Social Media: Removing the gatekeepers or erasing the artist?

I think social media has flattened the power in art. Someone decided that to get views, likes and shares, we needed to perform to get people to stop scrolling. Dance a little. Tease with a painting spin. Condense hours, days or months of work into a sped up 7 seconds because no one wants to see the whole process. The narrative then becomes that the art itself is not enough. And the fact is that is probably true …. when it comes to the algorithms and getting those likes, views and comments. But how is that distorting the art, distorting the consumption of art. How is that affecting how people view art? Is it changing the entire art ecosystem by erasing the labor of the artist?

Throughout history, art has just appeared; appeared in museums, galleries on walls with little to no understanding of the process of art making. This is nothing knew. Sometimes placards or historical texts might give insight into the behind the scenes moments of the art process, but this was rare. So the idea that social media is creating a conundrum of labor erasure might seem like a far fetched idea. We have always, regardless of the art form, seen the final product, whether its a theatrical performance, concert or painting. However, the process was unknown to those that were not involved. This gave some ambiguity to the process and the audience, viewer, patron could fill in the blanks as to the work that was involved in creating the final product that they see before them.

Social media started asking something different of the artist. Share the process. Share the pain, struggle, labor, the studio undertakings, the long nights with a pen and paper working on lyrics, moments from rehearsals, the ache, the frustration, the joy … and then it started asking us to do it in smaller bites. Chewable and easily digestible moments. First a few minutes, then 30 seconds, then 7 seconds, then 3 seconds and the artists chasing the desire to be seen and noticed and liked and viewed played by the rules. I did too for a little while. And then I caught myself and thought “But what is this doing to us all?” Not just the artist and how this may be manipulating how we make art and why we make art ….. but also, to all of us in how we consume art.

If you follow a couple artists, you are now inundated with artists. If you are an artist, you are inundated with people trying to tell you what you should make or how you should market it. And as we have seen with the movement to this accessible format of sharing art, its starting to come at a price. More artists than I have ever known are struggling to make the art. Focused so much on capturing moments and posting, they are spending less time on actually working on what is an innate built in feature to their identity. Being an artist is never easy, not long term. Some are falling into traps of seeing artists with huge followings and thinking “Well that must be good art because they have so many followers and likes.” Its changing us, its changing art. How long do you look at an artwork before you scroll …. seconds?

This then gets me thinking …. first we started to not only show the final product but the process. Then we were slowly conditioned to erase the process ourselves as artists. The making was trivialized. The art wasn’t enough. Was this the plan all along for the great AI invasion into the art world?