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I once watched a man wrap himself in cellophane and stand perfectly still in a Brooklyn gallery for three hours. It was called Preservation of the Ephemeral Self. The press release talked about commodity, transparency, the suffocation of modern identity. I thought it was brilliant. I also thought it was the kind of thing that… Continue reading The Algorithmic Gaze: How Social Media Decides What We Call Art

Let’s not kid ourselves. The art world has always been a rigged game. For centuries, a tiny priesthood of critics, curators, and rich patrons decided what hung on museum walls and what rotted in storage. But those velvet-rope gatekeepers have been shoved aside by something far more insidious, something that masquerades as democratic while quietly… Continue reading The Algorithm Is the New Art Critic—and It Has Terrible Taste

Let’s not kid ourselves: the feed is not a neutral gallery wall. It’s a ravenous, fidgety curator with one job—keep your thumb moving. It doesn’t care about your MFA, your gallery rep, or the conceptual scaffolding you spent six months building. It cares about dwell time, shares, and whether someone double-taps before their brain even… Continue reading The Feed Decides What Art Looks Like Now. Deal With It.

There’s a painting I think about all the time. It doesn’t hang in a museum. No placard, no donor’s name, no velvet rope. It lives on a screen, posted at 2:37 a.m. by an artist in São Paulo who’s never had a gallery show. A digital collage—layered, glitchy, half-abstract, half-figurative—and it stopped me cold. I… Continue reading The Algorithm’s Taste: How the Feed Is Quietly Rewriting What We Call Art

You think you choose the art you love. A painting grabs you in a gallery. A song stops you mid-scroll. A film leaves you gutted in a dark theater. But let’s be real: that first encounter is rarely a choice anymore. It’s a feed. And the feed has its own logic, its own rhythm, its… Continue reading Who Decides What’s Art? (Spoiler: It’s Not You)

I have a confession. Last Tuesday I lost 47 minutes to a TikTok of a woman sculpting butter into a swan. 2.3 million views, 400,000 likes, a comment section tripping over itself to call it “high art.” Meanwhile, a painter I follow—someone who spent six months on a single canvas trying to map the texture… Continue reading The Algorithm Is the Critic Now: How the Feed Decides What Art Even Is

Let’s not kid ourselves: the art world has always been a rigged game. For centuries, a handful of gatekeepers—critics, curators, patrons with deep pockets—decided what got the gilded frame and what got tossed into history’s attic. Then the 21st century rolled in promising a revolution. The internet, we were told, would democratize taste. Anyone with… Continue reading The Algorithmic Gaze: How Social Media Decides What Art Gets Seen (and What Gets Called Art)

Let’s just say it: the algorithm has more taste than you. Not more sensitivity, not a deeper grasp of art history, not soul—but more raw power to decide what flickers across your screen and burrows into your brain as “art.” I know this because last Tuesday at 2 a.m., Instagram served me a 15-second painting… Continue reading Algorithms Are the New Critics: How Social Media Decides What Gets Called Art

What we call art has always been a tug-of-war between makers, gatekeepers, and the people looking. But right now, the loudest gatekeeper doesn’t have a degree in art history, a curatorial statement, or a pulse. It’s a sorting system that cares about exactly one thing: engagement. Not beauty. Not difficulty. Not truth. Just engagement. And… Continue reading How the Algorithm Decides What Art Looks Like (And Why It Has Terrible Taste)

The feed doesn’t just show art—it sculpts it. (Photo by cottonbro / Pexels) You open Instagram. A watercolor jellyfish, glowing like a neon sacrament, floats past. Then a hyperrealistic charcoal eye, every tear duct rendered with the devotion of a Dutch master. Then a digital illustration of a girl with pink hair, crying binary code.… Continue reading The Algorithm Ate My Taste: How Social Media Decides What Art Looks Like