TLDR: I go the long way around saying that I am of the opinion that the art world needs a new alternative to Instagram, but I don’t know what the alternative is.
The thrumming of my ‘alarm watch’ wakes me, my wrist vibrating distantly.
I have three alarms set: 5:00, 6:00 and 7:00 am. 5:00 am is for painting, 6:00 am is for less painting and 7:00 am is the deadline – get the kids up now or we’ll all be late.
I’ve no idea which one this is until the focus creeps back to my eyes. 5:00 am.
I manoeuvre myself off the bed, aiming for minimal back pain. I unfold, gently, till I’m standing more or less straight – and shuffle over to the bedroom door, wiggling into my dressing-gown on the way.
I descend the stairs, consciousness gradually winning the battle with sleep. I head into the kitchen and flick the kettle on. Living room next to open the dog’s crate. He doesn’t emerge. He rarely does before 10:00 am. While I’m there, I grab my art caddy from under my desk and then head back to the kitchen.
I put the caddy on the kitchen peninsula and retrieve the panel I’m working on from behind the dining table. I wonder briefly why kitchen stuff is named after landmasses. Islands and peninsulas. Perhaps I should name ours, stake my claim.
I make myself a cup of coffee and begin. I’m at the latter stage of this painting, layering up highlights and shadows while scrubbing and scraping away paint to create worn textures.
My wrist rattles. Already 6:00 am. The 6:00 am alarm is handy, it signifies a halfway point. Another hour of work before my peninsula is invaded.
By the time the 7:00 am alarm buzzes on my wrist, I’ve packed away the painting and the caddy and wiped the bench down. Removing all evidence of my dawn manoeuvres, aside from the layers of paint drying on the panel.
Why am I telling you this? Well, aside from the incredibly entertaining insight into my early morning routine, it’s because at around 7:15, after the kids have appeared for breakfast after several attempts to rouse them, and just over two hours into my day, I’ll unplug my phone from the charger next to my desk and power it up.
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It wasn’t always this way.
Yeah, I know. “Look at me! I get up early and paint and don’t look at my phone for a whole two hours!”. The worst kind of virtue-signalling, surely. But I tell you this with intention.
This current iteration of my morning has been going on for a while now. Some days, I don’t manage to drag myself out of my pit until the 7:00 am alarm. Some days, I do get up at 5:00 or 6:00 but will sit at the computer and type dross like this. But what I am definitely not doing any more is starting my day scrolling through the socials. And I’m saying all this because I think a lot of people do start their days (and end them) looking into their black mirrors. It’s normal. The done thing. Culturally and socially accepted. But, in this commentator’s opinion, it really shouldn’t be.
I started trying to move away from socials ages ago. I dabbled with screen time limits and app blocks for yonks. Nothing worked. The pull of the feed was simply much stronger than my willpower. In the end, I made the (probably quite drastic) decision to get rid of my smartphone altogether – trading it in for a ‘dumb phone’, or ‘feature phone’ as the tech firms like to call them. That was a big step, but the one that has paid the biggest dividends. That was several months ago, and I’ve just about adapted. Another really useful thing has been the ‘alarm-watch’. I’ve used my phone as an alarm for as long as I can remember. I realised that despite the dumbphone having no apps, basically just texts, calls and emails, opening the screen first thing in the morning was a gateway drug. Turning off the alarm was an opportunity to scroll through the junk mail that had arrived overnight. So I started leaving it downstairs when I went to bed and bought an alarm clock to sit beside the bed. However, a high-pitched screech emitting from the other side of the bed at 5:00 am every morning does not make for a happy wife. So I landed on the ‘Alarm watch’, after googling “how do deaf people get up on time”.
Despite the app-less existence, like the insta-junkie I am, I found a way to get my hit. Instagram was my drug of choice, and try as I might, I just could not kick it. There is a desktop app, so I’d find myself opening up a tab alongside whatever else I was doing at my desk. So, again, rather drastically, I decided to go cold turkey and remove Instagram from the equation entirely.
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Now, to the meat and bones of this diatribe. I’ve been off the gram for a few months now, and while it’s given me exactly what I hoped it would (time, concentration, more time), I won’t bore you with more signalling. I want to focus on the negatives.
Early on in my art ‘career’, I sat down with a local Arts Council portfolio organisation to talk about my art. I was off Instagram at the time (the battle has been raging for years and years, you see), and one of the things I was curious about was if having an Instagram ‘presence’ was essential to becoming a successful artist. I’d noticed that Instagram seemed to be the place to be. The place, online, where artists and organisations would communicate, hawk their wares. When browsing open calls I’d noticed a big chunk of opportunities would ask, specifically, for a link to your Instagram. The seasoned arts professionals I was talking to didn’t think that Instagram was essential. And I do think it’s entirely possible to get somewhere as an artist without having an island in the sea of social media. But I do think that the art world, at a global, national and local level, is tied into Instagram. Tied in TIGHT. So tight that we’re all prisoners to it.
And why not, eh? Instagram has over 2 billion active users at last count. That’s like a quarter of the world’s population, give or take. Facebook is more, but Instagram is based on sharing pictures and videos – so it makes perfect sense for the art world to drop its anchor there. With a few clicks, you suddenly have access to huge numbers of the general public. You have a means of grabbing their attention. Not only that, but with algorithms, you can pinpoint people who like similar art to your own. You can pinpoint people who like similar art in a specific area. And if you are willing to invest a few quid to buy some virtual ad space, you can ensure that your content is displayed on the screen of your target demographic, prioritised above others vying for their attention.
Born in ’82, I’m a child of the world wide web, so I can barely imagine how the art machine ticked over pre-internet. Paint a picture. Then what. Turn up at a gallery with it? Undoubtedly, the dawn of the internet has been positive for art.
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My reasons for quitting Zuck’s gallery app are numerous. The most prevalent was the sheer drain on my time, attention and concentration. I used to spend so many hours scrolling, liking, swiping. To the point that I realised I had stopped reading books, which is something that’s been a huge part of my life since I was a kid. I think I have a personality trait; I was addicted to the cigs and probably addicted to the booze. I quit both of those things, but Instagram perhaps acted as a replacement of sorts (these days I chew my nails down to the quick).
The next biggest reason, I think, is just the sheer tech-bro-ness of Mr Meta. Him rolling back his fact-checking promises when Agent Orange came back into power was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, but I’d been very uncomfortable with the whole setup for a while. I mean, he famously invented the platform to rate the hotness of girls at his college. People grow up, people change, but Zucks obvs didn’t. I don’t want to be part of a platform where misogyny and racism can run rife, literally unchecked. I have a big problem with the whole ‘bubble’ concept, but oddly it was bubbles that had protected me from the dodgy content for a good while – but recently I’d been seeing some ropey stuff creep in.
I’d also become increasingly fed up with the whole idea of social media as a part of one’s practice. I’m an artist. I paint pictures, I make sculptures, and I write words that join them together. There are loads of folk like me. Where it gets murky is the urge to share. We all have it, I think. I want people to look at and read my stuff in the hope that they like it and that they, in turn, will get some enjoyment or inspiration from it. Of course, it would be great if someone were to buy some of it – but that is very much lower on the list. As above, in order to share one’s art – in this modern world – one must stick it on the internet (or get really old school and carry it to a gallery). You can build an online portfolio and stick to the Field of Dreams ethos, or you can stick it up your instagram. We’ve come in a circle.
This is where ‘social media manager’ creeps into the job description of the modern artist. You are expected (and advised, by many reputable arts and culture organisations) to put on a little fez, crank the music box and dance a little dance in order to get people ‘engaged’ with your ‘content’. Film yourself making work. Urgh. Nobody wants to see me in my dressing gown sticking down bits of masking tape at 5:00 am (that’s onlyfans territory surely). I find the whole influencing stuff utterly abhorrent to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, I like to talk about stuff. To each their own. Here I am, after all, on page three of a freewheeling meta-rant. But as an artist, I make art. That is my content. I don’t want to spend time splicing together clips of my ‘process’, analysing the best hashtags to use or coming up with something interesting to post when I’ve not made any art for weeks.
And you may argue, just don’t do it. But that’s the thing, like the capitalist cage we’re all trapped in, the very nature of the beast is to play us off against one another. A race to get the most likes, the most followers, the most views, and the most shares. A race to the bottom, but laced with addictive UI and algorithms to keep you staring down your own gravity well. To be popular is to be successful, they say. It certainly doesn’t help when galleries themselves have got their eye on your follower-count.
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But yeah, in a possible career-ending self-sabotage attempt, I’ve closed my account down. I’m fine with it. In theory, to do what I want to do (make art, show it in galleries, repeat), I need to make art and then convince galleries to put it in their spaces, which doesn’t, or shouldn’t, involve the need for a social media account at all.
However, I think in some respects, it does. Rewind to the start of this, and I was prattling on about opportunities requiring a link to your socials. This is still very much a thing. One thing that has become very apparent to me, looking from the outside in, is that there is a lot of stuff happening on instagram, a lot of communication, that is happening there, and there alone. I used to have my finger on the pulse, knowing who was showing, where, and when. I mean, I never go to the openings, but it’s nice to know they’re happening. Art Network North East has been a godsend as even though I’m signed up to the newsletters of every gallery and arts organisation in the northeast, a very small percentage actually send newsletters out. The ANNE listings have got me covered, but even then, I’ve found dozens of events and exhibitions happening that aren’t listed there. Some things are seemingly only advertised on Instagram or in the venue.
And this is what I can’t fathom. I get that Instagram is the perfect vessel for the art world to exist within, but in doing so, Instagram has gained control. It’s making the rules, and we collectively have to obey – or fall by the wayside. I know galleries can’t just rethink their communication strategy overnight, and it probably seems daft to write a newsletter for just me to read, then not act on it – but still, the whole thing feels very un-art. There are peaks and troughs of online protests; ‘blackouts’ where people dont post for a day to show the tech-overlords who’s boss, or sharing stories saying we’re not OK with them using our work to feed their AI beasts. But everything goes back to normal. We live with it, accept it, and keep watching the cat vids. We seem to be caged in and controlled by the very powers that many of us make art in defiance of.
You might think that this is just a big smelly stinking case of FOMO. Perhaps it is in some respects. I did build an Instagram following of almost 1000, which isn’t much, and a slice of those would have been russian sex bots – but I worked hard for that. Playing the game. But I did it organically. I do miss the community, seeing my peers work, discovering new artists and being inspired. But I don’t think that Instagram gave me anything in the way of ‘success’. Instagram did not help me make any of the progress I’ve made. That was all done through my own talent, perseverance and through good old face-to-face ‘networking’. I sell very little, and the few pieces that are gathering dust in someone else’s house have got there not through the algorithm but by my own actions.
But what’s the alternative? It’s a tricky one. Even if the art world just left Instagram, en masse, where would they go? I’ve set up a Bluesky account, and it’s NICE. No ads, nice people, it’s not addictive, and it’s federated, meaning if some other platform comes along that I fancy moving to, I can take all my stuff with me. But there are not many people there. Don’t get me wrong, I think they passed the 34 million user mark recently – but not many of those are my old faves from Instagram. And again, even if everyone and everything from the world of art was there – the general public, the body politic – they won’t jump ship with us, as the attention-sucking algorithms have their claws dug in tight, so for galleries and the like who thrive on that engagement and need a platform to advertise – it simply makes sense to be where the people are. The problem for me is that I simply can’t be part of a place that actively promotes things that go against my values. I can’t.
I do feel that, as a community, artists need somewhere to share work with one another. I’m personally trying to get out more, visit shows, talk to invigilators, arrange studio visits and generally get my social fix by being social IRL. But the world has moved on; it’s moved online, and there needs to be a space for us that works for us, rather than us working for it.
What that place is, I don’t know. Do you?
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