One of the most soul-crushing and absurd obligations forced upon the modern artist is the mandate to stay chronically online, endlessly entertaining an audience. You are either a hyperactive clown performing in the feed, or you fade into obscurity and starve. The algorithm recognizes no middle ground.
Yet when is an artist supposed to contemplate? When do we gather ideas, source materials, and experiment? When, ultimately, do we do the most vital work of all - failing, destroying what we made, course-correcting, and starting over from square one? By its very nature, the creative process is slow, intimate, and often unspectacular. It requires quiet solitude and the absolute right to fail. Today, however, you are pressured to turn the sanctuary of your studio into a round-the-clock reality show. If you aren't dancing to a trending audio, editing a "15-second aesthetic day in my life" Reel, and churning out daily content - you simply do not exist.
And then we genuinely wonder why the caliber of art worldwide has fallen off a cliff? Naturally. When you demand fast-food velocity from an artist, it is delusional to expect the depth, rigor, and mastery of the Old Masters.
How on earth did art manage to endure until the 21st century without an internet connection if daily output is so non-negotiable?
Leonardo da Vinci completed fewer than twenty paintings in his entire lifetime. He spent years experimenting, dissecting anatomy, filling thousands of pages with sketches, and could go months without touching a canvas while searching for a single, perfect stroke. Under today's algorithmic calculus, his account would have been buried long ago due to low posting frequency, and he would be written off as an unproductive amateur.
Paul Cézanne spent months painting the exact same bowl of apples, waiting for time to transform the subject as he pursued pure form. In the reality of TikTok, he would be shadowbanned for a total lack of momentum.
Mark Rothko demanded silence and a full thirty minutes of unbroken contemplation before a single canvas so viewers might experience pure tragedy and ecstasy. The modern user, by contrast, grants an artwork precisely 1.5 seconds of a lingering glance before scrolling past.
We have bartered artistic vision for "reach metrics." We turned creators into content generators, and viewers into consumers of easily digested visual noise. We demand that artists act as hyperactive marketing strategists, and then express hollow surprise when the soul vanishes from exhibitions, and meaning drains from the canvas.
(Digital drawing, 2026)