It’s Time To Burn Trends At The Stake
The easy accessibility of visual arts is unprecedented. The internet— more specifically, social media— has had a heavy hand in reducing the gap in exposure between established and budding artists.
The activation energy needed to engage with established artists in the pre-internet was higher than it is now (with work being most available in libraries and museums), nonetheless, this accessibility easily eclipsed non-famous artists. To gain a foothold, lesser-known artists would have to engage in aggressive word-of-mouth networking, pursue gallery showings, and host events. It was an uphill battle.
Enter social media. While the framework for virtually every social network was built around generating ad revenue and pushing products— and data harvesting, of course— this was much less present at the origin of most platforms. There was, in fact, a time when Instagram wasn’t pay-to-play. Remember when the feed was chronological? As of 2021, advertisements account for approximately one-fifth of the pieces of content you see on the platform. If you head over to the app right now, you likely won’t make it four posts (or story swipes) without crossing past a paid ad. Chances are, you didn’t even notice. While this has its own set of topics to explore in a separate article, here, it simply serves as an example of the platform’s slippery slope toward pay-to-play.
In the distant history of these platforms, it was a level playing field. The algorithms were young, inexperienced, and not yet hyper-tailored. This was fertile ground for undiscovered artists to rush to the scene with far better chances at establishing a platform.
Yet somewhere along the way, it took a nosedive. Rapidly cycling trends came onto the scene. These aren’t the decade-long periods (or longer) you can parse out when walking through a modern art gallery. No, these cycle in mere months, and they don’t age well.
Creativity, emulation, and being prolific are all great qualities, but given the right spin, they’ve led to an incredibly reductive online space. Consider the following “strengths” of social media, and their lesser-discussed dark underbellies.
Online forums are great for instant feedback. This is something that sounds right but is functionally off base. Real conversations are not occurring within artists’ Instagram comment section. Instead, they’re littered with single-word responses, which are hardly constructive, but rather a way to trip the Instagram algorithm into seeing the commenter as an active community member. These are not real interactions.
Social channels encourage artists to actively put out content. Exactly. It’s pushed creatives to see visual arts as quick pieces of “content” instead of crafted artworks. It places less value on careful, considerate choices of what to release, and replaces this intentionality with rapid-fire release to win over the silent approval of The Algorithm (which is now some kind of infamous entity).
It gives artists a voice. The average time spent viewing each Instagram post is 1.9 seconds. Socials inundate you with so much information at once that our attention span plummets, and any shred of analysis of artwork goes out the window. Instead, users spew out context-less posts with one-sentence captions and a block of hashtags. On the off chance that a creator takes the time to write a thoughtful caption, they’re immediately fighting the 1.9-second syndrome. Not to mention that an estimated 10% of one’s followers even see the post. Let’s do the math: not even two seconds spent on viewing a post that only a sliver of one’s followers will see. You’re better off walking around the street waving your artwork around in the air.
Social media provides inspiration and fuels creativity. We’ve arrived at the key issue. I have a fundamental disagreement with this assertion. Social media fuels jumping in on trends. Very little of the content out there is ever built upon enough to warrant any sort of evolution from the initial idea itself. It may be entertaining, but that's about as far as it climbs. While emulation is an excellent tool for crafting technical skills and experimenting with style, individuality isn’t rewarded. It’s penalized. The Algorithm pushes out trends to audiences because it knows they’ll be eaten up. If you start posting images outside of your norm— or norms The Algorithm has learned your followers will enjoy— you might as well be talking to an empty room. The Algorithm is smart, and disturbingly so. Unfortunately, this suspends one’s ability to break out of trend-based content if they’d like to keep platform momentum.
It’s time to burn trends at the stake. As they may help to jumpstart the creative juices, they also keep artists in an iron grip to keep with trends to be seen. Trends erode one’s ability to differentiate oneself from other players in the market. It signals that you can create tweaked copies, but are unable to build your own ideas from the ground up.
“Trends” of the past weren’t trends, they were movements. Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism weren’t a train to hop on. They were complex concepts with room to evolve and iterate. They weren’t cast to the side months later when everyone decides it’s time to move on.
While I find understanding social media to be an essential skill, I find it to be a better tool for advertisers and brands to control the way they’re perceived and quietly position themselves in the mind of users. I don’t find it a useful tool for artists who don’t have an extensive budget to play the game with.
Artists of the future will divorce social platforms as a primary means to house their artwork and move to spaces where they can create and release on their own terms. They’ll break out of the complacency of hyper-specific guidelines and contributing to white noise, and instead choose to push their craft toward something that will withstand the test of time. Or at least, the memorable ones.