The Convergence of Art and Content: Navigating Digital Maze

2024

While watching MoMA’s Instagram story promoting an upcoming artists' panel about human and machine intelligence, a notification from iPhone Screen Time reminded me I spent 8 hours 54 minutes on the phone yesterday, including 2 hours 31 minutes on Instagram. Now, I would like to justify the horrific number with the fact that most of the young artists I want to research have abundant content of their exhibitions, ideas, and work progress on Instagram. Reaching ten artists' pages within an hour to grasp a complete picture of a new trend feels far more satisfying and personal than reading a monthly trend report from the newspaper’s art&culture section in 2010. The addiction is real.

Tracing back to the source era of this almost universal addiction, during the early 2000s, the quiet but rapid transition towards user-generated content and participatory dynamics marked the emergence of social media art. They played a pivotal role in shaping a novel phase of internet art. In the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst and the advent of Web 2.0, platforms such as blogs and social networks evolved into fresh arenas for artistic expression and critical inquiry. Artists actively embraced blog arts to contest established online communication paradigms and corporate agendas, with the dominant objective of subverting traditional conventions and integrating art within digital platforms. The main critical angle in this particular area of art today is not so much the crucial experimentation with a new medium but rather our own experiences within this medium. Although I was too young to participate in this historic wave of change in society, my teenage years sure had joyful memories of watching homemade tutorial videos from photographers and reading popular girls’ posts about their lives in art school on renren.com (the Chinese version of Facebook).

Meet the OG digital persona: wannabe it-girl making it in LA

Between 2010-2015, the early days of Instagram were a golden era for raw and unfiltered content. Before real-time influencer and KOL were coined, popular accounts were called Instagram celebrities. Everyone can be famous for 15 minutes. As Andy Warhol predicted in the 60s, equal access to digital platforms broke the traditional gatekeeping systems in many industries and dragged celebrities off the pedestal. However, mirroring the old way of making an entertainment star, striving to stand out from other online users requires curation of public presentations and an engaging narrative to bond with. Therefore the beginning of digital content was born.

In 2014,  the contemporary artist Amalia Ulman created the performance piece Excellencies & Perfections putting to test the line between performance art and content creation. Within five months, she created an Instagram account to portray a wannabe it-girl trying to make it in Los Angeles, narrating her triumphs and setbacks through a series of carefully crafted images and posts up until she abruptly revealed her true identity and that the entire persona was just a performance. 

The fabricated content was curated so naturally that it is difficult to discern where the performance ended, and Ulman's real life began. She engaged with her audience in real-time, used Instagram features such as hashtags and location tags, and planned her posts with a consistentvisual and narrative style, the same way an authentic influencer would do. Her carefully curated feed, brimming with glamorous selfies, exotic travel photos, and aspirational captions, seamlessly blended into the hyper-

stylized world of social media. The performance is strategically divided into three stages: Cute Girl, Sugar Baby, and Life Goddess. Ulman's persona changes from a naive, innocent young woman trying to make it in the world to a materialistic wealth and fame worshiper to a spiritual guru advocating self-love and true happiness. The carefully curated personality development brought her the chance to experience different stereotypes, social pressure, and unsustainable beauty standards for modern women. At the end of the five months, she had gained over 90,000 followers who resonated with her, got triggered, and portrayed their own experiences to her, just like they do with a fictional soap opera character.

In an interview with ArtReview in 2014, Ulman stated that "performance art and social media are now very much intertwined." I would argue that Excellences & Perfections is content that is shared and consumed online. However, it is not simply a form of entertainment or self-promotion but an experiment that uses digital content to explore the performative nature of social media and the meaning of authenticity within. Amalia Ulman is not the first person to create a hoax online persona. Still, her work was critiqued as the “first Instagram masterpiece” because of how thought-provoking and performative it was during the mid-2010s booming era of the Instagram celebrity economy. 

With the expansion of the social media empire, the traditional notions of authenticity are challenged and reinterpreted through the evolving representation of the online persona. Authenticity is no longer a fixed character to connect with others genuinely but rather a performative act to create an imaginary identity to be perceived as authentic by others. Following Ulman’s intentional performance piece, millions of social media users balance between projecting an authentic image of themselves and conforming to the expectations of their online audience without realizing the performative nature of their choices. Does the intricacies of identity formation and expression in the context of social media become a collective performance art? Are we all unconsciously participating and witnessing the most extensive social experiment? 

Avocado_ibuprofen, the digital persona speaks your pain

When you click on avocado_ibuprofen’s Instagram page, it appears to be just another artsy comic account competing to spread your attention. Black and white quick-made comic strips, doodles, memes, AI-generated images, and design objects with few descriptions. It has little trace of curation while giving an easy and engaging read scrolling through the page. Memes sure make people chuckle, but what makes them stay is the introspective yet morosely funny comic strips. With pixelated, scribbly forms and first-person narratives, the comic strips critique the performative nature of social media and address the exploitation and commodification of creative labor under capitalist systems.

The comment section of avocado_ibuprofen is filled with a mixture of emotional artists, 30-second scholars, and annoyed no-bullshitters, but mostly the artists. “Thank you, you inspire me. Everything is just too much, but seeing your stuff makes it ever-so-slightly more bearable to be.” A wholesome comment was written under a comic strip post about “not being able to be discovered anymore” as a popular meme page artist in an attention economy that values “viral content” and an art system that values exclusivity and seriousness. With 113k followers and a rapidly growing rate of audience, it is clear that many are sharing a sense of perplexity regarding the challenges artists face within a commercialized visual culture and an increasingly unsustainable global framework.

Pallasvuo has regularly tackled the blurred roles of artist and influencer. In one comic from May 2021, quasi-Expressionist characters stride around looking furious and worried, emanating dense thought bubbles of prose like anxious steam: “I don’t think this division between ‘content producers’ and ‘artists’ will last,” they fume. “Art will just become more attention-deprived and drama-obsessed, more surface driven, faster…and online content will continue to become more neurotic, academic, angry, and serious.[...]

The creator, Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo's work, while often perceived as autobiography, is, in fact, autofiction, serving as a reflection of the thin layer of life presented on Instagram. The success of Avocado Ibuprofen, despite its critical content, lies in its intentional gestures and reflexivity. As viewers engage with its pixelated musings and introspective narratives, they are compelled to confront their own anxieties, insecurities, and desires. In a world inundated with curated content and manufactured personas, Pallasvuo dares to strip away the veneer of perfection, revealing the raw, unfiltered truth that lies beneath. Despite the diverse understandings of art among individuals, the account's popularity demonstrates its skill in striking a balance between art and content, making it an interesting case of modern digital storytelling.

Make art, AND content?

How art is perceived and evoked in modern society has shifted with the rise of social media as a dominant platform for sharing and consuming content. Simultaneously, a new configuration emerges in the art world, characterizing the artist as a "creative entrepreneur" and the audience as a "customer base." Artists today have adopted an approachable persona to accommodate the “market needs.” They are self-effacing, engaging, advocating, and supporting. Because they have to welcome customers, and customers are always right.   

Digital platforms force all art forms to compete on the same terms, favoring work that solicits a more purely visceral response and appeals to the lowest common denominator. The game is now won by the easily grasped and the loud rather than by complexity and subtlety. Surely, the latter have their popularity for the hype of being niche, but the intuitive masses always gather around the former as moths fly towards the flame. Fan communities, aesthetics clubs, niche-driven content, and personal brands were formed to keep you ahead in the Darwinian attention race of internet marketing. The struggling and tender artist is out of the topic, while the hustling artistic entrepreneur/opinion leader is now hot with a cult following.

The vagueness of the term “content” contributes heavily to the corporate way of devaluating creatives and their output. Prior to the Internet era, we consumed novels from books, enjoyed music through the radio, experienced movies in theaters, and viewed artworks in galleries or art books. Each medium had its distinct format, requiring time and mental adjustment to transition in between. Fast forward to the 2020s, like “product,” content can refer to anything from high art films, twitch streaming, and comic book series to educational podcasts, prestige novels, and YouTube videos. All the above is deemed equal, making the creators easily replaceable and frequently detached from their creations. Language shapes perceptions and attitudes most subtly. Before diving deep into analyzing or building any creative works, we should all be mindful of the commodifying and oversimplifying nature of “content” and grow the ability to view art and content separately and as a whole freely.                          

The forces of autonomy and the allure of the market in the art sphere have become an intensive battle. Critics decried the market's insatiable hunger, claiming it devoured the very essence of art. Artists, on the other hand, clung fiercely to their independence, guarding their creative visions from the clutches of commerce. Yet, amidst this conflict, a curious touch transpires. The idea of artistic autonomy, born in the Enlightenment's embrace of reason, had ironically paved the way for art's marketability. Like a double-edged sword, autonomy liberated artists from external constraints but also exposed them to the whims of the market.

Enter Marcel Duchamp, a master of the two-pronged strategy. With one hand, he defied convention, challenging the very definition of art with his enigmatic readymades. With the other, he navigated the art market with savvy, selling works by others and advising collectors. The historical avant-gardes, too, sought to break free from autonomy's shackles. They savored life, blurring the boundaries between art and everyday experience. But even this rebellion had its economic undertones, aligning with the "new economy" that valued the lives and experiences of its subjects.

As the art system underwent a transformation, mirroring the rise of other cultural industries, celebrity culture took center stage. Artists like Björk, Warhol and Ai Weiwei reveled in the spotlight, their images becoming synonymous with their art. Yet, despite the superficial similarities between art and luxury goods, works of art retained their intellectual prestige, transcending their economic circumstances. In this intricate dance between autonomy and the market, artists who have kept a tight eye on the trends became alchemists, transforming the very forces that threatened to consume them into fuel for their creative endeavors. They embraced the paradox, like a tightrope walker balancing on the edge of a chasm. They knew that art's true value lay not in the cold cash it could fetch, but in its power to stir the soul, to spark inspiration, and to shatter the invisible walls that confined the imagination.

While criticizing aspects of modern social media towards the art industry, we shouldn't deny the normative power of the art market's belief system and the role of critique in challenging prevailing assumptions. I would argue that art, creativity, content, and market have developed an interdependency while retaining some degree of autonomy, forming a multi-party dialectical unity of opposites and dynamic loop balance. It is crucial for individuals to critically examine art practices concerning their own participation and seek alternative conditions beyond those seemingly dictated by consumer capitalism. 

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