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. You double-tap. You scroll. The algorithm purrs. And somewhere, in a studio apartment with bad lighting and good intentions, an artist is watching the same feed, wondering if they should learn to draw that jellyfish, that eye, that crying cyborg girl.
We talk about algorithms like they’re neutral librarians, quietly shelving content based on our preferences. But they’re not passive. They’re more like talent scouts with a very specific, very boring vision of what a star looks like. And right now, they’re holding auditions for what gets to be called art.
The Feed as Curator, Critic, and Commissioning Editor
Before the feed, art had gatekeepers. Critics with elbow patches, gallerists with cold eyes, professors who could crush you with the word “derivative.” They were snobs, sure, but their snobbery was at least human-shaped. You could argue with it, seduce it, or defect from it entirely. The algorithm is different. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t have taste. It has metrics.
And those metrics—likes, shares, saves, dwell time—are not neutral measures of quality. They are proxies for engagement, which is itself a proxy for the emotional reactions that keep us scrolling: awe, outrage, lust, recognition. The algorithm learns that certain visual cues trigger these reactions more reliably. High contrast. Saturated colors. Faces, especially sad ones. Bodies, especially idealized ones. Familiar pop-culture references remixed just enough to feel clever. The result is a slow, invisible convergence. Not a conspiracy, but a convection current. Hot air rising.
I call it the Algorithmic Sublime: the aesthetic that emerges when millions of individual preferences are averaged into a single, frictionless goo. It’s not ugly. Often, it’s stunning. But it’s stunning in the way a casino lobby is stunning—designed to arrest, not to unsettle.
The New Academy: What the Algorithm Rewards
Let’s be specific. If you want your art to travel on the algorithmic winds, certain formal qualities help. Hyperdetail. Glossy rendering. A tight color palette that photographs well on a backlit screen. Subject matter that flatters the viewer’s self-image: empowerment mantras rendered in gold leaf, portraits of pop-culture icons, trauma repackaged as pastel surrealism. The algorithm loves legibility. It hates ambiguity. A painting that asks a question without answering it is a painting that doesn’t get saved, shared, or lingered on. It sinks.
This isn’t just about Instagram. TikTok’s algorithm is even more aggressive, because it doesn’t just rank content—it seeds it. A video of an artist applying gold leaf to a ceramic mug can rack up millions of views, spawning a thousand imitations within a week. The copies are not necessarily worse than the original. Sometimes they’re better. But they’re all responding to the same incentive structure: ASMR-adjacent process shots, sped-up or slowed-down just enough to hypnotize, with a reveal at the end that triggers a little dopamine pop. The algorithm becomes the brief. The artist becomes the fulfillment house.
This is not a moral failing of individual artists. It’s a rational response to a system that rewards certain formal choices with visibility and income. If you’re a young painter trying to pay rent, and you notice that your surrealist self-portraits get 200 likes while your fan art of Zendaya as a saint gets 20,000, you’re going to paint more Zendaya. You’d be irrational not to. The algorithm is a market, and markets shape supply.
The Death of the Difficult Object
What gets lost? The weird stuff. The slow stuff. The work that requires context, patience, or a willingness to be confused. I’m not romanticizing difficulty for its own sake—some art is just bad and calls itself challenging to avoid accountability. But there’s a whole ecology of artistic practice that depends on friction: the discomfort of not immediately understanding, the pleasure of revisiting, the shock of an image that doesn’t resolve into a shareable sentiment.
Social media platforms are friction-removal machines. They want you to keep scrolling, which means they want you to feel satisfied just long enough to move on to the next thing. An artwork that lingers in the mind like a splinter is bad for business. So the algorithm quietly deselects it. Not by banning it—that would be too obvious, too political—but by simply not showing it to many people. It withholds oxygen.
I think about the painter Amy Sillman, whose work is lumpy, awkward, full of false starts and corrections. It doesn’t photograph well. It doesn’t resolve into a crisp JPEG. It’s the kind of painting you need to stand in front of for ten minutes, letting your eyes adjust to its logic. On Instagram, it dies. In a museum, it can change your life. The algorithm cannot tell the difference between a masterpiece that requires time and a mediocre work that requires time. It just knows that both have low engagement, so both get buried.
The Rise of the Algorithm-Native Aesthetic
What’s emerging instead is an art made for the feed, by artists who have never known a world without it. This isn’t inherently bad. Every medium shapes its message; oil paint made the sfumato possible, the printing press made the novel possible, and the feed is making something possible too. The question is: what?
I see a few distinct genres crystallizing. There’s the Glossy Surrealist mode: digitally painted dreamscapes with impossible lighting, floating islands, figures with gold leaf halos, all rendered with the airtight perfection of a Pixar background. It’s surrealism without the unconscious—surrealism as interior decoration. There’s the Trauma Pop mode: confessional illustrations of mental health struggles, rendered in cute, marketable styles. Sad girls with speech bubbles. Skeletons hugging. The algorithm loves these because they combine vulnerability (high engagement) with visual sweetness (high shareability). They’re therapy as content.
Then there’s the Process Fetish genre: videos that show the making of a painting in hypnotic, sped-up loops. The final product matters less than the ASMR pleasure of watching paint spread, resin pour, or a palette knife scrape. The algorithm adores these because they hold attention through sheer sensory texture. But they also collapse the distinction between art and craft, between the object and the content about the object. The process video becomes the primary artwork. The physical painting, if it exists at all, is just a prop.
None of these genres are illegitimate. Some of the work is extraordinary. But they share a common DNA: they are designed to be consumed in under three seconds, understood instantly, and shared without friction. They are art as meme, and the meme is the native language of the feed.
When the Algorithm Becomes the Critic
Here’s where it gets truly strange. The algorithm doesn’t just shape what art gets seen—it shapes what art gets made, and then it shapes what art gets called art. I’ve watched this happen in real time. An artist posts a digital sketch. It flops. They post a process video of the same sketch. It goes viral. The sketch is now “a viral artwork.” The algorithm has spoken. The artist, understandably, makes more process videos. Their feed becomes a portfolio of performances, not objects. Their identity shifts from “painter” to “content creator.” The distinction isn’t semantic. It’s economic and existential.
This is where the old gatekeepers start to look almost quaint. A critic could pan your show, but you could still find your audience through word of mouth, through small magazines, through the slow burn of reputation. The algorithm doesn’t pan. It simply ignores. And being ignored by the algorithm is a kind of cultural death that no review can match. You don’t get a bad review. You get zero reviews. You become statistically insignificant.
So artists adapt. They learn to speak the algorithm’s language. They use the right hashtags, the right formats, the right color palettes. They post at the right times. They engage with the right trends. And in doing so, they internalize the algorithm’s preferences until those preferences feel like their own. This is the insidious part. It’s not censorship. It’s not even coercion. It’s a gentle, constant pressure that reshapes desire itself. You start out making what you love, and you end up loving what the algorithm rewards.
The Museum’s Uneasy Embrace
Institutions are not immune. Museums and galleries, desperate for relevance and young audiences, have started courting algorithmically successful artists. They see the follower counts, the engagement metrics, and they think: this is what people want. So they program it. They validate it. The feedback loop tightens. An artist gets a museum show because they’re Instagram-famous. They’re Instagram-famous because their work is optimized for Instagram. The museum show then generates more Instagram content, which further optimizes the work. The snake eats its tail.
I’m not arguing that popularity disqualifies art from seriousness. That would be snobbery of the worst kind. But I am arguing that the criteria for popularity on social media are fundamentally different from the criteria that have historically sustained art across time. Social media rewards immediacy. Art history rewards durability. A painting that goes viral today might be forgotten in six months, replaced by the next viral painting. A painting that sits in a museum for fifty years, slowly accruing meaning, is playing a different game entirely.
The danger is that we collapse these two games into one. That we start judging art by its shareability, its meme-ability, its capacity to generate a fleeting spike of attention. That we forget that some of the most important art of the past century—Rothko’s chapel, say, or Eva Hesse’s latex sculptures—would be an absolute disaster on TikTok.
What Survives the Scroll?
So what kind of art is built to last in this environment? I suspect it’s art that understands the algorithm but refuses to be determined by it. Art that uses the feed as a distribution channel without letting the feed dictate the product. Art that treats virality as a possible side effect, not a primary goal.
I think of artists like Hito Steyerl, who writes brilliantly about the circulation of images in digital networks while making work that is too dense, too essayistic, too slow to go viral. Her videos get shown in museums and biennials, not in Reels. But they shape the conversation. They infect the thinking of younger artists who then make the viral work. Influence flows in both directions. The algorithm is not a totalitarian regime; it’s a weather system. You can build structures that withstand it, or you can build kites that fly in it. Both are valid. But we should know the difference.
I also think of the painters who have quietly built careers on Instagram without capitulating to its aesthetic demands. They post process shots, yes, but their work remains strange, unresolved, resistant to the easy double-tap. They cultivate small, devoted audiences rather than chasing mass engagement. They treat the platform as a studio window, not a stage. It’s a harder path, slower, less rewarded by the metrics. But the work that emerges from it tends to have bones.
The Viewer’s Responsibility
Here’s the part where I turn the lens on you, dear scroller. The algorithm is not a force of nature. It’s a machine built by engineers to maximize ad revenue, and it learns from your behavior. Every time you pause on a glossy surrealist portrait and scroll past a grainy photograph of a performance art piece, you’re casting a vote. You’re training the model. You’re telling the machine: more of this, less of that.
I’m not saying you should performatively like challenging art to prove your sophistication. That’s just another kind of posture. But I am saying that attention is a resource, and how you spend it has downstream effects. If you want an art world that’s more than a content farm, you have to actively seek out the weird, the slow, the difficult. You have to leave the feed. Go to galleries. Buy strange little books from independent publishers. Subscribe to artists’ newsletters. Sit with a painting until it stops making sense and starts making something else.
The algorithm is a mirror that reflects our collective attention back at us, polished and prettified. If we don’t like what we see, we can’t just blame the mirror. We have to change what we’re showing it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does social media actually change what kind of art gets made?
Absolutely. Artists respond to incentives like anyone else. When certain styles, formats, or subjects consistently get more visibility and sales through social platforms, artists adapt their practice—consciously or not—to meet that demand. The result is a convergence toward algorithm-friendly aesthetics: high contrast, saturated color, instantly legible subject matter, and a preference for digital or digitally-mediated work that photographs well on a screen.
Is art that performs well on social media inherently worse?
Not at all. Popularity and quality are not opposites. Some algorithmically successful art is brilliant, technically masterful, and emotionally resonant. The problem is that the algorithm’s definition of “success” is narrow—it rewards work that generates quick, measurable engagement. Art that requires contemplation, context, or discomfort often fails to trigger those metrics, regardless of its quality. The algorithm isn’t a critic; it’s a popularity contest with a very specific scoring system.
Can artists resist the algorithm’s influence?
Yes, but it requires intention and often sacrifice. Artists can treat social media as a tool rather than a master—using it for distribution while protecting their creative process from its feedback loops. This might mean accepting slower growth, smaller audiences, or less income in the short term. It also means building alternative support systems: grants, teaching, commissions, or direct patronage through platforms that don’t rely on engagement metrics. Resistance is possible, but it’s not easy, and it’s not equally available to everyone.
What can viewers do to support art that isn’t algorithm-friendly?
Seek it out deliberately. Follow artists whose work challenges you. Visit physical exhibitions. Buy art directly from artists when you can. Share work that you find difficult or strange, even if it doesn’t fit the viral template. Talk about art in ways that go beyond “I love this” or “this is so satisfying.” Your attention is a signal. Use it to amplify the signals you want to see more of in the world.