I deactivated my Instagram account last Monday. While it doesn’t sound like a revolutionary act, because it’s not, I still find myself in a strange state of mourning—for what, I’m not exactly sure anymore, but the feelings are real—even if the consequences of my decision are probably way overblown.
Since my early twenties my “identity” as an artist has defined who I thought I was as a person. It’s the little white lies you tell yourself when you’re stuck in a crummy life situation to get you through the day; I may be an elite university drop out stuck going to community college, but hey! I’m an artist. I may be working a minimum wage retail job in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city, but hey! I’m an artist.
And, my Curriculum Vitae for being an interesting, sparkly snowflake, and solidifying my reputation as a person who creates things, was my Instagram.
Getting an Instagram coincided with getting my first smart phone. All my friends were already on the app and I had resisted getting with the technological times for as long as I could. Smart phones were expensive and I had no interest in carrying a mini computer in my pocket.
After the inconvenient death of my 2010 LG red flip phone, I could no longer rely on my argument that dumb phones were cheaper since replacing my broken in half flip phone turned out to be an exorbitant expense compared to buying a low quality Android smart phone.
Getting on the gram, an app that initially had been exclusive to iphone users was the next logical step of the smartphone acquisition process. If I was going to start thinking of myself as a “serious” artist, apparently I was also required to make an Instagram account.
I wanted to be a great artist—it was fated to happen. 23-year-old me had lived through enough disappointments, and this magical social media application was going to deliver me from my misery. In this early stage of my career as a “serious artist” I was making large scale hand drawn collages with every piece meticulously cut, assembled, and precariously adhered together using generous aliquots of elmer’s glue.
My apartment’s floor was covered with tiny multicolored pieces of construction paper, the waste from the various hand cut flora and fauna I would assemble together with the giant cut-out portraits of imaginary people—amalgams of reference drawings cobbled together from sites like Tumblr, another long-gone social media platform I would use for visual inspiration.
I posted my first piece of art on the app in 2013. At the time, my idea of being a successful artist was the ability to get the attention of large art accounts online, which in my mind, would then lead to art curators seeing my work with the ultimate goal of scoring a gallery show. I know now this isn’t the way the art world works, but at the time, I was naive, not well connected, and very very young.
I needed something—an online vessel, to put my hopes and dreams into, a digital altar to get me through the depths of desperation. In 2013 I was relatively unknown and struggling to pay rent in my rat and roach infested bottom duplex on a side street overlooking my extremely elite post college job as a cashier at Rite Aide1 in the high-end enclave of Buffalo NY.
I had felt completely let down by the promises of an adult job after college—and also the whole false future I had imagined for myself, the curse of being a highly “academically gifted” high school student. I learned the hard way that there are multiple paths to failure in academia and I gave up on my dreams of scientific excellence which I was striving for prior to having a massive panic attack during a electricity and magnetism mid-term at the ripe old age of 19 at my former institution—The University of Toronto.
Art, a major I had picked up out of sheer boredom at the state school I matriculated to after spending one of the worst years of my life at Erie Community College2 was my new focal point. I had been drawing since I was little taking breaks through high school but returning to the habit as a mortified 20 year old traumatized by not being able to keep up academically with my peers and wondering if they were ever my peers to begin with. Drawing—I was good at it, and I had a knack for art history, which I took on as a minor alongside my chemistry courses as I was determined to finish my science education, even if it was for my own ego.
While art school taught me how to copy Leonardo da Vinci sketches and to rightly hate oil painting (sorry it takes forever to freaking dry, everything in it will give you cancer, you can accidentally create a chemical fire if you aren’t careful, and acrylics come in much prettier colors…) it didn’t teach me or really anyone I went to school with how to “market ourselves.”
Marketing, a curse word in most artists circles because “capitalism” or whatever is still a necessary skill if you plan on ever selling your art to people other than your immediate family members. However “business acumen for artists” was not a course or workshop that art students got in school—and this is a huge problem. Instead of classes on how to create a website, write an artist CV, and contact clients, the career expectations put forth by arts administrators was that art students would just go on to MFA programs or conservatories and somehow magically get a teaching job in art somewhere. But what about those of us who were interested in just selling paintings? Maybe becoming…gasp! A commercial illustrator!? Instagram. Instagram was the answer—a pretty pathetic option in retrospect.
In addition to being dependent on the app for artistic visibility, Instagram also became a social crutch for me. For most of my life in Buffalo, I had been a social pariah with ebbs and flows in between—sometimes it let up, and I found myself unexpectedly at a DJ set packed in like sardines in someone’s one bedroom apartment in the Elmwood Village, or I’d get invited invited to a house show in someone’s Riverside/Black Rock based leaky basement; but usually my mouth (I have a lot of unpopular opinions), sarcastic sense of humor, or just general awkwardness would come out, and then it was game over. My antisocial tendencies made their way to the surface somehow—and still do whenever I return home, without fail. Instagram allowed me to become someone else online, a person who I didn’t think I was allowed to be in real life—”cool.”
Therefore, I reasoned that if I could leverage the app into a tool, I could finally gain the attention of people outside of my humdrum circumstances. I could sell myself and my art. I could get the attention of a curator in New York City, or a gallery in Los Angeles which would finally catapult me to the “big time.” What was my idea of “big time” you may be asking…well it was the pop surrealist art world, of course (yes Franklin you can roll your eyes now).
Magazines like Juxtapoz and High Fructose were my equivalent of “Rolling Stone.” They sold me an image of artistic success I wanted to emulate. It would be years later before I realized that the money and fame I imagined the artists featured in their pages had attained was a fabricated lie bolstered by the mirage of apps like Instagram where the number of followers and likes gave the audience of social media profiles a false sense of artistic success—like a gambler in a casino putting on the airs of a high roller by wearing a rented Givenchy suit. The bot farms filled with fake followers, the exorbitant profit percentage galleries accrued from art sales, and the predatory art accounts that attempted to goad artists into paying them money to get their work “featured” on their scammy social media pages alluded me for a while, but soon even I would be inundated with direct messages from shady characters attempting to exploit desperate artists for cash with the promises of recognition and notoriety.
Pop surrealism, also known as “low brow” art is an artistic movement that combines popular culture—think Lisa Frank and Disney meets Robert Mapplethorpe and Roy Lichtenstein put into a blender with Salvador Dali and painted in an exclusively pink, teal, and lilac color scheme with a bit of Japanese manga and anime sprinkled in for good measure.
Originating in Southern California and the Bay Area in the late 70s, the movement’s forefathers are artists such as Von Dutch (birth name Kenny Howard) a motorcycle mechanic metal fabricator and “hot rod” car painter, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth fellow custom car artist and creator of the cartoon character “Rat Fink” a macabre riff on Mickey Mouse, and my favorite—Margaret D.H. Keane creator of the iconic “big eyes” paintings of sad children.3 Other notable figures in the early movement include Don Ed Hardy a tattoo artist that blended traditional Japanese tattooing techniques with Southern California surf culture,4 Mark Ryden whose style has become one of the most recognizable of the movement post 1970s and whose iconic “Tree of Life Painting” was famously showcased in MOCA’s “Los Angeles Artists 1980-2010” survey of art show, and Robert Williams the founder of Juxtapoz Magazine.
One other important tangential art movement that certain historians lump in with “low brow” is the alternative comics or “comix scene.” Spearheaded by figures like comics artist and writer Art Spiegelman of Zap! Comics and Raw Magazine, comics writer Harvey Pekar and his series American Splendor,5 and what I would like to call “outlaw” cartoonists like R. Crumb and Spain Rodriguez; alternative comics was an underground art scene that turned comic books into a serious literary movement with adult themes and experimental visual art styles.
While not a movement that originated on the west coast, Spiegelman was New York based, Pekar remained in Cleveland until his death, Crumb was from Philadelphia, and Rodriguez from Buffalo respectively—many artists involved with “comix” including Rodriguez and Crumb, would eventually move to places like San Francisco, Portland Oregon, and Seattle. And by the 1980s, the Comics Journal run by Fantagraphics a important purveyor of alternative and underground comics, would be the premier nationally recognized but solidly west coast based beacon of the alternative comics sphere.
Due to the time period of it’s development and it’s regionally specific existence, it can be argued that alternative comix was the bridge connecting the visual art styles of graffiti and pop surrealism through artists like Crumb, Rodriguez and Vaughn Bode—another east coast to west coast comic artist transplant whose art has appeared on subway cars and fantastical 1970s animated movies.
As pop surrealism progressed so did the commoditization of the movement. What originally started as a organic coalescence of artists from underground west coast subcultures with distinct creative visions, eventually melded itself into the slick billboard ready art form that graces the pages of High Fructose Magazine today.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Artists like Amy Sol, Audrey Kawasaki, Tara McPherson, Casey Weldon, Shag, and Camille Rose Garcia to name a few, became the new torch bearers of this solidly established and commercialized art scene. It’s around this time, when pop surrealism hit mainstream success, that Instagram became the main mode through which art was consumed by the masses.
I cannot say that I want to emulate this art style now as an adult, but in my late teens and early twenties I thought pink and teal color schemes showcasing floating heads of attractive women in alien environments, was very “punk rock.” And, growing up in a city that idolized artists like Marcel Duchamp, an art world figure I still cannot identify with, let alone respect—seeing artists exalted in publications for their technical prowess instead of their abstract obtuse and “conceptual” ideas, made me excited about art again.
Pop surrealism gave me a direction—and a made up online audience to cater my work to. Even if now looking back at my “collages,” the only similarity I really have with many of the artists creating work under the pop surrealist umbrella is the fact that nothing I was drawing and assembling had any meaning. I was just putting pieces together I thought “looked good,” which is quite ironic to me now, especially when I started to realize that most of the post modern artists I looked at with derision also made work that I considered “meaningless.”
However, pop surrealism art was meaningless for the cameras—it’s art for the gram. It’s art that is weird and unsettling, but had a great color scheme and looks amazing on a white gallery wall. Or in other words, it’s art that was slightly tasteless, a little vain, driven by the worst whims of the art market, and looked great online—the new virtual “art gallery.”
In 2017, the year I moved to the west coast, the Pop Surrealist Movement was well into it’s late stages. I relocated to Seattle because I wanted to be part of the scene there—and I was for quite a long time. I became so entrenched in fact that I ran in circles with some of the most famous pop surrealists of the period, which eventually led me to somewhat fall out of love with the art movement all together.
At artists meet ups like the Drawnk in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, it was common to hear artists admonishing each other on sticking to a signature look. If you wanted to “make it” the purveying ethos was that you could not deviate from whatever weird style you had settled on—or else what would make you unique, also known as “marketable.”
If for instance you messed up your Instagram by pivoting away from painting neon cats to focusing on tempera still lifes—you could ruin your curated algorithm and corrupt your brand. Therefore, is was common knowledge that sites like Instagram were stunting creative growth, and to an extent culture as a whole—since artists were encouraged to play it safe in order to appease the algorithmic gods.
Looking back, it’s really not hard to figure out why tech bros were the main customer base for most of our art sales and commissions. West coast artists and west coast tech entrepreneurs had a incestuous toxic relationship with one another. Both groups were guilty of leaching off the other for success money and fame, whether it was in the form of art sales or addictively checking Instagram analytics. We won grants funded by Microsoft money while simultaneously being pushed out of our studio spaces in order to expand Jeff Besos’s Amazon empire.
Our lives as creative people were dependent on the whims of corporate overlords who developed complex mathematical equations that were mysterious and unpredictable using cutting edge technology for the sole purpose of keeping us addicted to a platform that was farming us for data while we fished for artistic validation.
Most of the art produced during this time period in pop surrealism had similar subject matter, most succinctly summed up as conventionally attractive looking heroine chic skinny blonde women with dinner plate sized eyes wearing deer headdresses in some sort of creepy universe surrounded by alien looking animals and flanked by flowers and skulls. All nods to the luminaries Keane, Ryden, and Hardy with none of the soul. A paint by numbers low brow composition encased in a sleek coat of resin where objects are placed at random and artistic decisions are made on aesthetics alone, its for the “gram” after all.
Segue-skip if you have no interest in more extraneous artistic examples:
To add more context to this aesthetic period in time, and also because I do enjoy riffing on how ridiculous the visual imagery of the mid to late 2010s could be—here are a few more examples: you had your acrylic paintings in pastel colors of naked “art models” wearing bear masks plastered on irregular shaped laser cut plywood panels usually painted by some waifish woman with a trust fund (that’s how she’s able to magically afford a studio space in the middle of Silver Lake without having a full time job at 27). Then, you had your limited edition “figurines” or adult toys—no not of the xxx variety, think less like things that go into nether regions that will not be named, and more like ridiculously priced collectors’ items that are generally rip offs of lovable cartoon characters but given an “alt culture makeover” and designed and painted by some middle aged graffiti bro who is now too famous to tag a convenience store. I should also mention, high chance waifish 20 something painter of naked bear masked women and middle aged trucker hat wearing graff dude are dating, they met while doing mushrooms on an artist retreat in the woods…file this away for later under “how I learned that the pop surrealism movement was a scam.” Welcome to Seattle! Don’t meet your art heroes kids.
Botticelli reincarnates we were not. And while we may have all deluded ourselves into believing we were painting alternate dimension “Birth of Venuses” in neon dripped color palettes on the heels of a come down from a day’s long acid trip—in reality, we were all just art slaves for the gram, making work that would look good in a grid framed in the screen of a smart phone.
But even with this grim realization, I still needed the validation of Instagram. I was still convinced that likes, shares, and an increasing follower count would pave the way for a viable art career even as I drifted farther away from my giant collage art roots and changed styles completely. A big no no for my new friend group.
Even as I shifted creative gears, I would still post a piece on the platform only to be enthralled with my phone screen for hours waiting for the dopamine hit of getting a “notification.” Like a gambler addicted to the game, I would constantly refresh the app when there was a lull in the hopes that by watching the little refresh wheel spin on my screen I’d see another like, a missed message, a new follower. Instagram was my slot machine.
While Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012, approximately a year prior to me using it in earnest, I would argue that the “Facebookization” of the platform in the first 5 years under Zuckerberg’s tutelage was initially slow moving. The changes Facebook implemented in it’s early phases of acquisition were almost unnoticeable to the average user, and then they accelerated in scale, as Facebook now known as “Meta” flexed their corporate muscle with competitors like Snapchat—stealing their core ideas and concepts as fun accessories for the gram while decimating their smaller tech rivals’ user bases. I would argue Instagram “stories” which appeared on the platform in August of 2016—only several months prior to my west coast move, was the first big demarcation that Instagram was no longer a space for artists, but a space for corporate advertisers.
I admit, I loved stories. It gave me the opportunity to share works in progress with my audience and to communicate directly with my followers in a way I couldn’t do prior to it’s implementation on the platform. But it’s inception also also sowed the seeds for a terrible future of tense angry online discourse, and general discontent. The temporary and ephemeral nature of “stories” which were slides, clips, and short-form videos that had the limited life span of 24 hours, would later become indoctrination tools, not just for selling art, or Netflix ads, but for laundering ideas—or blatant political propaganda.
By 2019 I had stopped hanging out with many of the people associated with The Drawnk—a “pop surrealist pseudo-salon” or “the envious artist social climbing micro internet celebrity drinking society” whatever you want to call a weekly meet-up that happened at a dive bar where more drinking and ass kissing occurred than drawing. I wasn’t a good cultural fit for my new Seattle cohort. I wasn’t west coast chill, and east coast sarcasm doesn’t translate well on the other side of the country—people will take you literally. I also knew that my art didn’t really fit in—and that my “style” wasn’t working well with the dominant aesthetic themes of the larger group. By this time, I was making large scale free-hand pen and ink cityscape drawings and trying to bury little turns of phrases and covert messages in my billboards and sign posts.
Many members of the Drawnk left Seattle during the lock downs. How did I know they were leaving the city? Instagram of course. That’s also how I found out many artists I used to hang out in person with had become radicalized online.
During covid, Instagram once again shifted gears and got weird. Tik Tok had only recently entered the social media rat race, but was quickly usurping the competition. And so, Meta got desperate and aggressive—not a good combination. In an attempt to keep eyeballs on the platform, Instagram pivoted to short video. Instagram “Reels” were just Tik Tok videos rebranded.
The content featured on Reels encompassed idiotic dances, makeup tutorials, lip syncing, and political commentary. The political videos were the most bizarre to me. Usually the clips in question encompassed a floating talking head in the foreground commentating on a sensationalized divisive culture war news story in the background. When this style of political commentary became more popular on the app I started noticing artists in my social circles who didn’t seem to be very informed or opinionated on world affairs in the past, reblogging and resharing these reels through their Instagram stories.
From 2020 and beyond It was clear that Instagram was quickly becoming a useful platform for the dissemination of political propaganda. With everyone stuck in their homes6 and art communities fragmenting, social media became the dominant form of human connection and expression.
As the relevance of pop surrealism and art in general on Instagram started to disintegrate and video became the dominating driver of the app, I noticed more normal people in addition to artists taking hard political lines. I found it odd that creatives in the pop surrealist movement—an art scene focused on vanity, party drugs, and the mystical would all of the sudden become purveyors of hot political takes.
Then again if on the surface aesthetics and make believe were the core ethos of the movement, and hard-line debate bro political takes were usurping artistic identity and becoming the dominant cultural zeitgeist—if you can’t beat them you join them. The fluidity and superficial nature of the low brow art movement was too passive to withstand the domineering cultural forces evolving from the social media apps.
Therefore, the ultra online pop surrealist movement’s only option was to follow the crowd in order to remain relevant and to continue to score art sales. And that option was to post a black square for BLM on your profile or to share that infographic about discrimination against demisexuals in the work place in your stories.
I would like to think I was immune to this trend. But I wasn’t above resharing political takes either. I also know that I was doing it in part as a reaction to many of the poorly referenced infographics and sensationalist videos that were starting to dominate my feed. By this point in my life, I was already immersed in the heterodox space where I was quietly consuming articles from Quillette and watching Magdelen Berns Youtube videos. I was starting to get burnt out, and I had finally started googling ways to leave the platform—but I wasn’t brave enough to call it quits yet.
I watched social media devolve into a Jew hate fest for the first time in May of 2021 when Israel and the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad had a month long scuffle. I watched artists I had respected and never said a peep about global conflicts prior throw their hat in the ring. I unfollowed many accounts I had kept along with creatively for years who all the sudden were peddling deranged conspiracy theories about Zionists attempting to colonize the Middle East with help from the Rothchilds and George Soros.
But I held on to my account until this week. Nothing in particular made me do it, I just think I had finally had enough. I wasn’t even posting art anymore. I had tried to hold on by the skin of my teeth and to maintain a presence just so I could push back on how dark dangerous and antisemitic post October 7th 2023 Instagram had become. I even started posting again for a while in a effort to refute some of the most dangerous myths regarding Jews and the war in Gaza being disseminated from Instagram accounts with large followings like Saint Hoax and So Informed. But the work was exhausting and unrewarding.
And, while I knew speaking up would come with costs—most notably hateful messages, antisemitic comments, holocaust denialism and the rest…hey. I’m an artist. And as an artist—pardon my language, but fuck your platform. I don’t need it anymore. What I need is the ability to make art untheathered, unbothered, un-enslaved to an algorithm or a tech company.
I only deactivated my account—I didn’t delete it, but I don’t think I’ll be returning. I also removed the app from my phone and do not feel tempted to get it back again.
Since 2013 to the day I decided to call it quits I had grown to over 2000 followers on the site. Which, if you are familiar with social media art accounts on the gram, 2000 people is nothing. However, 2000 people following my work was a lot to me—and it took me over ten years of trials and tribulations to garner that large of an online fan base. And while I’m not upset about leaving the platform, I am still walking away from over a decade of my life spent online documented in art and photographic momentos.
Instagram was the first social media app that allowed me to curate who I was to the outside world and become someone else—a new, better, wittier version of myself. I could entertain, I could enthrall, I could impress. Add all my drawing materials, half a bottle of red wine, and the most potent marijuana on planet earth and I could put on a whole show on the app for me and my 2000 odd followers. Yes, I was an addict—but I was also an artist.
I took my followers on trips with me, I documented my move to Seattle, my move out of Seattle, and I shared images of my first art show on the platform. Instagram became a scrapbook of my life, and my creative process and progress.
It became a friend, an adversary, a source of heartbreak. I broke up with friends through Instagram. I realized people I had know for years were antisemites through Instagram. I became consumed by doom, gloom, and an uncontrollable sense of dread through Instagram. So in the end, the app had to go.
Substack scares me too. Notes with it’s infinite feed is addictive. And I notice more people announcing they have “quit social media!” through a Substack Note without realizing the irony. And for that reason, I still need to be on high alert from falling into the same old patterns.
But—I am an artist, and now a writer (weird) and I still need social media. My view of success and greatness has shifted. I no longer care about online notoriety or art posts going viral—in fact the thought of an essay or image traveling too far into the depths of the internet makes me nauseous. Although…I still want an online space, a place to grow, a small corner of the internet to call my own. So for now, this will do just fine.
My two months at Rite Aide will make a glorious essay someday—I was cash scammed on the drawer and promptly fired…well my “resignation was accepted by management” aka fired. It was also my first brush with gun violence. Spoiler Alert!
Another essay for another time “My Year of Fear and Loathing at ECC” hopefully I can manage to write it in 2025.
The cartoon series “The Powerpuff Girls” by animator Craig McCraken was inspired by Keane’s paintings. Also see the movie “Big Eyes” a Tim Burton movie for a pretty decent biographical depiction of the artist’s life. I recommend it, it’s a solid film.
"Ed Hardy Deeper Than Skin” is in fact an amazing film and gave me respect for Hardy as an artist I didn’t have prior. He is extremely skilled talented and criminally overlooked…I really judged him on those terrible t shirts (I’m sorry). https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/ed-hardy
American Splendor the movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0305206/ also worth a watch.
I actually worked in a covid lab during the pandemic—so I was not at home, but again a story for another essay.