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 the little glowing rectangle. You post it. And then you wait, refreshing like a lab rat hoping for a pellet, for the machine to decide if what you made is actually art.
We pretend the gatekeepers are gone. The critics, the gallerists, the old-money patrons who decided that a shark in formaldehyde was worth more than your entire neighbourhood. We toppled them, supposedly, with the democratising force of the share button. But what crawled into the vacant throne is far more efficient, far more invisible, and it doesn’t even pretend to have taste. It has metrics. The algorithm has become the most powerful art critic in the world, and it writes its reviews in engagement rates, watch time, and whether your video loops at least three times.
The Feed as the New Salon
Think of the Paris Salon of the 19th century. A sprawling, floor-to-ceiling cramming of paintings, where acceptance by the jury meant visibility and rejection meant obscurity, or worse, a career in decorative house painting. The Salon dictated taste, not because it was right, but because it controlled the wall. Today, the wall is the feed. Instagram, TikTok, X—these are our salons. The jury is a set of opaque mathematical functions trained not on aesthetic theory but on the raw, twitching data of human attention. A Courbet-level scandal today isn’t a painting of a working-class funeral; it’s a video of someone pouring resin on a Dorito that gets 4 million views and spawns a thousand imitators within a week.
This isn’t just a shift in distribution. It’s a shift in ontology. Art, under the algorithmic regime, is no longer a thing you make and then show. It becomes a thing you perform for a score. The work isn’t finished when the paint dries; it’s finished when the engagement graph flattens into a long, grey tail of indifference. A painter I know started timing her studio sessions to coincide with peak posting hours. She wouldn’t put brush to canvas until she had a ring light set up to capture the process, the satisfying peel of masking tape, the dramatic final reveal. The painting became the byproduct; the content was the real piece.
The Performance of Process
You see this everywhere now. The art video has calcified into genre. The close-up of the palette knife scraping impasto across linen, the slow pan across a meticulously arranged still life of thrifted objects, the audio track of a lo-fi beat or a breathy voiceover explaining the meaning. The algorithm has learned that process is more compelling than product. Watching something come into being triggers a different kind of attention, a narrative hook that a static JPEG of a finished painting simply can’t compete with. So artists adapt. They become documentarians of their own hands. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, it makes a sound. If a painting is made off-camera and posted without a Reel, it may as well not exist.
This isn’t a moral failing of the artist. It’s a rational response to an environment that rewards constant visibility. The tragedy is what this reward structure leaves behind. The slow, ugly, necessary work. The work that doesn’t film well. The painting that needs to be sat with in silence, in person, where the scale and the surface and the smell of the oil medium do their quiet, cumulative work. That kind of art is not algorithm-friendly. It is a bad content animal. It doesn’t loop. It doesn’t trigger a reaction in 1.5 seconds. And so it drifts to the bottom of the feed, and eventually, to the bottom of the culture.
The Aesthetics of the Scroll
Algorithms don’t just decide what gets seen; they sculpt what gets made. They have an aesthetic. You can spot it instantly: high contrast, saturated colours, a composition that works even when blurred in peripheral vision, a subject that can be decoded in a fraction of a second. Think of the Instagram mural. Not the illegal, messy kind on a freight train, but the commissioned, hyper-realistic portrait of a woman with flowers growing out of her head, painted on the side of a coffee shop. It is technically impressive, instantly legible, and emotionally frictionless. It is content-engineered to stop a thumb.
This is the aesthetic of what the critic Brad Troemel once called “athletic aesthetics”—work that signals virtuosity without conveying any unsettling idea. The algorithm loves it. It is shareable without being controversial. It is beautiful without being difficult. It is, in the most damning sense, nice. The problem isn’t that this work exists; the problem is that it becomes the default. Young artists, absorbing the lessons of the feed as naturally as they once absorbed the lessons of art history, learn that success looks like a certain kind of smooth, photogenic labour. The glitch, the abject, the genuinely weird—these things can still break through, but often as a spectacle, a meme, a viral freakshow that is consumed and discarded before anyone asks what it means.
The Memeification of Meaning
Consider the fate of a challenging artwork in this ecosystem. A dense, layered installation about colonial memory and archival violence. It opens at a gallery. Someone snaps a photo of the most visually striking element, a pile of rusted keys perhaps, and posts it with a caption: “This is so powerful.” The image is cropped into a square. The colour grade is tweaked. It floats out into the feed, divorced from its wall text, its context, its argument. People like it because the image, now just an aesthetic object, is pleasingly melancholic. The meaning is sanded down to fit the format. The work becomes a mood, a vibe, a background for a quote about resilience. The algorithm has performed its ultimate trick: it has turned a complex political argument into a pin on a digital mood board.
This flattens art criticism into a binary. Work is either a soothing visual ASMR or a hot take that fuels a day of discourse. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with something that is ambivalent, that holds two contradictory ideas at once, that asks you to sit in discomfort without offering a clear moral. It wants clarity. It wants a takeaway. And so artists, even the smart ones, start to bake the takeaway into the work. They make art that acts as its own press release, its own explainer thread. The painting comes with a caption that tells you exactly how to feel, lest the algorithm misunderstand and bury it.
The New Gatekeepers Wear Hoodies
Let’s not romanticise the old gatekeepers. The gallery system was, and is, a rigged game of class, race, and geography. But at least the gatekeepers were visible. You could hate them by name. The algorithm’s power lies in its invisibility, its pretense of neutrality. “We just show people what they want to see,” the tech companies say, as if desire is a pure, pre-existing thing and not something they actively manufacture. The algorithm is a mirror, yes, but a funhouse mirror, warping and distorting what it reflects, amplifying the loudest and most reactive signals until they drown out everything else.
This creates a perverse kind of artistic monoculture. A painter in Lagos and a painter in Los Angeles, both trying to build an audience, find themselves gravitating toward the same subjects, the same palettes, the same formats. Not because they are unoriginal, but because they are responding to the same set of incentives. The algorithm rewards familiarity with a twist—something recognisable enough to stop a scroll, novel enough to justify a like. The result is a globalised visual language that is increasingly legible and increasingly empty. It is art as Esperanto, a perfectly functional, perfectly soulless tool for saying nothing much at all.
Can the Algorithm Be Gamed Back?
Artists, being artists, have tried to turn the weapon on itself. There is a lineage of work that treats the algorithm as medium, not just distribution. Think of the artist who bought thousands of fake followers to see if the perceived social proof would lead to real gallery interest. Or the collective that scripts bots to write and post automated poetry, flooding the feed with machine-generated sincerity. These gestures are sharp, funny, and fleeting. They get written up in a few art blogs, earn a knowing nod from the terminally online, and then disappear into the same algorithmic churn they critique. The machine is too vast. It absorbs critique as content. A scathing video essay about the emptiness of TikTok art is, itself, a piece of TikTok content, subject to the same metrics, the same need to perform virality.
The more interesting resistance might be a quiet one. A retreat. Not a Luddite smashing of the looms, but a deliberate, stubborn cultivation of spaces that the algorithm cannot see. The private Discord server, the group chat, the monthly potluck where artists show work to each other in a living room, without an iPhone in sight. These spaces are not legible to the data miners. They produce no engagement metrics. They are, from the perspective of the platform, a black hole. And in that darkness, maybe, the truly weird work can still grow. The work that doesn’t know how to be a post. The work that is too slow, too ugly, too private to survive the feed, but which might, if we let it, survive us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is social media ruining art?
No, but it’s reshaping it so fundamentally that our old criteria for judgment are creaking. Social media isn’t a toxin that poisons art; it’s an environment that selects for certain traits, like high visual impact and narrative clarity, while weeding out others, like ambiguity and slow-burn contemplation. Art isn’t being ruined. It’s evolving, and as with any evolution, some beautiful, strange creatures are being left behind in the fossil record.
Can an artist ignore the algorithm and still succeed?
Define “succeed.” If success means a quiet, sustainable practice, a small group of dedicated supporters, and the freedom to make exactly what you want, then yes, absolutely. The algorithm is only a tyrant if you are playing its specific game of mass visibility. There are plenty of artists who have opted out of the content hamster wheel and are doing vital work. They just aren’t famous on the internet, which, to the algorithm, is the same as not existing.
Does the algorithm just reflect what people actually want to see?
That’s the comforting lie the platforms tell. In reality, the algorithm is an active shaper of taste. It doesn’t just show you what you like; it teaches you what to like by repeatedly exposing you to variations on a theme. Over time, your preferences are sculpted by what the algorithm chooses to surface, which is based on what keeps you on the platform, not what is necessarily good, true, or beautiful. It’s a feedback loop, not a mirror.
What kind of art does the algorithm favour?
Broadly, art that is visually striking in a thumbnail, emotionally immediate, and easily digestible in under three seconds. Think hyper-realistic portraiture, satisfying process videos (paint mixing, palette knife work), and work that leans into trending audio or meme formats. The algorithm struggles with work that requires context, time, or physical presence. A massive, textured Rothko, for example, is a terrible Instagram post but a transcendent physical experience.