Social / Unsocial
How does social media impact the art I make?
This is a question that has struck me several times recently, and I still struggle with it occasionally. It is also a point that I feel sometimes hinders my own creativity and occasionally limits my expression. Though perhaps this feeling of self-limitation has more to do with my own opinions about the work I do, rather than the channels on which I choose to disseminate my work on.
As you can see from the footer of the site on which I publish this blog, I currently have four social media accounts: Instagram, BlueSky, Reddit and Pinterest. In terms of the amount of people these platforms can reach, Instagram has the furthest reach, with more than two billion users, followed by Reddit with about 750 million, Pinterest with 600 million and BlueSky with about 40 million registered users (source). While vast and impressive, these numbers are of course unreliable. Bot farms are real, and registered users are not necessarily active users.
As an artist, what is the objective of having any social media account? What impact does each platform have? What are the discussions that are garnered from each user base?
Social Media and Accessibility
I have come across artists online and in galleries who have no social media presence, and they barely have an online presence. These artists don’t fit any particular demographic, and their work is not of a specific style. If anything, I suspect not being online is an active choice they have made. Instead, they rely on gallerists and real-world interactions for the dissemination of their work, which, from the evidence, works for them. In my view, these artists have the means to successfully navigate the traditional avenues of the art market to their advantage. When I refer to means, I refer to several aspects: these artists exist in a context in which they know the gatekeepers of the art market; they have the right social abilities to be able to communicate the value of their work to the right people, people who will disseminate that artistic value; they have a body of work to prove their worth.
If you’re an artist who has just started out, who is shy, who has no contacts in the art world, and you have the ambition to be seen, it seems you will be naturally seduced by the promise of eyeballs being cast across your work on the internet. Social media platforms embody that promise, with perhaps Instagram being the most powerful seductor. Anyone can join, showing your work is free, and you can start getting validation and encouragement right away. You can also potentially reach anyone, even reach those art world gatekeepers, gallerists, buyers. In this way, social media is an excellent democratiser. Or it should be.
The reality is that getting seen by the right people is difficult, and involves strategising. Platforms have their own internal logic regarding whether your work gets seen or ignored, with these rules shifting all the time, sometimes in a contradictory way. Regular posting of work will supposedly get you more viewers, but be careful to not saturate your audience. More posting will get you more followers, but you don’t want to seem desperate for attention. Hashtags will help describe your work, but add too many and the platform will assume you are spamming users. Soon you’ll realise you’ll be chasing followers, likes, comments - popularity is the currency of social media. This form of popular validation soon becomes a source of value to yourself as an artist, which can be very misleading and is often superficial and short-lasting.
Not All Platforms Are Created Equally
What is the advantage of having multiple social media accounts as an artist? Because not all platforms are the same.
For example, I find that for my work, Instagram gets interactions very quickly, and these are often limited to likes and short comments. On Reddit, comments are longer, and more specific to the work, and will include humour and questions that encourage a discussion. Pinterest will show me more images that link to what I’ve posted that is popular, functioning as a platform that informs my own inspiration. BlueSky is still relatively new, so any new posts tend to result in more followers. All of these activities ultimately serve the same purpose: they are different ways of getting people to pay attention to what you are saying, each platform doing so according to its own set of rules.
A Social Media Style?
On the surface, the worlds of other artists that are presented to you on social media platforms are vast and varied. There is seemingly no dominant style or colour preference, conceptual art and figuration co-mingle happily, and realism is presented to you alongside abstraction. But slowly, patterns will start to emerge, as the platforms’ internal logic will understand what kind of user you are. When you paused slightly longer on that detailed portrait, when you liked that graffiti tag, when you commented with a heart emoji on the drawing of that eye. The platforms’ algorithms will pick up on your behaviour, present you with more information that will replicate and reinforce the same behaviour. You will start to be fed with what the platform thinks you will like, or what you will have a reaction to, and soon the styles of art you are presented with will start to look and feel very similar. The vastness of the art world will begin to be compressed and limited.
There are other, more obvious ways that this limitation of exposure to art occurs online.
Phone cameras, used by the vast majority of artists to create images to go online, automatically colour-correct and compress photos, creating flattened images that the internal logic of the phone thinks are better, often different to the intention of the artist. Nudity is a cause for censorship on most platforms, with nipples and genitals being considered the most contentious, egregious type of content. Political content that questions dominant ideologies is often a source of censorship and “shadow banning”, leading to drastic drops in exposure of your work to other users. If your work is about violence, sex, politics in any explicit way, then you’re unlikely to find a receptive platform; on top of that, the image itself will be dulled by the technology you use to participate in the very world of that technology.
This is extremely problematic in a number of ways. Perhaps my major gripe with a lot of the art I come across on social media is that it’s been reduced to a palatable, drab and unprovocative type of entertainment that keeps us feeling safe and dim. Shouldn’t the point of art be a wake-up call? A shaking of your understanding? An eye-opener? A means of expressing what is inexpressible otherwise?
The very language we use to describe social media and its effects is a hint to its limitations and problems. People are “users”, a term that is also associated with substance addiction. Receiving likes, shares, comments leads to triggers in the body’s dopamine reward system, creating a dopamine loop that is similar to that experienced in drug addiction. Endless scrolling leading to a feeling of numbness and loss of control, an inability to cut down use. Critically, the systems that enable social platforms to function serve to keep people on them, and away from the worlds of the artists.
Endgame
My use of social media platforms is shaky at best. I find the spaces in them limiting and problematic, and ultimately, not artistically stimulating, inspiring nor informative. Increasingly, I find myself turning to social media to be entertained, not to show my work nor my life, and artworks aren’t really featured in that drive to be entertained. Each time I open any of the apps, I’m seeking mostly laughter and joy, not really personal validation. When I post any work online, I am now aware that online attention is actually engineered, and has no bearing on the actual value of the work shown.
I’d much rather leave my phone somewhere else and pick up a pencil, a paintbrush, a stick of charcoal, and get to making.