Losing Friends and Alienating People--Social Media As Artistic Medium
By Arthur Fantastic, curator of Null Object: An Institutional Retrospective of Visionary Artist Nathan Sharratt. Sponsored Content Social media is nothing new, but the adoption of its use by artists as a viable artistic material has been slow. The media’s inherent ambiguities and apparent lack of art-historical reference points create a slippery surface texture that makes it difficult for the viewer to hold onto long enough to even recognize as art, let alone long enough to derive substantive meaning. However, all is not lost: there is light at both ends of the tunnel. In this pluralistic contemporary art world, where art can be anything an artist announces as such--from everyday objects, to weather, to spilled paint--how is the art-viewing public to know which balloon puppy is made by a clown for some celebration, and which is an artistic masterpiece? Which lightning strike is an expression of the sublime, and which just drops a tree on your house? One way has been the use of the sacred space, namely galleries and museums. The balloon puppy that is in a museum is Art, the one that is at a child’s birthday party is not. Paint splattered on a cloth in a museum is Art, paint splattered on your garage floor is not. Probably. The lines of distinction between Art and Not-Art become blurrier the more the walls of that sacred space are challenged. Many artists and movements (and institutions) have embraced institutional critique in one form or another. In recent history, Internet artists are one such group. They created artwork on and through the Internet, ostensibly removing their art from the art institutions’ sacred physical walls and opening the conversation up to a more democratic audience who could access it anywhere there was a computer with Internet access (Internet egalitarianism being a fantasy notwithstanding). Still, the work is typically confined to particular art websites or app projects, themselves a type of hierarchical segregation. Following the Internet artists are the Post-Internet artists, who create work about the Internet, online and offline, and also use the Internet and social media as a promotional tool. Some of these artists--after being discovered on Instagram--are allowed to insert their artistic practice into the traditional art conversation by exhibiting it in galleries and museums. Many so-called post-Internet artists reject the moniker or abandon their Internet practice once their traditional career has been kickstarted. It’s cool to be found as an underground artist on the Internet, but not very profitable for an artist to remain there (Even a social-media dabbling establishment artist like Richard Prince still prints out his Instagram screenshots and sells them as traditional art objects). Fuzzier still is the artist that uses the Internet subset of social media as a raw material. They reject the Relational Separation between Life-As-Art and Life-As-Life. These artists consider their personal accounts to be an extension of their body, and may not separate their artwork posts from their vacation and sandwich-photo posts. The illusion of the glorious and enviable lives we share on social media is no real thing, but it is no fallacy, either. There is always an element of authenticity inherent in any display of self, performed or otherwise (The research of sociologist Erving Goffman can probably speak to that). So when an artist fluidly switches between Artist-As-Person-Using-Social-Media and Artist-As-Artist-Making-Art, without announcing that art is now being made, the effects can be jarring on the artist’s followers who didn’t choose to walk into a sacred art space by logging onto Facebook today. What, then, alerts the viewer that they are now looking at art? What are the inherent cues to trigger the viewer’s art experience? I think we can safely assume that walking into a museum is a conscious choice, and someone who does so recognizes the museum’s monotask of presenting art for public consumption--a person doesn’t accidentally walk into a museum, pay the entrance fee and then bump into some art without informed consent. The viewer is primed for the art experience. They have (hopefully) left their daily worries behind for a few hours to participate in culture. Social media offers few such inherent cues (and it could be argued that social media itself is a primary source of daily worry. #FOMO). Perhaps the artist chooses to attach a specific hashtag for cataloging purposes, maybe something like #thisisart? This could be one such cue. But if the post isn’t obviously art related, what signals to the viewer that they should now consider this social-media interaction as an art experience? One in which there will be no other version because what they are seeing right now, on their screen, wherever they currently are, is the intended primary experience? Even assuming the viewer is able to at least recognize that the post they are viewing is within the art realm, what’s to differentiate this Post-As-Art from a Post-Promoting-Art? Without a preparation buffer, the viewer will likely be annoyed and even angry at the artist for clogging their feed with apparent nonsense. This, in turn, may lead the viewer to unfriend or unfollow the artist to achieve release from the discomfort and anxiety of that ambiguity. Can the viewer trust the Artist-As-Person any more? How do they know which is the authentic voice of the real-life person whose job is art versus the possibly-imagined and likely-fictional voice of the Artist with a capital A? Is there a difference? Are they just being spammy assholes? Or, is the artist simply making transparent the fictions of our contemporary reality in a way that we’re not yet accustomed to processing as such? Many traditional artistic mediums achieve meaning, in large part, through their association with the past. Their stickiness is owed to the huge catalog of human accomplishment known as Art History. This is what gives artists who spill paint on cloth--with intention--artistic merit (even some without intention). They know they have that foundation to rely upon, so that they can build on the problems that previous artists have had--and that time has vetted as meritorious--to give at least partial validity to their own artistic explorations. There is an assumption of at least a cursory awareness of art history that the artist exploits to allow the viewer to skip a few steps on their journey to seek meaning in an art experience. A shorthand, if you will, to the sublime. Newest-media artists don’t yet have that pantheon to secure them. Social media has been around for over a decade now, yet few artists have successfully used it as a material. And why is that? If anything can be used for art, why not this? Part of the answer is related to friction: Art history is a vast and complex repository of the human soul, but it is also a behemoth that is is bound by its own inertia. This can be a benefit in that it is reliable and easily located, but it doesn’t move very quickly. Newest-media art isn’t subject to the same heavy mass of art-theoretical physics. It can move quickly to respond to an ever-more-rapidly changing cultural and social landscape. Everyone’s 15 Minutes of Fame still exists, but now it's broken down into millisecond increments, spread out over a lifetime of micro-blogging and status updating. And without that friction to ground it, it becomes slippery and hard to hold on to. Meaning is lost, or never found, as it becomes folded into the daily routine of mediated social interaction. The material is so new, so unfamiliar as an art material, and so inherently ephemeral, to succeed an aspiring social-media artist must respect the Law of Conservation of Art Energy: an equal amount of resources must be expended online as would be expended offline to achieve an equivalent net gain in career advancement. Spending five minutes making a single artwork post on social media gets you about as far as throwing a painting you made out your studio door. It’s possible some renowned art-world mover and shaker could walk (or scroll) by your artwork, fall in love with it and decide to use their vast resources to make all your art dreams come true, but it’s much more likely that single work will get caught up in the current of the stream of life, swept away in the perpetual motion machine of double-taps and thumb-ups and moving-ons. The lack of tangible documentation is also a challenge to historical normativity. Internet artists could theoretically copy the HTML files for their artwork website and send them to a museum for preservation and presentation. The viewing context of the original experience might change somewhat with the new location, but we’re apparently okay with that compromise based on how frequently we move art around from wall to wall. A self-contained website viewed on a screen online versus one viewed on a screen in a museum doesn’t irreparably damage the viewer experience. But it’s not so simple for social-media artists. How do you archive a Facebook post? How do you re-present the unique viewing experience that an individual sees when the art shows up in their feed, snugged in among other algorithmically-chosen posts, news articles, and advertisements? Most importantly though, I think, is the lack of a successful path to finite economic ownership. Twitter and its shareholders may benefit economically from art on its platform, but how do the auction houses? Robert Rauschenberg's famous narrative about how he created the Combine--as I first heard it--went something like this: Rauschenberg was a poor artist in New York City. He didn’t have money to buy art supplies. This presented a problem for the artist. So, he walked around his neighborhood and saw all the perfectly good stuff people were throwing away. He collected said stuff, processed it through his artistic lens (whatever that means), assembled that stuff into compositions, and the rest is art history. Rauschenberg responded to his current environment, the environment he was embedded within and intimately linked to, by excavating its inherent characteristics and manipulating those characteristics as his artistic material. Today’s post-post-Internet artist, such as Nathan Sharratt, is doing the same thing, except their local environments are increasingly virtual. They absorb into themselves the inherent qualities of online social discourse and reflect it back upon itself, through itself, as itself. To separate the message from the medium would destroy the message. Viewers at the time were likely just as angered, frustrated, and confused with Rauschenberg’s new junk paintings as they are with today’s social media artists. Probably. I’m writing this on a plane to Atlanta and I’m not paying for in-flight Internet to fact check. That shit’s expensive. Thanks Obama. I’ll let the editors deal with it; I have an institutional retrospective of a famous artist to curate. #buynathansharratt #makeamericanateagain
[edit: the author of this article is actually Nathan Sharratt. It is presented as a performative text based on real life but through the voice of a fictional character]