You’re not Shadowbanned
The price of being politically active on your Instagram
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The Attention Trap
On the dangers of trading in online traffic & celebrity
<p dir="ltr">During 2022, I interviewed the founders of several digital art platforms that were focusing on growing NFT culture and essentially recruiting artists to become crypto-artists. One such founder, whom I won’t name, said that their company’s curatorial approach hinged primarily on the artist having a large following on Instagram. This was, after all, a practical method that ensured investing time and money into artists posed less of a risk, since they came with a pre-built audience. This audience-centric, or perhaps audience-aware approach, is commonplace in the digital art space. A large digital following doesn’t just offer street cred, it implies commercial viability. It implies immediate market feedback. What it doesn’t guarantee is artistic and cultural value.</p> <blockquote> <p dir="ltr">We are all participants of, and complicit in, the attention economy.</p> </blockquote> <p>For millennia, artists were protected from an immediate, opinionated audience. As a result, their practice wasn’t subject to the daily commentary and validation–or rejection–of the masses. A solo exhibition, usually years apart, was a rare opportunity for an artist to receive critical and public feedback (and, hopefully, to sell). These prolonged periods between shows, between moments of visibility, meant the stakes were significantly higher, but they also granted the artist a greater degree of independence from the market and from public opinion, to create independently. </p> <p dir="ltr">As artists on social media, we no longer have that luxury.</p> <p dir="ltr">We are all participants of, and complicit in, the attention economy. The impact of this cultural shift has been tremendously destructive for contemporary art. Social media rewards consistency and persistence. These are valuable traits, sure, but they also punish creative risk taking. For example, an artist exploring something that is not strictly in line with their past work will usually be punished, in terms of audience engagement and visibility.</p> <p dir="ltr">I should be clear that when I say punish, I don’t mean in the vindictive, disciplinarian sense. I mean that you are simply shifted lower down in the timelines you would have been featured in. Social media algorithms also often favor commercial realities, meaning figurative works are rewarded over abstract ones, the use of warmer colours, such as red, might be rewarded (with attention) over the use of the colour blue, etc.</p> <p dir="ltr">Most social media platforms are not benevolent mechanisms that seek to promote art: their task is to promote whatever content keeps you on the platform, scrolling endlessly. So if an artist posts a work that might disrupt that flow, such as an artwork that diverges from their oeuvre, do you think they might be promoted as diligently? Because based on personal experience, I can tell you that the view and like counts of my artworks that are consistent with my past work, versus experimental posts, is staggering. And it’s not a question of the audience refusing the experiments, because these systems decide for them whether it is worth their attention.<strong> </strong></p> <p dir="ltr">Another detrimental element of social media is the visibility of an artist’s following, which has an impact on their market viability. It would be reasonable to assume that today, some commercial galleries, much like NFT marketplaces, are aware of an artist’s pre-built audience on social media when considering them for a show or for representation.</p> <p dir="ltr">And while this enhanced, constant form of visibility may benefit some artists, to be discovered or to sustain their lives through a more continuous sales cycle, it does affect the creative cycle.</p> <p dir="ltr">TLDR: Measuring an artist’s cultural value by their social media footprint is a deeply problematic method for choosing the champions for digital art, because those engagements are fundamentally indicators of mass public appeal, not artistic prowess or creativity.</p> <h3 dir="ltr">E-Commercial Realities</h3> <p dir="ltr">Another dangerous trend that I am observing within the digital landscape recently came in the form of a DM from a fellow artist several weeks ago. Referring to one of my previous Cache columns, this artist had provided a link to a site that demonstrated his NFT sale performance over the last few years. It was not a flex or a pitch, it was simply his preferred method for presenting himself as an artist.</p> <p>I recoiled, because for a traditional artist to directly submit this kind of information to anyone at all is anathema. The art world, whether you agree with it or not, does not want artists to be too involved in their own commercial reality. For any traditional artist to publicise their sales performance data let alone send it to people so directly is… unthinkable.</p> <p>The digital art market, in its quest for transparency, does the polar opposite, and plenty of digital artists openly share their market cap and past sales numbers of their works. While this may help combat speculative pricing and demonstrate investability, it does create an unhealthy environment in which nascent digital artists begin to equate their commercial success with artistic success. Sometimes, especially in the absence of critical discourse, this may be the only metric they have access to. But not all metrics are designed to be shared, let alone considered by the artists themselves when producing work. This can, and sometimes does, lead to artists allowing the numbers to determine the nature of their practice, because they instinctively pursue series that reward them financially and on social media. Naturally traditional galleries also pressure their artists to make more of particular series that sell, but within a digital landscape, the mass production element becomes corrosive much more quickly.</p> <p>There is no quick and dirty solution to this problem, but it does need to be talked about. Online celebrity, market impact, or the ability to make the algorithms favour you, should not be the arbiters of the next great digital artist. When we confuse digital fame and commercial success with cultural value, we can lose sight of art we should cultivate, and preserve.</p> <p> </p>
The Perils of Digital Discourse
Can we talk about digital art without commerce?
<h3 dir="ltr">Digital art has existed for nearly a century, but it didn’t really become part of our lives until the 2020s. Although we all knew of Rembrandt, Pollock, Warhol etc., there wasn’t a single digital artist who was a household name until extremely recently. Now, many people can comfortably mention names like Refik Anadol and BEEPLE, and even Sasha Stiles, PAK, and Operator, without having to think too hard. </h3> <p dir="ltr">In many ways, today’s digital art market, and perhaps since I am excluding names like Vera Molnar and Aaron Cohen from this argument, I should call it the new digital art market, is quite nascent. A lot of its denizens are quite young, and are receiving tremendous exposure in spaces that perhaps do not have the infrastructure for meaningful critical discourse. What’s worse, fame and notoriety on X often fails to translate to the traditional art world, creating two parallel art markets.</p> <p dir="ltr">Social media does not quite function the way the physical world does when it comes to contemporary art, and the rules of the internet require a different set of skills than that of the physical. I often struggle with the fact that Twitter, or now X, is the primary space for conversations on, or about, digital art. It has been thoroughly distorted since Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endorsement-x-boosting-republican-posts-july-algorithm-change?utm_source=chatgpt.com">with the algorithm favouring a very specific set of linguistic signals and content</a>. And yes, you could argue that the traditional art world has a liberal bent, but it doesn’t create literal hierarchies of attention the way algorithmic platforms do.</p> <p dir="ltr">The rules for art-world discourse and visibility on X are wildly different. Is being retweeted by an established artist the same as walking into a gallery opening as said artist’s plus one? Does a blue check translate to being on the guest list, even if you paid for it? The parallels, if they can be drawn, are messy (though anthropologically fascinating).</p> <p dir="ltr">One thing that I come back to often is the language requirements of digital environments, in which artists don’t need to have the vernacular to describe their practice, but they do need to talk within the parameters of the digital art world. To the moon, for example, a common rallying cry for many in the NFT space, is openly about the pursuit of wealth. An artist debuting a work of art with this rallying cry is certainly transparent about their priorities and aspirations. They are also less likely to gain traction with any collector or curator interested in deeper motivations.</p> <p dir="ltr">Unfortunately, digital culture does not allow most artists to simply unveil or exhibit, they have to operate within the parameters of the culture. This means artists on X "drop" their works, a word borrowed from streetwear culture that creates a sense of urgency with the intention of creating demand. A drop is inherently commercial, and while there is nothing wrong with that, when the online landscape requires you to create urgency around the work for it to make a statement, the way in which you might have spoken about it if you simply wanted it to exist, changes radically. </p> <p dir="ltr">The traditional world still views NFTs as largely hype over substance. Digital artists and their communities intentionally attempting to create hype around their work does not help. In fact, I can emphatically say, hype is not the path forward.</p> <p dir="ltr">An art gallery also functions as a commercial space, and can create some semblance of urgency to facilitate sales, but it still manages to host culturally meaningful conversations. But by that analogy, there is no museum space in the digital conversation sphere, where someone isn’t chiming in on a thread trying to peddle their wares, as it were. I suppose the point I am trying to make is, can artists present their works on digital platforms like X without the explicit, or implicit, commercial concern? Does it have to be one big grand bazaar, or is it possible for a museum-like digital space to exist within it? Where are the digital kunsthalles?</p> <h3 dir="ltr">Trolls in the Thread</h3> <p dir="ltr">In the digital wild west, social contracts that govern us in physical environments are largely missing. This tends to dilute critical discourse.</p> <p dir="ltr">A digital commercial setting sometimes allows for interlopers. This is both good, and risky. Conversations are not streamlined and linear the way physical conversations are. Interactions are not finite, and so it is much more difficult to have contained, thoughtful discourse. This of course grants a kind of global accessibility to a conversation that in the physical world people might have missed out on. But a thread on X is often disjointed, cacophonic, can be interjected by tweets ranging from MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN to Here’s how I lost 40lbs using this one clever trick doctors won’t tell you. Or worse, can be littered with trolls intentionally attempting to sabotage a conversation, for no reason other than the fact that we have collectively accepted agents of chaos as part of the digital ecosystem.</p> <p dir="ltr">Say what you will about gallery talks, no one turns into a walking billboard or prevents you from literally listening to the artist by grabbing a megaphone and going on a rant halfway through.</p> <p dir="ltr">The price of this no-gates policy, this flexibility, is navigating a space full of arguments, cynicism, ridicule, self-deprecating language, humour (as a defense mechanism), and anonymity. All of these are manageable if you know your way around social media, but do digital artists have to? When did we decide that digital artists have to either endure, or also be good at, shitposting?</p> <p dir="ltr">There is also something so profoundly performative about the culture of tweeting GM into the ether that is almost cult-like, like a bird call but only for a particular set of birds even though everyone can hear it. Whether or not it is actually an innocent and warm greeting intended to build community matters very little when it is attached to the same discourses that focus, overwhelmingly, on sales and wealth. As I mentioned earlier, the physical art world also has its spoken and unspoken rituals, coded language, and barriers to entry. But I’m concerned that in our quest to make everything and everyone so utterly accessible on social media, we have eroded some cultural safeguards and stripped some of these digital spaces of their possibility for meaningful discussion.</p> <p dir="ltr">The result has been a siloing off of the digital art world. Supported largely by the crypto-community, which the traditional art world avoids, digital artists still do not quite coexist with their traditional counterparts. As accessible as it is, the internet is also maze-like in the way it harbors communities, and social media rarely gives you exactly what you are looking for, instead offering you what it thinks you should look at. Most traditional curators, collectors, and artists, simply do not navigate the internet the same way digital artists do. I have no clue how to enter some of these conversations around digital art on X, despite being very much in it, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for everyone else. For artists daring to venture into any social media beyond Instagram, there is also a language barrier that comes from the required performance of having to cynically put down your own practice before posting about it.</p> <p dir="ltr">The existence of algorithmic digital intermediaries, the extreme accessibility of conversations, the commercially-minded languages around digital art, as well as online culture in general, all contribute to the chasm between the traditional art world and digital art.</p> <p dir="ltr">So how do we bridge this divide?</p> <p dir="ltr">To answer this thorny question, I have decided to interview some friends on how they navigate the digital art world today. Stick around for The Cache № 8.</p> <p> </p>
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