On Being an Artist on Instagram (and How It Can Suck)

I was chatting with one of my friends yesterday, just to check in, when our conversation moved from small talk to the topic of being artists on Instagram. We’re both pretty unknown on Instagram, and I suspect she’s just as unsure as I am about how much of an audience she actually wants for her work, but the discussion was still mostly about how “well” we were doing. And as of right now, she’s doing much, much better than I am, despite the fact that I have had my account for about two and a half years longer than she has. To be fair, she is a much better artist than I am, which totally accounts for some of her success. However, not all of it can be attributed to that. At all.

The thing with Instagram is it’s actually a pretty terrible place to be an artist, and it’s an even worse place to hang out if you’re a young artist trying to find encouragement to improve your skills. The platform isn’t built to encourage the building of communities, and most people who scroll through Instagram are similarly not looking to engage in a community. The average Instagram user is mindlessly scrolling. In fact, posting art on Instagram is pretty counterproductive, since most people will likely scroll right past your work, and if they don’t, they will likely look at it for a few seconds (or less), like it, and move on. If you’re lucky, they might share it with a few people and follow you, but even then, they’re probably not looking that closely at your artwork. If your artwork is bad, most people will simply scroll past it and move on. I did not know this when I started my account almost three years ago, hoping that the potential of other people seeing my work would motivate me to get better. To be fair, it was probably a terrible reason to start the account in the first place, but I’m sure I’m not the only one. And I’m sure as heck not the first person to complain about social media wreaking havoc on artists.

As far as I’m concerned, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that social media rewards creativity. In fact, I bet it does the opposite. Social media (and by social media I mean the algorithm, and by the algorithm I mean the user, since the user informs the algorithm and vice-versa) rewards homogeneous content, if I may be a little harsh. It likes it when people can do the same thing over and over, and do it well. It also likes when said thing is easy to digest and somewhat familiar. What this essentially means is that in order to be successful as an artist on a platform like Instagram, you need to 1) be a good artist (the most refined your skills, the better), 2) make a whole bunch of art that a) looks the same but b) is different enough that people won’t call you out on it all looking the same, 3) make sure your art is bold and easy enough to understand that people will get the gist in under 3 seconds, and 4) post super frequently and use the right hashtags so that the algorithm will pick up your work. And then you hope people will actually see it and respond positively. As if that wasn’t hard enough, only a fraction of the people who respond positively will care enough about your work to keep an eye on what you’re working on.

This analysis explains a lot of what I see when it comes to artists on social media. First of all, it explains why fan art does so well on social media. If you’re an artist with decent skills and you make art for the right fandoms, as long as you use the right hashtags people are way more likely to pay a little more attention to what you’re doing. Why? Because it’s already familiar to them. They don’t have to expend that much more brain energy to understand what you’re doing and already like the fandom, so they’re primed to like your art. So remember my friend who I mentioned earlier? She is making art for a very active fandom. I am not. So yes, I did mention that she’s a better artist, but also, it’s that much easier for people to pay attention to you if you’re making fan art. Mostly because they’re not actually paying attention to you. They just want more from the world they’ve already spent so much time investing themselves in. (If you’re someone who makes fan art, this is not an attack on you. Please continue to do so if it’s what you love! I’m just trying to analyse common behaviors.)

The fact that fan art is so much easier to promote online means that you might get noticed significantly faster if you’re an active fan artist. At some point people may decided that they like your specific art style, for example, and so it’s a lot easier to gain a following that way. But the flip side of this is that unless you’re lucky, it’s very easy to lose engagement once you stop posting fan art. Something I’ve heard a lot of artists say on YouTube, for example, is that because people subscribed to them for a specific reason, they feel pressure to continue making the kind of art that people subscribed to them for. This, of course, is problematic. Some people specifically start out making fan art in order to get a following, then try to transition into marketing their own art. I’ve heard of this working with various degrees of success. Of course, the hope is that if you’re a good artist, people will discover your work soon anyway. But considering the number of amazing artists who remain unknown, I find it really hard to believe that.

The second thing that really annoys me is that social media’s emphasis on sameness and on people reliably being able to produce similar work is that many young artists now feel undue pressure to worry about finding an art style. This “art style” frenzy is, in my opinion, fundamentally different from the concept of an artist finding their voice. Your voice as an artist is a combination of everything you’ve ever loved, everything you’ve ever hated, every unique experience you’ve ever had, and everything you’ve ever wanted to express, and it leaks into your art whether you want it to or not. A voice can be cultivated, true, and, yes, it is easier for your voice to be unique if your perspective is unique in some way, and yes, figuring out what you want your voice to look or feel like might take a while, and yes, learning to express yourself the way you want to takes practice, but for many of us it is more of an unconscious thing that develops as we make more and more art. You might have it in the back of your mind, but the focus really should be on making better art. But the thing with your voice as an artist is that it is a reflection of who you are, and more crucially, of who you are at that time. This means that your voice might manifest itself differently in different mediums or situations. It also means that it will change over time.

Some people do naturally gravitate towards a more fixed, more bold, iconic style. But some people don’t. Some people never will. The problem with people deciding they need to find an art style is that they’re putting themselves in boxes too early, and also, it makes them a LOT more likely to plagiarize from other artists who do have an established style. Not everyone needs to find their own specific way to exaggerate eyebrows or lips, and not everyone needs choose from one or two colour palettes that they stick to. If that’s what you want to do, that’s cool. But there shouldn’t be pressure to do so. And what’s more, the culture of having an art style makes it so much less likely that people will experiment, which sucks, because that is, in fact, how people find their voice. Once you’ve been making art for long enough, people can tell what’s yours even if you can’t. Everyone sketches a little differently. Everyone. Even if you’re notoriously bad at drawing.

The reason why the art style problem exists in the first place is partly because of the need for art to be easily digestible, and partly because of the fierce competition to reach more and more viewers, where artists feel the need to drastically differentiate themselves. The irony in all of this is that the art I see on the platform becomes more and more homogeneous. There’s only so many ways you can make bold and easy to digest art. Going through any one artist’s page yields post after post that looks exactly the same. And creators are complaining about it. Because there’s only so much time you can keep that up before you start feeling drained. This all proves me my point, which is that Instagram kills creativity. It’s also not the place to post art that is deeply thought provoking, because most people will not spare the time required to understand it while they’re mindlessly scrolling. Artists typically find that their favourite pieces aren’t the pieces that do well on social media. This is why. No one cares about how much more time or thought went into your favourite piece; it’s likely your favourite because it’s somehow different or more creative and more detailed, all of which equals harder to understand, which equals less viable on social media.

So, bearing all of this in mind, let’s take a step back and review some possible reasons why I’m not doing well on Instagram after almost 3 years of hanging out there:

  1. My art skills are really not there yet. Remember how I said I didn’t understand how the platform worked when I started my account? I started it to document my progress, as I was then doing a daily art challenge. I was just getting into drawing, so my art skills were crap, so of course no one cared. I’ve improved a lot since then, but I would not call my technical skills good by any means.
  2. I take photos with my crappy phone camera, and don’t edit them well, and people like to see artwork when it’s presented well. This one is completely my fault, but I’m lazy, whoops.
  3. I’ve so far used my account for a mix of poetry and art, which likely confuses my followers, as some of them are there for the art and some are there for the poetry. This is exacerbated by the fact that I go through periods of time where I exclusively post art and not poetry, and vice-versa. This breaks the rule of consistency on social media. Funny thing is, I plan on posting music and graphic design things as well to my account soon, so I’m really not helping myself out here. (And why would I want to create yet another account?)
  4. I’m an abstract artist, or I am for the time being, at least. (No guarantees I won’t switch soon.) Abstract art is generally a hard sell because no one gets it, so you essentially need to already have a following for people to care. Also, my art is super geometric and detailed and not the type of thing you can really understand in 3 seconds.

So, knowing all of this, am I going to change how I run my social media? Well, I hope not. Hopefully writing these articles and verbalising my thoughts has made me more aware of what to watch out for. Because right now, I love my art and I love having a place to dump whatever I’m working on at the moment. Hopefully eventually people will care, but if not, so be it: I’ll try my best not to let that discourage me. But this is also written as a warning to myself. So many of us say no for now, but the unspoken expectations and we unconsciously (or sometimes, consciously) adjust in order to better feed the algorithm. Which really, really, sucks.

But I’m sure being Instagram famous isn’t as great as it sounds anyway.