do the same. I was also very young when I got my IG account, and copied what needed to be done. And even though I always thought something was strange and missing, some periods of my IG life I thought the problem was me, and the way I do things. So yes, this affects everyone, I just had to write about it cause I had enough. Funny thing is, at this point gatekeepers keep keeping the gate! Hahaha. I'm glad it resonated. Cheers!
I love this article - thank you for articulating these ideas so well. In a way, I feel that Instagram has just intensified what galleries have already been doing for a couple of decades: branding more and more narrowly. if you imagine Picasso transplanted to the 21st century, perhaps he would’ve only got away with one of his ‘periods’ after which his gallery would have said: no, no Pablo we don’t want you to confuse our audience by producing something different, something they’re unfamiliar with. I have friends who are writers - it’s exactly the same in the publishing world: if you’re successful publishing one type of book, they’ll want you to do exactly the same thing. It’s as though they have no courage or vision. The irony is that if you’re unimaginative and risk averse, you often don’t do well commercially in the long run anyway.
Yes!! Thanks for your comment Paul, many galleries push the artist to produce the same over and over because it's liked. However, other better galleries try not to influence the artists in this or that direction. And hey, it can happen in principle, that an artist does something that works very well in sales, but suddenly they get tired and want to do something new for them... It should be respectable. But as you say it's a paradox, because a artist who doesn't evolve doesn't do well in the long term... What a fucking balance! At the end of the day, the artist should be able to say to the gallery look, I do whatever, you try to sell it... That is that. Unfortunately many galleries don't think in a big scope and many artists comply 🤷♀️ I believe the art career is always long term oriented. Anyways thanks for your comment!
As an art historian, I find I’m not interested in what the artist has to say about his/her work. I believe the work must live or die on its own. If I need the artist’s interpretation, the work isn’t successful.
That's a very old fashion and, if I may say, pretty reductionist way to see art, specially contemporary art. "Art speaks for itself" only covers until the end of XIX century, because you are talking about recognizable form. What is a Duchamp artpiece without an explanation? What is the Guernica by Picasso without knowing the context? Just a few black grey and white shapes. I would even go further and say you miss a lot of info about any artwork in any period of art history with this attitude. As an art historian, you should be interested in the story behind the art, being told by the artist or by any other person who analyzes it. If you look at a Da Vinci painting you may recognize the shape of what you are seeing. But only looking at the image without knowing anything else or reading about it you are gonna miss what the artist was up to, who the portrait is, all the symbolism behind, the decisions regarding composition, color, context... In fact, I don't think you look at art history in these terms, if you say you are an art historian. You learnt a great deal about art outside of the canvas in the university. I'm sorry, but it sounds like a learnt sentence "art should speak for itself". We heard it thousands of times, and it seems you haven't ever questioned it. I mean, it's respectable, you do you, but just so you know, you are missing a great deal of what's going on in the arts, being classical, modern or contemporary.
I did not say I don’t want to know the context in which the art was produced. In other words—the history part of art history. Did Duchamp provide an explanation of his urinal? If he did, I missed it. But I’m aware of the political era in which it was created. Guernica was inspired by a specific tragic event, but it can stand for many.
Hey Tamsin!! I am very happy this resonated with you :) I totally get what you mean about art and ideas, it seems there is a lot of confusion on this field in the art world. I always thought that artists who choose conceptual art as their medium are artists who simply don't have the craft or skills, hahaha. Obviously it's not true, but I just wonder why anybody with the skill would chose to wipe it out of their lives and practices, if it's the most beautiful part of the arts to practice it. At the same time, it seems there has been a bit of gatekeeping in relation to ideas from conceptual artists: the fact that you prioritize ideas over perceptible material elements doesn't mean that the artists who prioritize perceptible material elements over ideas in their work don't have any idea behind. A landscape is also an idea. A copy from reality can be also an idea, and a pure abstraction can have an idea behind too! I just hope you never give up to the world of ideas, either to the perceptible material art :) Cheers!
I can't give up, meaning and ideas jump at me from every corner of my art-making world!
Excellent essay, thank you Marina.
We too struggle big time with two of the points you raise in your text: immediacy and content. Too much of the first and too little of the latter.
Those notions however seem to be baked into the current (contemporary) art ecosystem. Galleries want shows of new artists to sell out immediately and push the prices up towards more profitable levels. Generally, that implies work that is less 'difficult', images that are understood at first sight, at the expense of what you call 'art' and 'beauty'. Many artists are happy to comply. Last year, a gallery here in Brussels sold out the first ever show of a 28-year old artist on opening night. The cheapest price for a painting was 35k€. About 3 works in the show were indeed spectacular. Most of them were just average.
You mention the difficulties of representing art on Instagram.
We're struggling with another IG trend that you haven't mentioned: Instagramable shows and the enshittification of exhibitions. Kusama is an amazing artist (especially early in her career) but I have developed a polka dot and infinity room allergy. James Ensor is not my favourite artist, but he's an exceptional post-impressionist painter. The show in Antwerp was so much about 'experiencing' the visit that you lost sight of the art. The result: 450k visitors...
To end on a positive note, I see a lot more focus—both from collectors and leading galleries—on older artists and the estates of deceased artists. I have a feeling that collectors are seeing the brevity and financial risk of 'Instagram art' as well.
Thank you for your attention and insight, I really appreciate your comment. I know very well what you mean about entshitification of art shows and horribly curated exhibitions. I agree 100%, and as a viewer you have to constantly watch out which galleries you end up visiting. Some of them have fallen into this immediacy trap and the result is palpable, although you need artistic sensibility to spot it. And I think they fool many viewers... Well, audience is also to blame. Everyone seems to be in this loop and quite comfortably enjoying their consumerism. As for Yayoi.... My god, she is such a good artist but the Ives Saint Laurent facade was simply insulting... I wonder how much she personally contributed to it, or if they just set it up telling her -trust me, this is the good shit nowadays. It was tacky as fuck, stupid bullshit and fastfood art. It's interesting how you can enshitify any kind of great art into that tacky and cheap look. As for galleries as speculator agents I haven't mentioned it on the essay cause there will be so much to say and such a long text, but 100% agree. The truth is, everyone wants to get really rich really fast now, but whatever goes uphill so fast, will have a crushing downhill around the corner. Sometimes they bring artists to exhaustion, and suddenly they are not the market's darling anymore. It's the end of their careers, they should watch out cause in a matter of ten years many times they simply go back to zero. I would love to write about all this things too. Stay tuned and again thanks for reading!!
Great discussion!
👉🏻Thanks for pointing to it.
Art as Commodity is always a problem. Then we get to what is even currently being defined as art. If one were to actually break down the attributes of most of what floods the feeds? And the worst part is they are sure what they are doing is ‘art’ and there’s no one can tell them it’s not.
Basically it’s Art by Populism. Just like it’s turning into governance by populism.
@Rogue Art Historian plz chime in as a historian here. We really have nothing in art history that compares to the ‘👍🏻👎🏻’ meter for setting the quality of aesthetic— or do we? My first thought is the gladiators being given the thumb to determine their fate in the ring of lions. But on second thought I am thinking back to the Academy which set standards— to a degree by popular opinion—or was it royal decree?
Art by populism is a great definition. Now, wasn't pop art originally an attempt to make art popular, meaning, for the regular people? There is a question going on here about intellectual elite vs. economical elite. Does popular art become populist art when it faces the easy taste of "the people"? What a debate! I want to write about these subjects but for the moment t's a bit mushy in my head.
Agreed there is a lot here to process. Have to break it out into pieces.
Populism ><Pop Art
Let’s start with that and this phrase:
“Making art ‘popular’ and more for the people”
Pop Art was a response to Abstract Expressionism (AE). So once again we see one movement bounce off another—basically what dada was to the intellectualized promise of modernism and rational art. Indeed, to your second point, people were tired of not being ‘intellectual enough’ to ‘understand’ or see the value in AE so Jasper Johns and crew decided to shove commercialism down our throats ‘as art’ and it stuck. If we track all the postwar movements, each of them wants to tear down the limitations and definitions of ‘art’ they had been fed. Pop Art is basically the cherry on top by injecting irony and humor. Art wanting to laugh at itself. This reminds me of The Controversy of the 🍌as Art.
We loop once again. The distance in time between dada and pop is about the same distance in time from pop to the banana. This suggests a cycle of about 50-60 years. If we go back the same amount before dada we hit the cusp of the controversy of Monet rebelling against Realism. So we start to see a half century cycle for revisiting some form of rebellion that turns a page in art history.
All this to say, we can complain about the shallowness of content and definition of art (back to my TikTok article) but we have to admit something is shifting. From 10,000 meters up we can look down to see the needle on the compass is moving. To what? That is the question.
I have my theories. Some of them I begin to work out through my essays. I am always proofing the system to see where it bends. There is no doubt in my mind historians will be pointing back to this decade as the root of the next ‘thing’. The tools are appearing, the practice is ramping up. Remember that experimentation requires trial and error. The messaging systems point toward creatives flexing their muscles amidst craft and commercial enterprisers. My guess is peddlers of some art or another have always existed. Because we only get the narrow view of those who ‘made it’ we really don’t know how flooded the streets were with copycat Vermeers, Pissaros and Picabias who everyone thought were tepid.
Wow Karena, I'll need to reflect on all of this... Very very interesting point, the 50 years shift. I had never noticed it so blatantly. It makes me wonder about so many things. I'm gonna think think think and I'll get back to you, also in relationship with Yayoi Kusama cause she is such a good example of this debate about pop, populism, ethics and aesthetics...
👍🏻
This is such a great comparison. Gladiators facing the 👍🏻/👎🏻 judgment feels eerily close to the algorithm-driven validation of today’s art market. But the Academy? That’s where it gets interesting. It was a mix of royal decree and a self-perpetuating elite dictating taste. The Salon had its own gatekeeping, but even then, populist sentiment (or outrage) played a role; think of the Salon des Refusés and the birth of modernism.
What’s different now is that the algorithm isn’t just the gatekeeper; it is the taste-maker, reinforcing trends based on engagement rather than artistic merit. The Academy at least had a theoretical foundation (however flawed). Now, we’ve got a system where visibility = value, and that’s a very different beast.
Great insight regarding Academy— thx for sharing this tidbit!
Back to gladiator theory, the biggest, the brauniest, the most appealing to the masses wins… and us financially compensated.
But it's only 👍 without the 👎, cause there are not dislikes on Instagram. So even if you are being eaten by lions you may think everything goes perfectly well....😂😂
Wow, while I've been away this has turned into such an interesting discussion!
My interest in art has always been matched by my fascination for its economics. We occasionally buy when we like something, but we don't consider our purchases as investments, nor do we consider ourselves collectors. Other than a short stint as a partner in a gallery, we're not commercially interested either. The business of art is purely an intellectual interest.
If you stick to the rules of supply and demand, art should be free, because there are no limits to its supply. We all know that art is not free, and that—for artists with a certain level of success—supply is artificially limited so that it doesn't meet demand and pushes the prices up. If you want to buy a Claire Tabouret you'll have to smooch for years with Perrotin, buy some lesser known artists, and work your way up to get the chance to buy one of her works. One of the lesser quality works, that is, because the better works are immediately spoken for by earlier buyers.
I don't think the masses decide on anything.
I think that there are 2 main players that decide 👍/👎:
1) the curators of the leading non-profit contemporary art centres such as Wiels, Kunsthalle Zurich, Palais de Tokyo, Pirelli Bicocca, SMAK, PS1... They stick their neck out showing new artists with potential to a select audience. Because there's no immediate commercial objective, artists can go pretty wild within the curator's framework. Interesting stuff.
2) the leading galleries that either pick up artists from the non-profits, or find and promote new artists that produce similar work. This is where art becomes business. From here on, new trends and artists start to trickle down into the middle and lower end of the market.
I think Joe Bradley is a good example: first exposure in 2002 PS1, then a medium sized gallery in NY before moving to Gagosian, Hufkens and now Zwirner.
Joe Bradley lookalike work is everywhere now. Unfortunately, it's often more "content" than quality. As this happens, algorithms start to pick up this trend and spread it even more.
Counter-intuitively, this potentially damaging effect is offset by reducing Bradley's output and exhibitions, while increasing prices.
Everyone's a winner at the top end of the market.
There's no winners at the middle or the bottom.
But art isn't the only segment where this happens...
This is so much of what I have been talking about and feeling lately.
I’m a chef, not a painter, but I feel the same devaluation of my genre of work/craft (let's retire content) on Instagram. I feel strong armed into turning everything into a reel. Your "random splatter" and "acrylic paint drip", is my cheese pull (at its most inoffensive), a manicured hand cracking through chocolate shell into a creamy mason jar of protein packed ovenight oats with ASMR, an extreme closeup food porn shot of something rich and indulgent, or worse, fake indulgent. (Surprise! It’s cottage cheese, collagen, and monk fruit.)
I've been a professional chef for 25 years. When I started on instagram it was sharing a static photo (so I taught myself how to shoot and edit food - which is not something I actually care about as a chef) but didn't mind. I enjoyed connecting with people, sharing recipes and inspiration. Then it became all about the leaving reciprocal "that looks so tasty" type comments for other people to boost your place in the algorythm. The time suck of that is so embarassing in retrospect. Now, it’s about editing, lighting, and producing slick, professional videos just to get a shred of reach. I went to cooking school, not film school. Like you I tried paying for adds a little bit in the begining and got more likes, but nothing of substance in return for my money.
Everyday I want to quit instagram but I keep it as a place for my recipes for the followers who use them. I still try to post now and then, to remind people that I am on Substack where I feel better....
"The best idea is to leave it as a portfolio excerpt and abandon its rotting use. Now my endeavour is to drag all the people I collected there over the years to my newsletter." THIS EXACTLY!!!!
Hello Emily, thanks for your wonderful comment, you made me laugh so much with the cheese!!! My god, what we have to do....🙄 It's simply ridiculous. I find funny this feeling we all have as if this was sudden. But it's been getting worse and worse over the years and we complied enough... I'm just glad I stopped thinking "it's just me", and that everyone needs to talk about it. So here we go, we will find the way to communicate without acrylic dripping and cheese strings! Hahaha. Cheers
Thank you for this. I’m not in the art world, just a beginning painter, but as I became interested in painting, my Instagram feed filled up with artists. After a few months I started to wonder why so much of it left me indifferent. I kept thinking I just wasn’t finding the work that made me actually feel something. I gave up last week and came over here.
Hello Tracy, thanks for your comment. It's difficult to find the community that fits you, especially in such conditions of an app. Substack is definitely warmer, although the art world hasn't arrived just yet. But I believe many artists could benefit from the structure of Substack. Substack is gaining traction since the USA elections. Maybe it's a matter of time that the art world finds it. In any case, on Substack you will find conversation, debates going on. Good luck for your new profile and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :)
Thank you for such a coherent exploration of many of the impact of IG and other social media on art. As a photographer, it feels that these effects are why there is increasing emphasis (perhaps a return to?) on making books, which provide an opportunity to develop a meaningful collection of images contained within a theme or concept that can be enjoyed slowly and repeatedly.
Yes! Thanks for your comment. I have a friend who is a photographer and believes the only way out -or return as you say- to materiality for photography is photo books. In a book you ad other elements to play with, like time, rhythm, seriality.... And slowness as you say. Instagram has been even more harmful for photographers than for painters, at least at the end of the day, I produce a real object with it's materiality. Anyways, I believe photographers should start to print again, I know many of you never stopped it, but I mean... Art needs materiality, in my opinion, something you can see and touch, palpable, real, in the physical world... Thanks for reading!
The same thing, this flattening effect of immediacy, is happening in the world of music. It started before social media, but social media have turbocharged the process. You are right, it rots our brains--literally. Babies raised without complex stimuli literally lose the neural connections necessary to process complex inputs. It's a vicious cycle.
I would love to read about the flattening on music in the last decade, I also got a cook saying with cooking it's the same. it's interesting how artists from other fields are seeing themselves identified with what I say regarding painting, so we are all having the same shitty experience there.. if you write something about this, let me know :)
“Culture makes your brain roll, content makes your brain rot. “ woahhhhh
🥰🥰
I agree so much with what you say, and the exact same problems exist in Photography because of Instagram. The platform has basically indoctrinated a whole generation of photographers to go for simpler, minimal, pleasingly aesthetic images, that most turn out to be hollow.
Not to mention this madness about having a “style” so that you are recognisable, which I find boring and repetitive and harmful to the concept of creation.
Hey, thanks!! I would love to read what you have to say about this subject from a photographer perspective, you must suffer Instagram even more than painters. Photography has gone for such a perversed phase...! There's a lot to analyze there. But I didn't feel with enough knowledge about photo to include it in my essay. I hope we can talk and you write about it too :)
Let’s definitely do that
I absolutely agree! I’ve always pondered that about style, sometimes feeling inadequate about my work because I try so many different things. It made me feel juvenile because I didn’t have a “style” like what I was seeing others doing. Now I realize it’s what makes my work more interesting. It also drives me crazy to see magazines putting photos on the cover that are just plain awful artistically and don’t even get me started technically. Not to say that a photograph has to be technically sound, but it needs to be balanced artistically in some way to compensate.
Yes! I totally agree, thanks for your comment. First of all it's great that your work is variated and experimental and can be many things with many different "styles", even though IG is not the right platform for it. Second, my god you are so right about magazines covers!! It's as if people who choose them hadn't seen an image in their lives. We might be witnessing a generational jump there too. Sometimes it feels that magazines are run by old people try to play cool and young. Anyways thanks for reading!
Well said and on point. Although…my Italian friends (over 50) still use “bello” and often. Has there been a generational migration from this simple word that fills the mouth so perfectly?
Ja, apparently in Italian bello is used more often than in Spanish, a woman in another comment told me. In Spanish even older generations lost the regular use. Thanks for reading!
Such an honest read. And I couldn’t agree more! My creative language constantly changes and my process is the key to everything, and yet there’s no room for sharing that on instagram. Thank you for sharing your words!
I'm glad it resonated! Yes, if your work changes it's impossible that your profile on Instagram spreads out. Here though is another deal. Thanks for reading, and welcome to Substack :)
I just hit Substack, leaving IG for good, that place is an absolute cage, not a good place for image makers, not anymore, tnkyou for the effort of writing this pice.
Well done! And thanks for reading!
It’s like you’re living in my brain! Yes! I’ve just started exploring spaces away from Instagram for all of these reasons.
Hey Angela, thanks for your comment. I'm glad it resonated. As you see for the amount of comments and likes, many people are thinking this... It's funny how it feels so sudden, although it took us years and years to arrive at this point. Substack is a good place to begin with alternative spaces
Thank you for reading!
It is strange how it seems so sudden. I’ve been feeling this way for years, but I had reluctantly bought into the idea that it was necessary as a place to share my art in this artist as self-marketer era (ugh!) and just couldn’t make the break. It’s become so unbearable though. Now I feel like I have to cleanse and restart my brain after the years of rot so I can get back to real conversations.
Yes, I also had many moments when I questioned it along the way but also thought it was just me. It turns out, everyone is fed up now, so we need to start talking about it now. Yesterday I got into my IG and realized I had 600 posts there... It made me think of the amount of hours I gave to the app, thinking I was giving it to the people. Ugh, so embarrassing now... The good thing is, this is real conversations already :)
Wow, you just wrote about everything I’ve at one stage or another thought about Instagram and the deluge of imagery to be found there.
Everyone is an artist these days it seems, without understanding what an artist actually does. That isn’t to discredit learning artists or defend the traditional gatekeepers (at least social media has dismantled this to some respect: I have no wish to return to the hawking around of my physical portfolio to disinterested commercial gallery directors), rather it’s more a comment on arts education and the way our capitalist society has devalued the arts (except for the top few at the top of the pile).
Thanks for your support insight.
Hey Greta, thanks for your comment! Yes, we don't want to discredit learning artists, we all are just in this loop of information atomization. Young people just do what young people have to do: look at how it's done in the period they work and do the same. I was also very young when I got my IG account, and copied what needed to be done. And even though I always thought something was strange and missing, some periods of my IG life I thought the problem was me, and the way I do things. So yes, this affects everyone, I just had to write about it cause I had enough. Funny thing is, at this point gatekeepers keep keeping the gate! Hahaha. I'm glad it resonated. Cheers!
Resonates a lot, especially your point about critics and art writing disappearing....thank you!
Thanks for reading!
I love this article - thank you for articulating these ideas so well. In a way, I feel that Instagram has just intensified what galleries have already been doing for a couple of decades: branding more and more narrowly. if you imagine Picasso transplanted to the 21st century, perhaps he would’ve only got away with one of his ‘periods’ after which his gallery would have said: no, no Pablo we don’t want you to confuse our audience by producing something different, something they’re unfamiliar with. I have friends who are writers - it’s exactly the same in the publishing world: if you’re successful publishing one type of book, they’ll want you to do exactly the same thing. It’s as though they have no courage or vision. The irony is that if you’re unimaginative and risk averse, you often don’t do well commercially in the long run anyway.
Yes!! Thanks for your comment Paul, many galleries push the artist to produce the same over and over because it's liked. However, other better galleries try not to influence the artists in this or that direction. And hey, it can happen in principle, that an artist does something that works very well in sales, but suddenly they get tired and want to do something new for them... It should be respectable. But as you say it's a paradox, because a artist who doesn't evolve doesn't do well in the long term... What a fucking balance! At the end of the day, the artist should be able to say to the gallery look, I do whatever, you try to sell it... That is that. Unfortunately many galleries don't think in a big scope and many artists comply 🤷♀️ I believe the art career is always long term oriented. Anyways thanks for your comment!
As an art historian, I find I’m not interested in what the artist has to say about his/her work. I believe the work must live or die on its own. If I need the artist’s interpretation, the work isn’t successful.
That's a very old fashion and, if I may say, pretty reductionist way to see art, specially contemporary art. "Art speaks for itself" only covers until the end of XIX century, because you are talking about recognizable form. What is a Duchamp artpiece without an explanation? What is the Guernica by Picasso without knowing the context? Just a few black grey and white shapes. I would even go further and say you miss a lot of info about any artwork in any period of art history with this attitude. As an art historian, you should be interested in the story behind the art, being told by the artist or by any other person who analyzes it. If you look at a Da Vinci painting you may recognize the shape of what you are seeing. But only looking at the image without knowing anything else or reading about it you are gonna miss what the artist was up to, who the portrait is, all the symbolism behind, the decisions regarding composition, color, context... In fact, I don't think you look at art history in these terms, if you say you are an art historian. You learnt a great deal about art outside of the canvas in the university. I'm sorry, but it sounds like a learnt sentence "art should speak for itself". We heard it thousands of times, and it seems you haven't ever questioned it. I mean, it's respectable, you do you, but just so you know, you are missing a great deal of what's going on in the arts, being classical, modern or contemporary.
I did not say I don’t want to know the context in which the art was produced. In other words—the history part of art history. Did Duchamp provide an explanation of his urinal? If he did, I missed it. But I’m aware of the political era in which it was created. Guernica was inspired by a specific tragic event, but it can stand for many.
But the artist has a voice as well as any other person who faces the art. I don't see why you would take on every voice except for the artist one