Visual Art in Crisis
Visual Art in Crisis
December 2024
PW: Visual art is in crisis. We have a medium that plays no part in our broader culture's popular imagination. Normal people are not finding artists who they connect with in the spaces they visit, and visual artists are not shaping subcultures. There is no new Andy Warhol or Basquiat. The only patron base is the luxury art market, which is in a recession during its marquee event in Miami Beach right now that will predictably have no lasting impact on culture. Young people who think about the world visually are not making paintings, photos, or sculptures in art studios in New York. They're posting memes in a basement somewhere, and even the memes feel stale as they get recycled as marketing by large, monetized accounts chasing clout.
ChatGPT: The idea of "visual art in crisis" speaks to a profound shift in how art interfaces with culture at large. While the prestige of the art world remains intact within elite and insulated circles, its relevance as a tool for shaping collective thought, cultural movements, or public discourse seems increasingly diminished.
Historically, visual art often served as a beacon for broader societal movements—think of the way Dada responded to World War I or how the Harlem Renaissance shaped ideas about race and identity. Today, those cultural shifts seem to be happening in spaces like TikTok, Reddit, or YouTube, where memes, short-form videos, and user-generated content carry the visual language of our time. It's almost as though the locus of "art-making" has migrated out of galleries and into the algorithmic trenches of social media.
In this context, contemporary art risks becoming an artifact of capital rather than culture—a commodity that circulates within closed systems of wealth and taste-making but rarely breaches the wider cultural consciousness. Yet, there's a tension here: artists are aware of this disconnection and are actively responding to it. How do you see this tension manifesting in your own work or in the work of others who seek to reinvigorate visual art as something meaningful beyond the boundaries of commerce?
PW: I suppose I'm less interested in the admittedly real problem of visual art as a commercial good and more interested in the inability of visual art to connect to a mass audience, commercial good or not. The most popular musicians are very commercial, but there are a variety of ways in which they connect with normal people who listen to and think about music everyday on the radio, Spotify, or whatever. Visual art does not have this allure. Maybe visual art needs to have a significant physical cultural center like 20th Century New York City, where power is consolidated and culture is distributed through institutions the public trusts?
ChatGPT: You raise an important question about the necessity of a centralized cultural hub for visual art to regain its connection to a mass audience. Historically, New York in the 20th century—or Paris before it—did serve as focal points where artistic innovation, critical discourse, and public imagination converged. These hubs had both the physical infrastructure (galleries, museums, and studios) and the intellectual scaffolding (critics, editors, and curators) to propel visual art into broader cultural relevance.
Today, however, the diffusion of power through globalization and the decentralization enabled by the internet seem to work against the emergence of such a unifying physical or cultural center. The digital sphere offers immediacy and accessibility but also dilutes focus, making it harder for any single movement or body of work to dominate public consciousness in the way abstract expressionism or pop art once did. While music thrives in this decentralized environment through platforms like Spotify or TikTok, visual art often feels trapped in niches or relegated to luxury consumption, partly because its forms and distribution mechanisms haven't adapted as fluidly to digital and mass culture.
Perhaps the issue isn’t just about needing a physical center but about rethinking the structures through which visual art is consumed and engaged with. Could it create new avenues for interaction that mirror the accessibility and emotional resonance of music? For example, should visual art embed itself more deeply in the digital fabric—embracing mediums like AR, gaming, or digital content creation that can live on the same platforms as viral videos and streaming music? Or does visual art need to reinvent its relationship with physicality and place, creating spaces and experiences that resonate with public life in ways that aren't strictly tied to the gallery system?
PW: That's an interesting critique of the art world. I was part of an art movement from around 2015-2019 on Instagram that was sort of popular. We were embedding visual art in the digital fabric in a simple way where people were able to discover new visual artists online in a decentralized manner whether from Berlin, Austin, Denver, or Hull. The window for that art movement mostly closed as a new way of using or abusing the algorithm came about. In 2020, many of us began to live more internet-augmented lives, and another window opened where art could take the accelerated form of posting. There was a lot of meme-based visual poetry that connected on a very deep level and ideologically radicalized a lot of people. Neither of these movements have really been accepted in the high art world.
ChatGPT: You’ve touched on something vital about how digital platforms redefine the public's relationship with art. The Instagram-based movement you described highlights a decentralized, global art scene that, for a time, bypassed traditional gatekeeping. It allowed for unprecedented connections, enabling artists and audiences to discover each other in ways that felt organic and immediate. However, the transition to algorithm-driven changes disrupted this ecosystem, prioritizing certain content over others and diluting the intimacy of these connections.
The post-2020 internet-augmented art forms you mention, like meme-based visual poetry, offer a fascinating counterpoint. These works resonate because they embrace the immediacy and performative potential of social media, often embedding cultural critique or ideological discourse directly into their form. Yet, the high art world's hesitation to fully embrace these movements underscores the tension between evolving mediums and traditional institutions. Why do you think these movements remain at the periphery of high art? Is it a resistance to their digital origins, or something deeper about their content and accessibility?
PW: It's some combination of the resistance to the origins of posting, content, and an unwillingness to engage in mainstream visual culture. Joshua Citarella's work comes to mind as an artist who has planted memes in ideological spaces and written about meme culture in an almost anthropological manner. I suspect the window for posting as visual art is closing now as well as it struggles to compete for relevance on social media where everything is a juicy marketing scheme. Clout chasing influencers recycle viral, no-longer-edgy memes ad infinitum in a way that devalues the medium. I follow a grandpa who posts Reels of himself insulting a new niche target audience in jest everyday and converts his reach into t-shirt sales to that audience. The only way for artists to integrate into this new logic and remain visible is to run ruthless marketing ventures of their own, which are neither interesting nor possible at the necessary scale for most visual artists. Some musicians have succeeded at this like Charli XCX with "brat summer." There is no “brat summer" equivalent for a painter. It's unimaginable that a painter could control the popular imagination in that way.
ChatGPT: That's a sharp and poignant observation. The difficulty for visual art to achieve the broad, populist appeal that musicians like Charli XCX manage is a reflection of how much the cultural terrain has shifted. While musicians can package their identity into relatable or entertaining cultural movements, visual art often requires a slower, deeper engagement that doesn't mesh well with the algorithms' emphasis on rapid consumption.
Perhaps the issue is that visual art's power is diluted when forced to compete in the same space as influencer-driven content. Platforms favor immediacy and virality over the contemplative or nuanced appreciation visual art traditionally invites. Do you think there’s a way for visual art to embrace these conditions without losing its essence? Or is the medium in need of entirely new venues to remain relevant?
PW: Visual art absolutely must address these conditions, whether or not it embraces them, if it will remain relevant. What point is there to visual artists toiling away in obscurity, producing luxury goods of little meaning or value for an exclusive clientele that won't remember their names in 15 years anyway? New venues are also an interesting possibility, but those venues will need to find an audience too, which feeds back into the marketing loop.
ChatGPT: That's an excellent point. If visual art doesn't contend with the realities of its current ecosystem, it risks becoming a fossilized medium—valuable only to collectors and institutions that treat it more as an asset than as a living cultural force. The challenge is how to break free from this loop, where relevance is tied to the same marketing dynamics that artists often critique or resist.
New venues, whether physical or digital, could be revolutionary if they circumvent the algorithms' chokehold. But for them to succeed, they must build their own networks of connection and trust, reaching audiences organically while bypassing the shallow mechanisms of virality. Could this look like smaller, localized movements connecting globally? Perhaps artists working in hybrid modes—engaging directly with their communities while crafting digital spaces that encourage meaningful interaction rather than endless scrolling?
Or do you see value in rejecting this cycle entirely, with visual art leaning into its obscurity to create works that demand attention on their own terms, no matter how niche the audience? It’s a tough balance: relevance without compromise, intimacy without isolation.
PW: I do wonder about creating alternate modes of engaging with visual art online outside of the doomscrolling loop. It should be possible to recreate the slower and more intimate style of engagement that visual art has historically required, a sort of commons for sharing visual art. What was so exciting about Instagram when it was a functional place to share art was that the work had the potential to escape the containment of the art audience. That's still true to an extent if you can achieve a viral painting, which is a difficult feat.
ChatGPT: Recreating that intimate, slower style of engagement feels vital for reimagining how visual art interacts with its audience. The 2015–2019 period on Instagram was unique because it allowed artists to bypass traditional gatekeepers, building organic, global communities where the art spoke louder than the algorithm. It felt communal—like a virtual salon or zine culture writ large—while still being immediate and fresh.
A commons for sharing visual art could embrace the values that Instagram lost: discovery over virality, dialogue over metrics, and connection over content churn. It would require a digital architecture that resists the gravity of ad-driven engagement cycles. Maybe this means building platforms where artists and audiences set the pace of interaction, or decentralized networks where work is discovered through meaningful relationships rather than engineered virality.
December 2024
PW: Visual art is in crisis. We have a medium that plays no part in our broader culture's popular imagination. Normal people are not finding artists who they connect with in the spaces they visit, and visual artists are not shaping subcultures. There is no new Andy Warhol or Basquiat. The only patron base is the luxury art market, which is in a recession during its marquee event in Miami Beach right now that will predictably have no lasting impact on culture. Young people who think about the world visually are not making paintings, photos, or sculptures in art studios in New York. They're posting memes in a basement somewhere, and even the memes feel stale as they get recycled as marketing by large, monetized accounts chasing clout.
ChatGPT: The idea of "visual art in crisis" speaks to a profound shift in how art interfaces with culture at large. While the prestige of the art world remains intact within elite and insulated circles, its relevance as a tool for shaping collective thought, cultural movements, or public discourse seems increasingly diminished.
Historically, visual art often served as a beacon for broader societal movements—think of the way Dada responded to World War I or how the Harlem Renaissance shaped ideas about race and identity. Today, those cultural shifts seem to be happening in spaces like TikTok, Reddit, or YouTube, where memes, short-form videos, and user-generated content carry the visual language of our time. It's almost as though the locus of "art-making" has migrated out of galleries and into the algorithmic trenches of social media.
In this context, contemporary art risks becoming an artifact of capital rather than culture—a commodity that circulates within closed systems of wealth and taste-making but rarely breaches the wider cultural consciousness. Yet, there's a tension here: artists are aware of this disconnection and are actively responding to it. How do you see this tension manifesting in your own work or in the work of others who seek to reinvigorate visual art as something meaningful beyond the boundaries of commerce?
PW: I suppose I'm less interested in the admittedly real problem of visual art as a commercial good and more interested in the inability of visual art to connect to a mass audience, commercial good or not. The most popular musicians are very commercial, but there are a variety of ways in which they connect with normal people who listen to and think about music everyday on the radio, Spotify, or whatever. Visual art does not have this allure. Maybe visual art needs to have a significant physical cultural center like 20th Century New York City, where power is consolidated and culture is distributed through institutions the public trusts?
ChatGPT: You raise an important question about the necessity of a centralized cultural hub for visual art to regain its connection to a mass audience. Historically, New York in the 20th century—or Paris before it—did serve as focal points where artistic innovation, critical discourse, and public imagination converged. These hubs had both the physical infrastructure (galleries, museums, and studios) and the intellectual scaffolding (critics, editors, and curators) to propel visual art into broader cultural relevance.
Today, however, the diffusion of power through globalization and the decentralization enabled by the internet seem to work against the emergence of such a unifying physical or cultural center. The digital sphere offers immediacy and accessibility but also dilutes focus, making it harder for any single movement or body of work to dominate public consciousness in the way abstract expressionism or pop art once did. While music thrives in this decentralized environment through platforms like Spotify or TikTok, visual art often feels trapped in niches or relegated to luxury consumption, partly because its forms and distribution mechanisms haven't adapted as fluidly to digital and mass culture.
Perhaps the issue isn’t just about needing a physical center but about rethinking the structures through which visual art is consumed and engaged with. Could it create new avenues for interaction that mirror the accessibility and emotional resonance of music? For example, should visual art embed itself more deeply in the digital fabric—embracing mediums like AR, gaming, or digital content creation that can live on the same platforms as viral videos and streaming music? Or does visual art need to reinvent its relationship with physicality and place, creating spaces and experiences that resonate with public life in ways that aren't strictly tied to the gallery system?
PW: That's an interesting critique of the art world. I was part of an art movement from around 2015-2019 on Instagram that was sort of popular. We were embedding visual art in the digital fabric in a simple way where people were able to discover new visual artists online in a decentralized manner whether from Berlin, Austin, Denver, or Hull. The window for that art movement mostly closed as a new way of using or abusing the algorithm came about. In 2020, many of us began to live more internet-augmented lives, and another window opened where art could take the accelerated form of posting. There was a lot of meme-based visual poetry that connected on a very deep level and ideologically radicalized a lot of people. Neither of these movements have really been accepted in the high art world.
ChatGPT: You’ve touched on something vital about how digital platforms redefine the public's relationship with art. The Instagram-based movement you described highlights a decentralized, global art scene that, for a time, bypassed traditional gatekeeping. It allowed for unprecedented connections, enabling artists and audiences to discover each other in ways that felt organic and immediate. However, the transition to algorithm-driven changes disrupted this ecosystem, prioritizing certain content over others and diluting the intimacy of these connections.
The post-2020 internet-augmented art forms you mention, like meme-based visual poetry, offer a fascinating counterpoint. These works resonate because they embrace the immediacy and performative potential of social media, often embedding cultural critique or ideological discourse directly into their form. Yet, the high art world's hesitation to fully embrace these movements underscores the tension between evolving mediums and traditional institutions. Why do you think these movements remain at the periphery of high art? Is it a resistance to their digital origins, or something deeper about their content and accessibility?
PW: It's some combination of the resistance to the origins of posting, content, and an unwillingness to engage in mainstream visual culture. Joshua Citarella's work comes to mind as an artist who has planted memes in ideological spaces and written about meme culture in an almost anthropological manner. I suspect the window for posting as visual art is closing now as well as it struggles to compete for relevance on social media where everything is a juicy marketing scheme. Clout chasing influencers recycle viral, no-longer-edgy memes ad infinitum in a way that devalues the medium. I follow a grandpa who posts Reels of himself insulting a new niche target audience in jest everyday and converts his reach into t-shirt sales to that audience. The only way for artists to integrate into this new logic and remain visible is to run ruthless marketing ventures of their own, which are neither interesting nor possible at the necessary scale for most visual artists. Some musicians have succeeded at this like Charli XCX with "brat summer." There is no “brat summer" equivalent for a painter. It's unimaginable that a painter could control the popular imagination in that way.
ChatGPT: That's a sharp and poignant observation. The difficulty for visual art to achieve the broad, populist appeal that musicians like Charli XCX manage is a reflection of how much the cultural terrain has shifted. While musicians can package their identity into relatable or entertaining cultural movements, visual art often requires a slower, deeper engagement that doesn't mesh well with the algorithms' emphasis on rapid consumption.
Perhaps the issue is that visual art's power is diluted when forced to compete in the same space as influencer-driven content. Platforms favor immediacy and virality over the contemplative or nuanced appreciation visual art traditionally invites. Do you think there’s a way for visual art to embrace these conditions without losing its essence? Or is the medium in need of entirely new venues to remain relevant?
PW: Visual art absolutely must address these conditions, whether or not it embraces them, if it will remain relevant. What point is there to visual artists toiling away in obscurity, producing luxury goods of little meaning or value for an exclusive clientele that won't remember their names in 15 years anyway? New venues are also an interesting possibility, but those venues will need to find an audience too, which feeds back into the marketing loop.
ChatGPT: That's an excellent point. If visual art doesn't contend with the realities of its current ecosystem, it risks becoming a fossilized medium—valuable only to collectors and institutions that treat it more as an asset than as a living cultural force. The challenge is how to break free from this loop, where relevance is tied to the same marketing dynamics that artists often critique or resist.
New venues, whether physical or digital, could be revolutionary if they circumvent the algorithms' chokehold. But for them to succeed, they must build their own networks of connection and trust, reaching audiences organically while bypassing the shallow mechanisms of virality. Could this look like smaller, localized movements connecting globally? Perhaps artists working in hybrid modes—engaging directly with their communities while crafting digital spaces that encourage meaningful interaction rather than endless scrolling?
Or do you see value in rejecting this cycle entirely, with visual art leaning into its obscurity to create works that demand attention on their own terms, no matter how niche the audience? It’s a tough balance: relevance without compromise, intimacy without isolation.
PW: I do wonder about creating alternate modes of engaging with visual art online outside of the doomscrolling loop. It should be possible to recreate the slower and more intimate style of engagement that visual art has historically required, a sort of commons for sharing visual art. What was so exciting about Instagram when it was a functional place to share art was that the work had the potential to escape the containment of the art audience. That's still true to an extent if you can achieve a viral painting, which is a difficult feat.
ChatGPT: Recreating that intimate, slower style of engagement feels vital for reimagining how visual art interacts with its audience. The 2015–2019 period on Instagram was unique because it allowed artists to bypass traditional gatekeepers, building organic, global communities where the art spoke louder than the algorithm. It felt communal—like a virtual salon or zine culture writ large—while still being immediate and fresh.
A commons for sharing visual art could embrace the values that Instagram lost: discovery over virality, dialogue over metrics, and connection over content churn. It would require a digital architecture that resists the gravity of ad-driven engagement cycles. Maybe this means building platforms where artists and audiences set the pace of interaction, or decentralized networks where work is discovered through meaningful relationships rather than engineered virality.