Making Art in the Age of the Algorithm
When did being an Instagram artist become this hard?
The algorithm! Artificial arbiter of value, more sacred to Instagram artists than the muses of old, the pollice verso by which our online art career lives or dies. We stood around its rim and poured out libations of our precious time and sacred hobbies. We hurled into it acrylic markers, tablet styluses, masking fluid, and gouache palettes. We watched the cauldron bubble and run bright with ink and then we went home, where in private we burnt effigies of Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri. We awoke the next day and checked the Explore page to see if our offerings had been acceptable, only to find that it had chosen instead a 14-year-old in Minnesota who’d drawn some dog with a cape and, disturbingly, a perfectly styled mullet. The dog stared out at us, grinning from its revered position in the upper-left corner of our screens.
“The algorithm!” we cursed when we saw the dog with a cape. The dog had done nothing wrong, and we were happy for the 14-year-old. We were once that 14-year-old, content to draw portrait after portrait of slightly-varied Zootopia fanart. But we wondered: should we hide the ways that we’d moved on? Should we keep to ourselves the fact that now Art Nouveau was more inspiring than anthropomorphic otters or the cute-core rainbow unicorns of Lisa Frank? Lisa Frank seemed to be what the people wanted. Or perhaps the people wanted Lisa Frank because that was what the algorithm served.
How did it know? Do algorithms have eyes? Do they prefer certain shades of orange? We pondered this privately, and then set off on our individual experiments. When I reverted to painting Lisa Frank, it seemed the algorithm could detect that I’d given up. You need to be passionate about this it hissed at me and then glided away on its mysterious course.
I started my Instagram art account, @vossanova, eight years ago. The app was fun back then, or so I remember — it gave me enough to be nostalgic about, at least. It was an uncomplicated escape from AP homework: I posted an uncoordinated spate of watercolor birds and photos of my chickens and videos of myself playing the piano. I captioned my art with embarrassing and irrelevant song lyrics. The account was an eclectic nest of ideas and experiments, and somehow, within six months, it grew to 4000 followers.
For all of the account’s naive joy, it was equally an experiment in gratification. My art had spent the last several years lurking on the edges of DeviantArt (“the world’s largest online art community,” or so it claimed), where, once every few weeks, it might be noticed by a single stranger. On Instagram, an algorithm propelled my artwork onto hundreds of strangers’ “Explore” pages instantly. The affirmation, which came through likes and comments and follows and gifts, was intoxicating. I kept up a relentless post schedule. My art, and the time I spent on it, felt real for the first time.
I abandoned the account after about a year, when I traded long evenings painting for even longer nights studying. I occasionally stole hours from my studies to paint, but my hobby would never be the same. For the next five years, I was burdened by a dull gnawing that I needed to show some proof of my identity as an artist — how thrilling and worthwhile it had been to turn my precious free time into something validated by thousands of strangers! But I didn’t have time to keep up with the demands of the platform. Although few noticed my absence, equally powerful was the guilt I felt for abandoning my little community of followers and friends, and that was enough to keep me from going back.
During the pandemic, I at last worked up the energy to return to @vossanova, which had rotted away to 2000 followers. I painted feverishly to make up for the years I had spent privately. I painted feverishly because that was what this newer, hungrier algorithm demanded, and I needed it to like me if I wanted this account to grow again. I became addicted to my art in a way I never had the time to before; it began feeling less like a hobby and more and more like a mental illness.
Within a year, I had created over 400 paintings. The algorithm recognized me as a dutiful worker (not an artist, but a “content creator”), and my account grew to over 17k followers. The app’s demands for content occupied most of my day, and for a time I could meet them. The attention, almost as exhilarating as it had been all those years ago, justified its steep cost. But on some nights, surrounded by hundreds of tiny postcard paintings, I began to think wistfully of the large, experimental drawings I had created in years past. Skill and improvement often seemed beside the point on a platform that demanded evidence of production for every ounce of my free time. I gave up creating big paintings, knowing that nobody would drink them deeply—not when there was a never-ending tasting flight by other artists, whose works they could lightly sip.
My disenchantment with the app grew as I felt it pressuring me to create videos. TikTok’s addicting algorithm was outshining Instagram’s at every turn, and Instagram passed on its desperation to its users. It began showing my art to only a fraction of my followers after “allowing” it be seen for several months in 2021, and my account stopped growing. Videos, when I posted them, got the kind of engagement that my artwork once did. Thinking of original content took enough work. I resented that I now needed to learn video editing.
I continued posting every day; I engaged with everything that I was supposed to until I couldn’t anymore, and then my numbers began to fall. I adjusted again and again to my ever-dwindling engagement. My “Creator Insights” reported to me that my content was reaching only 15% of my own followers, and thinking about the app became paralyzing. I stopped opening it.
I know exactly why Instagram no longer favors my art: I am now so tired, and there are too many valuable ways to spend my last year in college. When I have time to paint, I am no longer content just to paint a fox in a white field, and the algorithm can tell. I have stopped engaging with it, and it stopped engaging with me.
In theory, the algorithm operates simply: it is optimized to keep users engaged with the platform for as long as possible. This metric favors the cute, the relatable, the accessible, and above all else, the filmable. This is perhaps why my most popular post ever was a video of me peeling masking tape off a wall mural I painted, which hit 2016’s market for “satisfying” 30-second content just right. (It wasn’t the art itself that people liked, it was the clean, straight edge left underneath the tape. “So relaxing,” I was told again and again, “art ASMR.”)
Most days, though, I believe that the algorithm is optimized to make me hate my art.
To be an artist on Instagram is to create art for thumbnails and grids. Successful internet art often provokes an instantaneous pleasure, justifying its worth to the algorithm within seconds. Few can get away with art that necessitates more than a few seconds of thought. Classic masters like Michelangelo might be tremendously skilled, but I wondered whether they’d succeed on this platform — you can’t fit the Sistine Chapel into a tiny square.
My paintings are dense and bright and will look pretty if you post them to your story. Few have backgrounds, and even fewer have any of the elements of “fine” art: shadow, light, or a remote understanding of space and gravity. They’re often just pieces of design, floating in white space, stylized in a way that only the internet can digest. There’s a reason that tattoo artists do so well on Instagram, and it’s because this is an art form they mastered long ago, halfway covering blank spaces with designs dictated by their clients.
I don’t want to give the impression that I believe the type of art found on Instagram is inferior in any way to the type of art found in the “real world” — quite the contrary. I believe that online artists, whose medium is pixels, are some of the most creative the world has to offer. There are many “minimalist” artists that I find hugely inspirational (rfskia, xintoii, faunwood); some of my favorite artists have created extremely moving art using the constraints of Instagram itself (mapartche, rhymes.y, dionne_ong); there are many digital artists whose sheer talent cannot be contained by Instagram’s tiny squares (loisvb, pix_bun). Many artists continue finding success on the platform. And make no mistake — I am proud of my own art too, despite the ways that the algorithm has pressured me. I take tremendous joy from painting, even after all these years and how cramped my hand has become.
Still, I think often of what my art would be if I spent these hours privately, if I were born a few decades earlier with the same eye and sense of style and was driven by a desire to grow as an artist rather than an obsession to grow my numbers. I’m not sure that, one hundred years ago, my art would even be recognizable as art to people who couldn’t understand the platform in which it exists. I suspect they’d wonder why I painted so many tigers in minimalist beds of fallen leaves. Even though my art makes me happy, I know that it isn’t museum art or traditional art in any sense. The artistic communities that shaped it were born on the internet and rely on fiber-optic technology for motivation to exist, just as much as for inspiration.
In pleasing the algorithm — the content written around this could be considered its own cottage industry — you can begin obsessing over superstitious details, like posting at the right time of day, or photographing the right ratio of art-to-desk, or including just the right keywords in your caption. One of the reasons I’m bad at Instagram is because it wants me to post captions that describe what I’ve painted so that it can determine whether or not it’s relevant, but all I want to say are things like “Read my taxes: no new lips,” or “whatever you do don’t smell your toenail clippings.” For a platform that so brazenly steals features from other, more successful apps, it turns out that Instagram doesn’t like when you treat it like Twitter.
Of course, an algorithm is just a way of processing inputs. There are real people out there somewhere, possessed by seemingly volatile interests, glancing at my art and occasionally deciding to pick a fight with my intentionally provocative captions. It is their attention that is held hostage, and my art is somehow the weapon.
I know I am complicit in all this, too. I like things with bright colors and simple shapes; my tastes and the subsequent paintings they inform are completely devoid of any sort of artistic philosophy beyond my gut impulse. On the best of days I wonder how much time the artists in my feed — many of them my friends — must have spent to bring me a fleeting moment of enjoyment. How I wished to be able to paint like that! And I would scroll on, occasionally awarding the highest honor that I could: a “save” for future reference.
After acquiring Instagram in 2012, Facebook began slowly releasing its new algorithms to solve a problem of attention optimization that didn’t actually exist. I didn’t join the platform until 2014, and I didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of some of the changes (the shift from chronological to algorithmic feeds; the increased frequency of ads). My art seemed to be doing fine, so I only passively observed other artists discussing rumors that the algorithms were crafted not by programmers, but by an AI that “updated itself” to select for content maximizing user attention and engagement.
I understand their worries now, as I watch old art friends leave the platform. I’ve learned for myself the subtle, insidious ways that Instagram milks its “creators” for content. Despite the company’s public statements describing why some images are favored above others, the forces that govern the algorithm remain mercurial and mysterious even today.
Instagram is losing at its own game, though. It was recently announced that Meta, Instagram’s parent company, lost half a trillion dollars since the start of 2022. Studies began confirming what any teenager can tell you, which is that Instagram is awful for the self-esteem of youth, and probably for everyone else too. (Little’s been written about the plight of Instagram artists, but as a once-teenage girl and present-day artist, I can confirm that the experience is similar.) Instagram seems to be going the way of attention-intensive, low-return platforms like Facebook, and I suspect that’s why it began to cannibalize itself, trying everything to remain relevant, throttling creator and small business growth and promising redemption through in-platform paid advertising.
I don’t think that any of this is as simple as a deviously-targeted campaign to prey on artists, of course. In fact, I don’t think that Instagram thinks of its art community at all. I don’t think Instagram realizes Instagram is now the biggest art community in the world, and I believe this is a reflection of the way that the internet itself devalues art.
Online artists, especially small artists, are expected to be accessible and pleasant and flexible in a way that I believe is remarkable even among influencers. Our art, especially our digital art, is seen as disposable. It’s stolen for album art, for NFTs, for advertising and commercial products, for reposting, and rarely is it ever attributed to us. Sometimes we’re even expected to be grateful for the “exposure” that such thievery affords. We’re expected to post every day and to work for free, for the joy of it, as if having a few thousand followers is reward in itself. How indecorous to bite the hand that feeds us! Meanwhile, the few places that allow an online artist to monetize, such as Etsy and Redbubble, slowly have been upping fees and fines, while emulating Instagram’s heavy demands for creator engagement.
I’ve watched all this unfold. Artists shared grassroots campaigns in their stories, protesting each change and sharing tips to increase engagement, but their efforts seemed futile to me. I reflected on the ways that art has always been a question of patronage and constraint, even in da Vinci’s time, and was this any different? Wasn’t our biggest patron an arbitrary code? I reflected on the ways that the platform had encouraged me to be passive, to feed it my time and desperation while expecting less and less in return. It had been a long time since it’d given anything back to me, or had let me reach the people who had encouraged me to paint in the first place.
I thought about leaving again and again. But I couldn’t.
Maintaining an art account, even poorly, takes effort, and the fact that I am still here proves to me that there is still something that I gain from the community that I’ve found on Instagram, even as it takes more and more effort to reach them. It’s more amorphous than attention. It has to do with the way that, for over a decade now, art has become inextricable from the internet for me. It’s how I’ve learned to see new things. It’s how I’ve been inspired to try new techniques. It’s shaped my sense of style and beauty. It’s where I’ve found friends who have helped me grow.
I can’t claim anything more dramatic than that the internet has ruined my hobby, and I can’t even claim that. I’ve benefitted from my short time in the sun: I’ve made a few thousand dollars in commissions and prints and I am in awe that there are tens of thousands of people out there who care about my journey as an artist. My literary agent found me through my Instagram account, and now my first book is out on submission. I don’t know if there’s an endgame for all of this, but if there were, writing a book would be it. It shouldn’t matter that I am angry at some corporate entity, because I’ve gotten everything that I ever could have wanted from it. But I’m angry.
I hate that now I have to work so hard just for the chance of reaching the people who already followed me. I hate that I care so much about my numbers and the electric guts of the machine. I hate that I have bought into a system where the things I create to be beautiful are reduced to just another piece of content to keep users of an uncaring platform engaged for one more instant. I hate that nothing has cost me my artistic joy more than being an artist on the internet, but I also know that I wouldn’t be an artist if it weren’t for the internet.
This is what I think most deeply about. I signed with my agent on the promise that my first few books — if they ever sold — would be picture books. Every day I am grateful that someone believes in me enough to represent me, but I also worry that I’ve made an impossible promise; it’s as if I’ve written a moderately-successful tweet and now am being asked to write a novel. Because of the internet, I have the opportunity to finally paint an entire story, maybe an entire world, but my art, being shaped by the internet, feels inadequate for the task ahead.
But as an artist on the internet, you learn to adapt. You adapt to new ideas, to new platforms, to new ways of creating art. It’s been so long since I’ve let myself think beyond the canvas of a 4”x4” square, and now, inspired by the stories I’ve been asked to tell, I find myself creating miniature universes. I bought a new set of liquid watercolors and have been slowly teaching myself a new medium, gradually deepening each painting and trying to infuse life into the characters to which I once committed only a few brush strokes. I paint stars now. I am learning about the way that light shines through leaves. I find myself minding less that I am painting so slowly and that my experiments are received so quietly.
I’ll stay here as long as I can, because the world is bigger this way. I think that my artwork will always be connected to the internet, because that is how it has reached people, and people are what have given it meaning. I’ve sent my art to fellow Berkeley students in quarantine, painting them tiny vignettes of campus. I’ve memorialized beloved pets; I’ve traded with artists a decade older and a decade younger than me. Since 2020, I have sent away some 250 paintings to strangers, and now my art decorates the walls in over 25 countries.
An old art friend reached out to me the other day. She told me that she’d followed my art all these years, and it was what inspired her to keep making art of her own. That’s real. That’s worthwhile. That’s why I’ve stayed.
