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

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)

There is a particular kind of madness that descends when you stare at a canvas that has spent three months being whispered to, fought with, and coaxed into something resembling a truth. You clean your brushes, you stare some more, and then you photograph it. Not for the archive, not for the portfolio, but for… Continue reading The Algorithmic Easel: How Social Media Shapes What Gets Called Art

Here’s a hot take you can slap on a sampler and loop until it distorts: the best music writing of the last two decades barely cares what a song says. It’s not in the rhyme schemes, the diary-page confessions, the meticulously annotated genius pages. It’s in the frequencies. The textures. The choices made in rooms… Continue reading Why the Most Interesting Music Writing Is About Production Not Lyrics

Let’s commit a tiny act of sacrilege right up front: lyrics are pretty much the least interesting part of any song. I know—someone just death-gripped their annotated To Pimp a Butterfly and let out a small, horrified gasp. But stay with me. When we obsess over what a singer is saying, we miss the real… Continue reading Why the Most Interesting Music Writing Is About Production, Not Lyrics

Confession from someone who writes about culture for a living: I barely know what most of the songs I love are actually about. If you backed me into a corner and demanded a line-by-line breakdown of a Missy Elliott track, I’d probably just start beatboxing and pray you let it slide. And still, I’ve spent… Continue reading Forget the Lyrics—the Real Magic Lives Inside the Mix

The Difference Between Curation and Gatekeeping By Zara Okonkwo | April 7, 2025 There’s a sliver of time, somewhere between scrolling past a studio-lit avocado toast and a grainy meme of a cat processing the raw sting of betrayal, when you register that someone—or some thing—paved the road your eyes are traveling. Maybe it was… Continue reading The Difference Between Curation and Gatekeeping

The album cover used to be a sacred object. A 12-by-12-inch gatefold sermon, the thing you stared at while the needle wobbled through the first crackly seconds of side A. It made promises, spun myths, and occasionally started fights in record stores. Now, it’s a thumbnail. A sad little square on a screen, flicked past… Continue reading How Album Covers Became the Most Overlooked Visual Art Form

The Tyranny of the ‘What Does It Mean?’ Question Sooner or later, it happens. A gallery, a cinema, a friend’s abstract painting series on Instagram—someone tilts their head and asks the question that curdles creativity: “But what does it mean?” They mean well, usually. They’re scared of looking uncultured. They want the decoder ring, a… Continue reading Why You Should Stop Asking What Art Means and Start Asking What It Does

You know that sinking feeling. You’re scrolling, thumb moving like a metronome, and a painting appears—a Caravaggio, maybe, or a Basquiat. It’s been cropped into a square, topped with a quote pulled from a Pinterest board, and it’s floating between an ad for keto gummies and a reel of a dog using a talking button… Continue reading The Problem With Treating Art as Content Instead of Conversation