Introduction

A few years ago, Scott Indrisek wrote a very engaging article for Artsy about his decision to quit Instagram. His main problem with the platform was that it had turned him into someone who was perpetually hunting for what might play well in a square format in someone’s newsfeed, which he hated. For him, quitting Instagram was a lifesaver when it comes to appreciating art, although he did acknowledge the fact that “there’s nothing more tiresome than the former addict who won’t stop talking about how great he feels now”.

I’m not planning to follow in his footsteps, for I like to believe that so far I’ve been capable of using Instagram in a less toxic way, but I wholeheartedly agree with the problems he describes. A lot has been said about how social media affects our well-being, but perhaps not enough about how social media affects artists’ well-being. Having written several posts discussing various challenges artists face: the struggles and hardships, the need for courage, the importance of having one’s own space, the power of rituals, and so on, I’ve naturally brushed on the negative effects social media, but it’s only in the past months that I became fully aware of how insanely destructive and ridiculously unreal these platforms are.

Let me make it clear: I’m not advocating that everyone should close their account immediately, but I think that it would help us all to realise exactly what goes on behind the (beautifully edited and curated) scenes.

Fake it till you make it (with a toilet seat or bots)

When it comes to my own Instagram experience, I have to make a confession: I follow very few people and spend very little time on the platform. And it’s not because I’m smug and immune to procrastination — on the contrary, I can spend way too much time reading articles on the Guardian or threads dissecting films on Reddit — but somehow I never found Instagram engaging. Needless to say, I’ve never followed any influencers and their “look at my luxurious lifestyle” kind of posts, because looking at swimming pool selfies interests me as much as watching paint dry. I did, however, assume that some people feel the need to boast about things they can afford, so I nearly fell of my chair when I discovered that a lot of those posts aren’t real. Perhaps this demonstrates my extreme naivety but I had no idea that before it became a “fake travel” trend on TikTok, using a toilet seat to fake an airplane shot was a common trick to make your audience believe that you’re a world traveller. Who needs to spend money on plane tickets and expensive hotels, when you can check into Four Seasons while posing in you own courtyard with a €12.99 worth of plastic?

I first learned about the toilet seat trick thanks to Nick Bilton’s brilliant Fake Famous documentary from 2021 (which everyone who ever felt negatively about Instagram should watch). The film is a social experiment in which 3 ordinary non-famous people with no particular skills or charisma attempt to become social media influencers by “faking” fame (spoiler alert: they succeed). One of the most powerful scenes in the film is where hundreds of people audition to be selected for the experiment as it demonstrates just how many people dream of becoming influencers and are willing to do anything to achieve that. According to the film director, the desire to appear more popular than one really is can take extreme forms. One of which is buying a fake audience and fake appreciation.

For a few dollars, you can buy fake bidders on your listings on eBay, you can pay for fake song downloads on music websites, fake sales of books and fake reviews of movies. You can pick if your bots are male or female, American or Chinese, liberal or conservative. And right now, there are hundreds of millions of them blending in online, and most people can’t tell them apart from you and me. And it’s not just influencers. Journalists, politicians, and even A-list celebrities all purchase bots.

The irony, as Bilton points out in his documentary, is that while companies are willing to pay huge amounts of money to people for advertising their products (“We offered these 16-year old mega YouTubers, like $36,000 each to post a few frames on Snapchat”, “I’ve paid influencers $80,000 for one post and two tweets before”, “Kim Kardashian charges as much as $500,000 for a single post on Instagram”), a lot of the targeted audience for this advertising isn’t real. Kim Kardashian might be charging a hefty price for her post but that post is shown to tens of millions of fake bots.

Why is nobody calling bullshit on this? Because, well, money. Instagram won’t stop bot farms because it inflates their numbers. As Bilton says in his film, “it is not in the interest of the bankers to ask if the people on the platforms are real because the money surely is.”

So the question is: how much of the internet is actually fake?

The answer: A LOT.

According to a bot broker interviewed in the Fake Famous documentary, Instagram used to be about 7% to 9% bots, but that number has of course risen: “Some of most the famous people in the world have about 50%-60% bots on their page. You can make 3 million dollars a month from a little bot farm. Some of the bigger bot dealers make about 10 times that.”

An article in the New York Times stated that in 2018 Facebook disclosed to investors that it had “at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform. These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations. Yet their creation and sale fall into a legal gray zone.”

Studies suggest, according to an article in the New York Magazine, that year after year, less than 60% of web traffic is human. Some researchers claim that in fact, a substantial majority of it is bot. The New York Times reported that for a period of time in 2013, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people”.

You’re gonna love this new Hydrogene Cyanide drink

But let’s assume that at least some percentage of the following the influencers have is real. And so when they advertise products and services, there is a high chance that those real fans will want to buy these products — that’s what the influencers are paid for, after all. But what happens if the advertised product is a deadly poison?

Five years ago, the BBC did an investigation into influencers’ credibility, i.e. whether they do actually try the products they advertise and guess what: they don’t. When the crew of the BBC Three series Blindboy Undestroys the World approached 3 top influencers: Zara Holland (246k followers), Mike Hassini (235k followers) and Lauren Goodger (952k followers), asking them to promote a new drink called Cyanora, which included the ingredient hydrogen cyanide used by Nazis in concentration camps, all of them said yes without hesitation. Mind you, they had all read the script (which clearly stated the drink’s contents) without so much as batting an eye and none of them had any issue with the fact that they wouldn’t be able to try the drink before promoting it. Goodger gleefully boasted about the fact that she doesn’t try the various products she swears she loves in front of the camera.

So people like Zara Holland fake their fame to become famous, fake their following using bots, and fake their opinions, promoting products they have no interest in. Well, that’s a hell lot of faking, if you ask me.

While I can marvel at the phenomenon of people like Holland or Kim Kardashian making a fortune from advertising a facial cream they haven’t tried to a bunch of bots, an average Internet user is by now more or less aware that this is paid advertising. What I find more disturbing is artists whose whole career is built on making an authentic connection with their audience faking authenticity. This takes many forms — from having others make the work for you to lying about who you are.

When artists fake authenticity: art factories

When a collector buys a piece of art from an artist, they assume they’re buying a bespoke piece made by the artist’s hands. But that is not always the case.

The British-based artist Alexander Gorlizki never bothered to learn to paint, and outsources the work to seven inexpensive painters in Jaipur, India, claiming that “it would take him 20 years to develop the skills of his chief Indian painter, Riyaz Uddin” Yes, well, it does take a long time to develop technical skills, but isn’t that a crucial part of the artistic journey? Likewise, fellow big names such as Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons operate factories with hundreds of assistants making the work for them.

Some years ago, one of Jeff Koons’ assistants wrote an article about his experience of working for the artist and art student himself and painting his Cracked Egg piece in 1995: “Cracked Egg sold at Christie’s in London in 2003 for $501,933. At the time it was Koons’s most expensive painting. Everything else I made in college ended up in a Dumpster on West 115th Street.” And it’s not just the big names, artists such Ghada Amer, who is known for stitching figures and words across canvases and furniture, and photographer Jack Pierson, who uses found objects in his work, also rely on their assistants to do the actual work.

I recently signed up to a newsletter by a Ukrainian artist with a relatively large following, whose Mailchimp footer claimed that she’s based in New York (Mailchimp requires to include one’s address in its footer). This sparked my curiosity, as not many artists can afford to have a studio space in Manhattan so imagine my surprise when I found out that it’s a fake address.

Well, so much for writing about authenticity, sharing your real emotions with your fans etc., when you feel compelled to fabricate a lifestyle you don’t lead.

Consequences of a fast art diet

We all know that fast food diet is unhealthy, as it leads to obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and various cardiovascular conditions. Given that 2 in 3 people eat fast food at least once a week, there is a lot of information available to make us aware of the consequences of such a diet. But it’s not just fast food that is problematic due to its omnipresence, there’s fast art too. And when I say “fast art”, I mean art that is poorly made and mindlessly consumed like fast food.

And just like it can be hard to make good choices about what to eat, given the availability of tempting ready-mades and processed food, and the lack of consensus in terms of nutritional value or danger of many food products, it’s harder and harder to find good art because it gets lost in the ocean of tackiness. Because of the easiness of faking one’s value, and the fact that social media platforms favour big numbers, the audience is bombarded by fast art only because their makers have invested in bot farms.

In an article for Glasstire, Christiana Rees explains exactly what “art” we’re talking about:

Remember when art’s chattering class worried about the “Art Fair”-ing of art? That all the younger artists flooding out of art schools (and some more seasoned artists who should know better) would strive to create instantly gettable, gimmicky, conceptual-lite work that a new collector could feel smart for “understanding” and buying from a booth at Frieze? It wasn’t idle worry. We’re surrounded by quick-take dreck that’s meant to be art. (…) Opportunistic non-artists are making “art”-looking things in increasing numbers, for an Instagram audience, and they have the Patreon accounts to back it up. Instagram levels the visual playing field between some of the smartest visual artists I know and some of the most contrived and insipid people I’ve ever come across.

Since this article was published, things have only got worse: now Instagram doesn’t level the visual field, it actually gives priority to those accounts with the largest following. Of course, having 30k followers on Instagram doesn’t mean these people actually make a living from their art. I personally know people who bought followers, I’ve seen accounts go from 300 followers to 30,000 within a few weeks, and I know that those artists have side jobs, and some of them have rarely sold a piece. So it’s a number that means exactly nothing. But: it gives visibility. And it can easily fool those who are influenced by metrics or can’t be bothered to discern the good from the bad.

One might ask: what’s the problem with someone buying a piece they genuinely like, no matter how amateurish and kitsch it is? For one thing, they’re often getting robbed — I could name several “galleries” and auction houses that wind up prices of tacky copycat art and thanks to clever marketing tricks and fancy packaging, sell it for hundreds of thousands of euros, just because they can. For another, if tacky art overfloods the market, then it’s hard to find valuable works. If galleries start going after sellable artists rather than investing in and promoting artists who challenge themselves and challenge their viewers, then artists who make a living from their art start feeling pressured to lower their standards (after all, everyone needs to eat) and the whole level of art drops. It’s a losing game.

And it’s not just art. What happens when, rather than paying a professional interior designer who graduated from an art or architecture school, people hire a cheaper “decorator” whose knowledge comes from Pinterest or a YouTube tutorial? Not only do they end up with a badly designed and often exceedingly impractical interior (believe me, I’ve seen what “decorators” can do, where the simple act of washing hands becomes a challenge because of a poorly chosen and badly placed sink), but this interior will shape the taste of the future generations. And those generations will be responsible for urban design, graphic design etc. So it’s not just a personal matter — a lack of education in art and aesthetics leads to omnipresent ugliness.

Instagram is filled with ads all looking the same — a painting inside a “mockup” interior (I’ve seen the same interior in a large number of posts), with some “inspirational” caption accompanying an often mediocre piece that would be at best met with an embarrassing smile at an entry exam to an art school. The Emperor’s naked but with enough of following, branding, and likes, people think they’re looking at a spectacular designer outfit.

When art becomes a backdrop: how social media affects art experience in museums

The other problem – and this is what prompted Scott Indrisek to delete his account — is that Instagram changes how we view art in museums.

It’s what happens when all art is Instagram art, when even a solo journey through a museum becomes an awkward threesome: you, the art, and your phone, with the whole world supposedly watching. This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. I’ve walked into exhibitions recently that left me entirely cold and unmoved, yet I’ve still dutifully snapped my own installation shot; that bland, modular arrangement of abstract, colored panels on the wall might be boring in person, but with the right angle and lighting, it’s thrilling on Instagram. Meanwhile, a painting or performance that’s guttingly beautiful IRL often doesn’t translate into the flat world of the app. Instead of enjoying the experience as it unfolds, I would find myself suddenly irate about the inability to capture and share that ineffable feeling.

Because of Instagram, we are starting to treat art we see in museums and galleries not as something to look at, ponder over, explore and research, but as an excuse to promote ourselves. The art becomes a cool backdrop, a striking filter that makes us look and seem more attractive. As Holly Williams wrote for The Independent, “no wonder the Insta art snap is popular: it’s a way of taking a selfie with added cultural capital, where the just-so backdrop is also proof of your excellent taste.”

The consequence of that is not just an inflated ego, but the fact that museums are now prioritizing “Insta-friendly” art which they know the visitors will want to photograph. And as much as I’d like to blame them I can’t: with limited funding, they need to sell tickets, and since more and more people are after Yayoi Kusama-like installations, that’s what they’ll be trying to get.

I’m just as guilty as everyone else. When 2 years ago I went to the Broad in Los Angeles, I also stood in the queue to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms and couldn’t resist snapping a picture. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but think that her installation had been purposefully set up for taking selfies. With thousands of people queuing up to take the exact identical photo and post it on Instagram, the art starts to become meaningless because the attention shifts from the object to its viewer. The photo becomes a wall tag, akin to these “I’ve been here [name] [date]” scribbles people leave in various tourist sites.

And all these exact same pictures get poured into the visual ocean of Instagram. One artist (who remains anonymous), was so fascinated by this phenomenon that she set up an @insta_repeat account where she makes compilations of the same shots she finds on the platform. In an interview for PhotoShelter, she explains her motivation for the project: “It’s this genre of adventurous and creative living, tagged with phrases like “liveauthentic” and “exploretocreate” that seems so ironic and thus an interesting target to me”. Explore to create the same stuff as everyone else.

Depressed narcissists: how social media affects artists

I’ve recently read a very interesting piece called “Why The Metrics on Social Media Platforms are Destroying Our Creativity”, where the author talks about the problem of confusing attention with accomplishment which directly stems from measuring the quality of work based on the social media metrics. “There are plenty of shitty books that have sold millions of copies. There are lousy podcasts that get millions of downloads. (…) It’s quick and easy to get attention. Compose a tweet, write a status update, and upload a picture with a clever caption. But it is harder and takes much longer to master your craft. That’s why billions of people choose the former over the latter every day. But in the long run, the latter is far more rewarding than the former.”

The problem is that while it’s all true, this lack of attention can badly affect artists, both in terms of their mental health (feeling discouraged when you can’t reach your audience without explicitly paying Instagram or Facebook) and their finances (if you make a living from selling your art and your sales drop because the algorithm is no longer showing your work to customers). Furthermore, social media encourages unhealthy comparisons, hate-following, trolling, ghosting etc. But the worst crime? It actually stops artists from making art because instead of spending time in our studio and giving ourselves time for reflection and experimentation, we’re compelled to “create content”.

And when we finally present a piece, perhaps something we’ve spent weeks or months working on, it disappears in the visual jungle.

Rees has a point when she says that while Instagram is good for showing photos of “consumer products — and décor, and people’s nice tanned shoulders, and illustration, and some excellent photojournalism — when it comes showing us art, it’s like a massive Serra sculpture being driven past your house at 200 miles an hour on the back of a flatbed truck: Yeah, I saw it, kinda. I guess. Okay. You saw it — on Instagram. Stay home, then.”

For this reason, when people ask me where they can see my work, my response is always: my website (or my studio). Many of my paintings don’t even fit into the 4:5 ratio, and cropping a painting is, well, a sacrilege. For me, Instagram is a mood board, where I share my interests, thoughts and artworks, finished or in-progress. But it’s not a portfolio and certainly not a place where people can get a comprehensive understanding of my painting.

Solutions

Some of the authors I quoted here advocate to quit Instagram. I don’t. What I do, however, recommend is using it mindfully, and by that I mean with full awareness of the ridiculous fakery that is going on it. There is absolutely no point worrying about the metrics. I have a small following and this hasn’t stopped me from connecting with new fans and selling my paintings to collectors around the world.

Also, there are tools that make using social media platforms a little bit less frustrating.

My favourite two are Chrome extensions, Antigram: Explore and Reels Blocker and Fluff Busting Purity. The former enables us to block Instagram’s most annoying functionalities so instead of being shown promoted contents, we actually see the posts of the people we follow. And the latter helps clean up and customise Facebook so it resembles how the platform used to look and function before Zuckerberg got greedy and started bombarding us with ads and all sorts of junk. Just by using these two extensions, you can radically improve the experience of using these social media platforms, and never be confronted with Zara Holland promoting Hydrogene Cyanide drink.

But the most important thing is to go offline and keep on making art – away from the noise, away from the ads, likes and numbers, with joy, dedication and authenticity.

Cover photo: Milada Vigerova via Unsplash