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The Attention Trap

On the dangers of trading in online traffic & celebrity

During 2022, I interviewed the founders of several digital art platforms that were focusing on growing NFT culture and essentially recruiting artists to become crypto-artists. One such founder, whom I won’t name, said that their company’s curatorial approach hinged primarily on the artist having a large following on Instagram. This was, after all, a practical method that ensured investing time and money into artists posed less of a risk, since they came with a pre-built audience. This audience-centric, or perhaps audience-aware approach, is commonplace in the digital art space. A large digital following doesn’t just offer street cred, it implies commercial viability. It implies immediate market feedback. What it doesn’t guarantee is artistic and cultural value.
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We are all participants of, and complicit in, the attention economy.
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For millennia, artists were protected from an immediate, opinionated audience. As a result, their practice wasn’t subject to the daily commentary and validation–or rejection–of the masses. A solo exhibition, usually years apart, was a rare opportunity for an artist to receive critical and public feedback (and, hopefully, to sell). These prolonged periods between shows, between moments of visibility, meant the stakes were significantly higher, but they also granted the artist a greater degree of independence from the market and from public opinion, to create independently. 
As artists on social media, we no longer have that luxury.
We are all participants of, and complicit in, the attention economy. The impact of this cultural shift has been tremendously destructive for contemporary art. Social media rewards consistency and persistence. These are valuable traits, sure, but they also punish creative risk taking. For example, an artist exploring something that is not strictly in line with their past work will usually be punished, in terms of audience engagement and visibility.
I should be clear that when I say punish, I don’t mean in the vindictive, disciplinarian sense. I mean that you are simply shifted lower down in the timelines you would have been featured in. Social media algorithms also often favor commercial realities, meaning figurative works are rewarded over abstract ones, the use of warmer colours, such as red, might be rewarded (with attention) over the use of the colour blue, etc.
Most social media platforms are not benevolent mechanisms that seek to promote art: their task is to promote whatever content keeps you on the platform, scrolling endlessly. So if an artist posts a work that might disrupt that flow, such as an artwork that diverges from their oeuvre, do you think they might be promoted as diligently? Because based on personal experience, I can tell you that the view and like counts of my artworks that are consistent with my past work, versus experimental posts, is staggering. And it’s not a question of the audience refusing the experiments, because these systems decide for them whether it is worth their attention. 
Another detrimental element of social media is the visibility of an artist’s following, which has an impact on their market viability. It would be reasonable to assume that today, some commercial galleries, much like NFT marketplaces, are aware of an artist’s pre-built audience on social media when considering them for a show or for representation.
And while this enhanced, constant form of visibility may benefit some artists, to be discovered or to sustain their lives through a more continuous sales cycle, it does affect the creative cycle.
TLDR: Measuring an artist’s cultural value by their social media footprint is a deeply problematic method for choosing the champions for digital art, because those engagements are fundamentally indicators of mass public appeal, not artistic prowess or creativity.
<h3 dir="ltr">E-Commercial Realities</h3>
Another dangerous trend that I am observing within the digital landscape recently came in the form of a DM from a fellow artist several weeks ago. Referring to one of my previous Cache columns, this artist had provided a link to a site that demonstrated his NFT sale performance over the last few years. It was not a flex or a pitch, it was simply his preferred method for presenting himself as an artist.
I recoiled, because for a traditional artist to directly submit this kind of information to anyone at all is anathema. The art world, whether you agree with it or not, does not want artists to be too involved in their own commercial reality. For any traditional artist to publicise their sales performance data let alone send it to people so directly is… unthinkable.
The digital art market, in its quest for transparency, does the polar opposite, and plenty of digital artists openly share their market cap and past sales numbers of their works. While this may help combat speculative pricing and demonstrate investability, it does create an unhealthy environment in which nascent digital artists begin to equate their commercial success with artistic success. Sometimes, especially in the absence of critical discourse, this may be the only metric they have access to. But not all metrics are designed to be shared, let alone considered by the artists themselves when producing work. This can, and sometimes does, lead to artists allowing the numbers to determine the nature of their practice, because they instinctively pursue series that reward them financially and on social media. Naturally traditional galleries also pressure their artists to make more of particular series that sell, but within a digital landscape, the mass production element becomes corrosive much more quickly.
There is no quick and dirty solution to this problem, but it does need to be talked about. Online celebrity, market impact, or the ability to make the algorithms favour you, should not be the arbiters of the next great digital artist. When we confuse digital fame and commercial success with cultural value, we can lose sight of art we should cultivate, and preserve.

TAEX is an interdisciplinary platform for artists, curators, and collectors to discuss, showcase, and sell crypto art.

The Attention Trap

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