I have a love-hate relationship with those “romanticize your life” videos you often see on Youtube or Instagram, especially when they’re paired with the arts.

On one hand, who doesn’t love seeing video clips of beautiful leather notebooks perched on an iron cafe table in some picturesquely autumnal town? On the other hand, 99.9% of the process does not look like that, and it makes me fear that social media is giving people very unrealistic expectations of what “the process” looks like in regards to art.

Eating with your Eyes

There have been plenty of articles recently that have discussed the burden social media marketing has put onto artists, writers, and craftspeople (I’m going to refer to everyone as artists from here on out because that’s what we all are, whether we want to admit it or not, and this may be part of the problem). Social media marketing for artists sucks. The main problem stems from the commodification of every single thing an artist creates. A fickle algorithm decides whether or not your video or photo is worthy of attention based on your keywords (or lack of) and whatever trend du jour is on order. This means art is being created with algorithms in mind instead of being created for art’s sake or for the artist or even for the artist’s intended audience. This is especially true on sites like Instagram and Tiktok where the idea is to get a post widely disseminated rather than it reaching the artist’s intended audience as one would encounter on Twitter, Bluesky, or author/genre specific forums. Tiktok especially expects the artist to find the audience rather than the audience go looking for things they actually care about. In order to get their work in front of more eyes, artists have to become actors and performers, and as the algorithm shifts further and further in favor of those who are better at this, then the rest of us are forced to become trained seals in their wake.

If you’re thinking, “Oh, well, you just have to get better at talking in front of a camera and selling your product,” you’re wrong. If it was that simple, my teaching skills would come in handy for once outside the classroom. The problem with these hyper visual platforms is that the artist becomes irrelevant except as a vehicle to take B roll or set up an aesthetic time lapse. Half the time, the product barely batters. What truly matters are the aesthetics. Does the artwork look good on camera? Can I put it somewhere aesthetic and film outdoors? Can I show the process at a cafe or in a dark academia-esque study lit with candles while I type nonsense on my very clean Mac Book in my Sunday best? It’s all smoke and mirrors to catch the algorithm’s attention and to get others to buy into that aesthetic delusion as well.

Viewers/followers are eating with their eyes. They are consuming a brand rather than a piece of art. They spend however long the video is taking it in before scrolling onto the next video and the next and the next with no end in sight. Artists are creating visual input that leaves little room for discussion, exploration, or even just the lingering one might do at a museum. You have to be changing camera angles and creating ambience; there is no time for contemplation. That isn’t the viewer or platform’s aim. But if no one is truly seeing a piece, what’s the point? Once the product is barely relevant, a blip on a phone screen, what does that mean for the process?

All Polish, No Process

Back when I was growing up, before Tiktok or IG or even Youtube, there was DeviantArt. It still exists as a place for artists to post their work, but it was a far different space than it is now. One of the things I appreciated about it was how there was a section specifically for artists to post their sketches or scraps. The main part of the site was all the polished works, but artists let you peek behind the curtain at their pages of rough sketches. There would be chunks crossed off, random scribbles, repeated anatomy practice (cough mistakes cough). Artists would post the vulnerable parts of art: the mess. Even then, it was often a curated mess, but it still looked like my best friend’s sketchbook pages. When I would grab his sketchbook and flip through it, it would be pages upon pages of sketchy mess. Places where he worked on anatomy, half-finished pieces that were abandoned, pieces that looked perfectly fine to me but were scribbled out in bright blue marker. But now, when I see a sketchbook tour on Instagram or Tiktok, it’s a notebook filled with picture perfect drawings that might be simplistic but blemish free. The emphasis is on the filling of space aesthetically rather than learning.

On one hand, I don’t think outsiders need to be privy to the process of creating. The creative process leaves us vulnerable. When people see the process, the underpainting, the handwritten outlines, they often don’t understand what they’re looking at. There’s no way to do it wrong, yet so many of us are hesitant to show the unfinished, unpolished product for fear of judgment. What if they think it’s the finished piece and think I suck as an artist? It’s a reasonable fear. At the same time, it isn’t a good idea to curate the artistic process so heavily that all people see is the shiny, Instagram-worthy final product because people will assume if it looks easy, it is easy.

The more concerning question is, what are young artists seeing when they look at the Instagram or Tiktok feeds of the people they look up to? If all they see is the final product or those highly edited four-weeks-of-work-in-thirty-seconds videos, they might assume that that is what the artistic process is actually like. It may sound silly, but how are they supposed to know about all the false starts, practice, and frustration that can go into a piece of art if they never see it? Young artists who don’t have other artists in their lives will get a false perception of how the process is supposed to look. If they assume there are no false starts or messiness, will they assume that, because their early work is messy, they’re a talentless hack and give up on art before they can get to the point of even having a true process? Artists are already lacking in community. This sort of alienation from the process will only make that worse.

But it isn’t just new artists who are being affected by the Tiktok-ification of the artistic process. Because artists can’t just toss their work up on social media in text or pictures, they need to document the process in video if they have any hope of gaining traction on Instagram or Tiktok. Instead of settling into the flow of a piece, artists need to think about whipping out their phones at every step, setting up the perfect lighting, making sure the process looks aesthetic enough to catch the attention of those who don’t already follow them. And what happens if they miss a step in the process because they get engrossed? What if the memory card runs out of story or the app crashes? Was the entire piece a waste of time if it didn’t yield the max amount of social media fodder?

The way social media has forced artists to turn the creative process into a made for TV process should be alarming to all creatives. While filming his show, Bob Ross produced three copies of each painting: one that was sort of a rough draft, one he made on TV to show the process, and a more perfect final version that was used for display. Will that become the expectation for creatives online? That we’ll have to hide the mess in favor of production value and work three times as hard for nearly no tangible reward. Julia Child, one of the most famous TV chefs, often dropped things or burned food on air, yet I can’t tell you the last time I saw that in a cooking Tiktok. We are no longer allowed to roll with the punches and recover when performing before an algorithm.

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Social media promotes capitalistic exponential growth, and to achieve that, the algorithm requires flashy, picture perfect productions made digestible for the masses. But if we reduce hours of work to trending music and an aesthetic montage of productivity, what are we saying about the value of our labor?

Tune in next week for part two where I talk about the devaluation of the arts, the branding of artists, and how all of this has led to the rise of AI in the arts.