The deceptively safe and soulless nature of Instagram art

Art today feels so safe. Artists like Hilma af Klint, Beatrix Potter and Marina Abramović were immensely brave, vulnerable and risk-taking. These days, there’s a lot of art trends on Instagram. They appear as prolific and amorphous Matisse-fied shapes, demonstrating an awareness of art history, but no signs of the artist’s hard-won style.

There are a lot of naïve paintings of Italian table settings circulating the internet lately that pair well with the artist’s aesthetic pictures of their trip to Italy. Oysters, wine glasses, grapes. All low-hanging fruit, easy to execute and palatable to everyone. It lends itself conveniently well to interior decorating. Almost as if premeditated for that purpose. Temu takes these already appropriated works, re-appropriates and sells them for $10.

I don’t blame these creatives for ‘optimising’ their work to make sales, hoping to escape the drudgery of their day jobs. I’ve misguidedly fallen down this path myself. I think it’s so easy to do for most of us. We’re torn yo-yo-ing between making marketable art and practising art for its own sake, sometimes forgetting the difference between the two. But is solely creating commercial work not the same trap we’re trying to escape from?

The alternative is to make art sacred and separate from economic necessity.

Patti Smith

talks about this in a 1976 interview. “When I was a young poet, I had no money, I became a pick-pocket — that’s what I had to do. You do whatever you must do to keep doing your art. You can prostitute your body, but never your art.”

The problem with making art for money is that it homogenises the world’s artistic landscapes and the artist’s creative impulse. It breeds things like the Marvel franchise and soulless recycled pop songs. This approach to making art is both commercially and psychologically safe. It doesn’t require experimentation, diving into the depths of one’s soul to ask what needs to be expressed, or sitting alone in a room long enough to explore your artistic style while contending with your inner critic. Like the teenagers of today who grew up with Instagram, formulaic art might bypass the dreaded awkward phase of experimentation…but at what cost?

Many of us have lost the impulse to create entirely because we’re told that our art doesn’t have value unless monetised or popular. So we abandon it. Or worse, we calculatedly make art we know is palatable to a large enough cross-section of the population that will validate it with their purchase.

While it’s unfair to expect anyone to make artwork like the world’s most aspirational artists, we can emulate something that I believe is even more remarkable about their lives — which is what had to happen for them internally to be able to create and share the work. This internal process I’m referring to isn’t the instant gratification we’re used to. For that reason, it’s probably more fulfilling.

While wading through the circumstances of their lives, an artist with a strong process will explore curiosities that scratch at the boundaries of the world they find themselves in. Tucked away in their hearts and imagination, they hold onto their vision of how things could be. For Louis Wain, he saw a world where cats could be domesticated in a time when they were considered pests. Marina Abramović wanted to expose human nature, so she sat passively in a room with objects the audience could use on her. Hilma explored the spiritual realm through abstract form in an era when art was photorealistic. Beatrix Potter persisted in publishing her children’s books at a time when she had little to no role models.

What I admire most about these artists is their courage to trust and share a vision that was so far beyond the norm. This isn’t to say I think we’re all destined to reach these extremes of bravery, pioneering or achievement. We each have unique paths. But we can use their examples as a guide toward a more fulfilling art practice.

Like these artists, we too can experience the growth, the becoming, the joy and the sanctuary that comes when we allow ourselves an art practice. But I believe it’s only possible if we permit ourselves to have a practice separate and sacred from economic gain. If art is about exploring, expressing, understanding, or whatever the artist is doing through the work, then a large portion of artwork is an unseen internal process. Are most of the rewards of an art practice not therefore internal?

Art, singing and dancing stimulate the vagus nerve, which regulates the nervous system. Art is a healing and connecting force. But if we prioritise making marketable art, we are robbed of what I believe we’re craving deep down. To make and connect to art that helps us get closer to our inner truths and to see some part of ourselves reflected in the work. There’s nothing more valuable or relieving than the experience of feeling understood by an artwork in our most intimate and intricate detail. Work that makes us feel connected by our humanity and less alone. I think this is what people mean when they say art can save lives.

Art requires vulnerability and vulnerability doesn’t feel safe, or lucrative. We can make safe art, but the cost is not getting to experience the internal transformation and connection that happens when you follow a messy meandering path to find your unique self-expression. It’s the harder approach, but I think it’s worth it.

I say all this as a recovering art-capitalist; someone who’s asked my creativity to pay my way in life. I’ve safely bobbed on the surface of my creativity, steering clear of my vulnerability. I’ve repetitively handmade the same orders for a pottery studio, started a business (that I mistakenly tried and failed to find creative fulfilment in) and written content. These may look creative on the outside, but nothing was ever really ‘expressed’ (other than maybe dancing, which I don’t do much these days). So like a butterfly, I’m currently flitting between different mediums, and styles, and figuring out what I want to say. I haven’t landed on anything yet, but that’s the messy path I’ve signed up for. It feels different and unfamiliar, but that feels like a good thing.

Hilma af Klint