Why it’s almost impossible to find art criticism on social The social world, dominated by influencers and creators in all fields, is becoming less and less fertile ground for criticism: it’s happening for art criticism, too. Here’s why.
The now scanty, scrawny, boneless cadre of recipients of cultural products who are still interested in knowing an argued and, possibly, evaluative perspective on the things they see, will surely have noticed that, in recent months, there has been an interesting revival of that rivulet of discussion about the demise of criticism centered on the opposition of the venues that usually welcome exchanges and confrontations about culture: “institutional” venues, so to speak, on the one hand (mainly newspapers and trade journals) and social on the other. We talk mainly about literary criticism, the only form of criticism, along with film criticism, that today seems to still have some jolt, given the chronic stagnation of other genres of argumentative-evaluative production, starting with art criticism, which has now disappeared practically everywhere. Interesting then, among the most recent interventions, is the one by Gianluigi Simonetti published in the Tuttolibri insert of La Stampa a few weeks ago(L’età dell’insofferenza per i “second discourses”), a piece in which the literary critic attributes the growing intolerance of critical spirit per se to what he calls the “domination of pop,” meaning by “pop” any production that imposes consumption at the center of the cultural experience, and consequently “pop” means in his view “more simplification, more immediacy, more narcissism,” it means deterioration in an infantilistic sense of the identity “of all cultural mediators - critics included - but also of writers, publishers, and of course readers.”
Of course, the consumer product needs communication more than criticism, the consumer product needs marketing more than competent discussion, the consumer product seeks publicity more than insight. It is obvious, therefore, that the consumer product finds a supremely congenial dimension among the swamps of social networks, to which Simonetti ascribes a role of active complicity in this process of slow but steady stifling of criticism: “nothing destroys the mediations of critique more than the generalized and schematic take on it, nothing drowns out individual accredited voices more than the flow of anonymous opinions or (on the opposite end) the charismatic but incompetent interventions of popular and ignorant influencers.” In literature, in art, in politics: "ideology is no longer forged in newspapers, magazines or institutions, but in social media and mass communication, often through gross simplifications or fake news." There is no need to point out what threats we experience every day in the age of disintermediation, no need to remind us of the enormous dangers caused by a policy that bends to the same logic of a cultural production devoted to consumption (if for cultural productions the center of experience has become consumption, for politics the center of action has become consensus: it can be said, admittedly trivializing, that the mechanisms, modes, and dynamics by which consumption is sought on the one hand and consensus on the other are not so dissimilar, indeed), since the effects of a politics that builds its ideological foundations by means of social media are now part of everyone’s daily chronicle.
It is abundantly clear that disintermediation has caused the most extensive damage in the smallest, most fragile sectors, where interrelationships are most widespread (on these pages, for example, a heated debate on the causes of the almost total disappearance of art criticism was triggered some time ago in which discussed this aspect as well), and social media have offered to this process of erosion of criticism an effective, intrusive, and pervasive support, given also the evolution that the platforms have undergone in recent years, especially following two events that revolutionized the social media universe, namely the Covid-19 pandemic and the success of Tiktok, which came at the same time: the pandemic began in the spring of 2020; the Chinese social reached 1 billion users in August of the same year. The pandemic, first and foremost, opened the doors of social to Simonetti’s “ignorant ones” who found themselves locked in their homes overnight and, not knowing quite what to do with the sudden increase in free time, began to try their hand at public speaking via Instagram, trying to find a way to share their passion, whatever it was, with a wider or smaller audience: the most adept at exploiting the mechanisms of social networks soon became “popular influencers,” and those who were already influencers before benefited from a particularly favorable historical moment, since Covid has had another effect, which was, moreover, the subject of a recent survey conducted by the Hurrdat Marketing group: the changes in daily life induced by the disease, above all the increase in the consumption of content produced on social, have pushed companies to reallocate part of their budgets in order to look for alternative routes to promote their products in a completely abnormal period.
Contextually, Tiktok’s success has prompted Instagram to launch reels to try to stem the fortunes that short videos have begun to enjoy online in the wake of the Chinese social’s popularity: from the late 2020s onward, the preferred means of achieving success on Instagram (i.e., on the platform of the moment, on the platform that has offered and continues to offer shelter to Facebook transfuges, on the platform that has become in recent years what Facebook was ten to twelve years ago) has thus been the reel, the short video. And Instagram more readily granted popularity to those who were able to leverage the new medium to engage their audience: it therefore happened that so many fans achieved popularity almost overnight, with dizzying increases in follower numbers achieved precisely because of skillful use of reels, which Instagram intended to push to the maximum to counter the advance of Tiktok. Those who, at that moment in history (roughly between the date of the launch of reels in August 2020 to about the end of 2022), were able to skillfully employ the medium were risen to the laurels of popularity. Those who came later have been forced, with few exceptions, to stand by and watch. It has happened in all fields, the arts being no exception: those who want feedback think of an influencer (meaning one who, by Collins Dictionary definition, "uses social media to promote to their followers choices inherent in a lifestyle, commercial products, etc. ") or to a content creator (i.e., one who, more generally, has specialized in the production and distribution of digital content via social) that he or she habitually follows, opens his or her profile and scrolls back through his or her wall. High is the probability that he left during that time, just as high is the probability of finding, on many profiles, sudden spikes in popularity: we are talking about profiles that went from an average of four to five thousand views per video when it was going well, to suddenly crossing the one hundred thousand threshold in the face of some technical adjustments (a more graphically appealing cover, a better calibrated clip length, a more engaging format, a more effective and pressing editing, and so on). This is why Simonetti’s adjective “ignorant as hell” should not be read, borrowing an expression from football jargon, as a kind of reaction foul: brutal as it may be, it is a direct and simple statement of the fact that, in order to achieve success on a social media that favors rapid consumption, the intrinsic quality of the content is but one of the many elements of the magic potion to achieve the coveted virality. Add to this the fact that, in art, literature (and, above all, in politics), social networks have amplified that old mechanism of searching for authenticity that ends up generating the populist misunderstanding whereby identification (“he is someone like us”) matters more than competence: however, from a politician I do not expect him to be like me, I demand that he be better than me. And similarly, from those who disseminate content on social media (about art, literature, or any other topic), I do not expect them to address me with my language, I do not expect them to talk about a book they “liked.” I expect him to speak better than I do, and to analyze a cultural product for me, possibly giving me a judgment or, in the absence of judgment, providing me with context, because he has the expertise to do so. This is not, of course, defense of a nonexistent principle of authority (there are creators who despite coming from unstructured paths do egregious things, and there are esteemed luminaries with decades of experience whose presence on social media serves little or no purpose except to gain endorsements from those who already share their position or those who are already informed about a topic: a Burioni, to say, offers the precise, exact, timely example of what the esteemed professional should not do on social): it is simply the idea that expertise on a topic should be the ground on which to build a cultural or political proposal, and social, at least on paper, offers everyone the opportunity to measure themselves against those with expertise (the criticism of social, of course, is a criticism of the platforms, not of those who frequent them).
The Hurrdat survey put on record what more or less all of us, empirically, have observed: the forced gaps that confinements, quarantines, and lockdowns have generated in our lives have been filled by influencers and content creators who, from their homes, have come up with videos, live feeds, disparate content, and, Hurrdat’s article notes, “have been able to make high-quality content without the help of third parties during studio closures.” It goes without saying that “high quality” referring to content conveyed on social in this historical period means technical quality rather than content quality. A social’s algorithm, at least for the moment, cannot tell whether an influencer has just finished uttering a jibe about Leonardo da Vinci, which may perhaps escape most of the audience: it is, however, able to effectively measure the resolution of a video, the correct timing of the publication (there are times when the audience is most active and platforms reward those who are able to intercept those moments), the degree of participation of a profile in the comments that come in under its content (this is why budding creators are suggested to always respond to comments, even if they are simple hearts), the amount of interactions received, the percentage of time a user spends watching a video, which is why most favor short and engaging content over long and in-depth analysis (which, moreover, due to the limited length of reels, and because of the two thousand character limit imposed in the captions of individual posts, are physically impossible).
In the area of art, influencers and creators have explored a wide variety of genres by inventing a quick-consumption popularization (the length of videos rarely exceeds two minutes: it has, after all, been observed by many that videos that are even considered “long-form,” thus content that should be more in-depth, perform better if they do not exceed one minute in length, but there are also those who argue that the best results are obtained with videos of even shorter duration), a type of production lacking any precedent: quick travel tips to art cities, lightning-fast visits to exhibitions, various anecdotes about artists, micro-pills about works of art, emotional videos inside churches. There has already been ample discussion here of how these professionals have changed the way art is communicated, so perhaps there is no need to elaborate further. It must be said, however, that those who achieve success work professionally, since a certain type of quality and competence is needed to achieve success with social media: it would be a gross mistake to assume that an influencer or creator is an improviser.
Missing from the roll call is art criticism, although, incidentally, there is no shortage of those who present themselves as critics and merely describe works, without providing any argumentative-evaluative content, but in this the creators behave no differently from many journalists. And art criticism is lacking for obvious reasons of incompatibility: poiché gli influencer e i creator che esercitano queste attività per mestiere fondamentalmente campano vendendo i loro spazi alle aziende che intendono pubblicizzarsi tramite i loro canali, da un lato si potrebbe dire, un poco brutalmente, che non possono correre il rischio d’eliminarsi possibili datori di lavoro, e dall’altro non possono concedersi quelle stonature che sarebbero inevitabili dentro un mezzo dove il confine tra pubblicità and content (even in the presence of hashtags and assorted markers that serve to distinguish a content that the creator thinks and produces sua sponte and a content paid for by a company) in fact does not exist, since the content producer, the protagonist of the narrative, the voice of the product, is at the same time also the advertising testimonial of the brand that pays him. It is true that newspapers are not immune to equally questionable commercial logics (and this has also been written on these pages, pointing out that there are often interrelationships between those who invest and those who write, so that just as often, when it comes to reviewing an exhibition, one avoids making judgments about an exhibition organized by a subject who has invested in advertising on a newspaper, and so on and so forth) but, at least formally, on a newspaper there are ways to avoid the mixing typical of social, since advertising and content travel on distinct, separate, recognizable channels, and since journalists are prohibited from lending their faces to advertising campaigns: a journalist who were to do what an influencer does, i.e., a video in which he personally advertises an exhibition by branding it with the “adv” marker, would be sanctioned by the Order.
There are those who believe, correctly on the abstract level, that criticism should be expressed through social media. A professional critic, therefore, should practice on social to make sure that the medium is manned. The problem is that, today, criticism appears increasingly ontologically incompatible with social due to the fact that we are probably going through a historical period of profound decadence of platforms. Some have spoken of enshittification to describe this process that knows some distinct phases (there are those who believe that all major online platforms, not just social, are experiencing this progressive deterioration, from search engines to portals such as Amazon and the like), and that finds its reasons in the maximization of profits by the platforms. To those who have been frequenting Facebook since its beginnings, the process will appear quite clear (so much so that some have called Facebook “the king of enshittification”): at first, the platform induces you to a seemingly pleasant and useful use (telling about your life, seeing photos of friends, following the page of your favorite newspaper, of the singer you love, discussing the news of the day). After that, the platform exploits its users to convince companies that that is the right place for an advertising investment: users’ bulletin boards are progressively flooded with advertisements, and advertisers invest in the medium because the costs are low, compared with the possibility of reaching a profiled user base with a depth previously unknown. Then, the platform exploits advertisers as well, lowering the quality of service and increasing the cost of reaching that audience at which they were previously reaching at a fraction of the cost. Finally, the quality of service gets worse and worse until both companies and users begin to abandon the platform, decreeing its crisis and then its death.
Theenshittification of major social platforms (Facebook and Instagram especially: both, as is well known, belonging to the same entity) has transited through easily detectable actions. Facebook, for example, has begun to increasingly reduce the reach of external links (a user who clicks on an external link is a user who takes time away from the platform, and is a user who will go to see an advertisement somewhere else, instead of inside the platform), and has likewise progressively reduced theimportance, in the logic of the algorithm, of everything that comes from the world of newspapers, so much so that many newspapers have experienced very heavy drops in traffic coming from Facebook (although in the last few weeks the first signs of a slight counter-trend seem to be appearing). Subsequently, it has reduced the reach of pages that users decide to follow voluntarily to focus, rather, on suggested pages, even when the recommendations are unsatisfactory to the user. Instagram, for its part, does not allow external links to be posted (except in stories, but the traffic they guarantee to a website is usually insignificant), and has acted as seen above, that is, rewarding content for quick consumption. Today, social cares little about intrinsic quality (if there was ever a time when social really cared about promoting genuinely interesting content): it cares most about engagement, which is why platforms tend to encourage compulsive scrolling of content that is easily consumed and with which one can easily interact: the more time one spends on the platform, the more one scrolls, the more advertisements one sees, the more the platform makes money. Art criticism, literary criticism, music criticism, film criticism, and so on, on the other hand, are activities that require attention, method, analysis, time, accuracy, depth: characteristics that are irreconcilable with the dynamics of a social platform that is experiencing a phase of involution, of decay. A critic, of course, can (and perhaps should) fix his garrison on social as well: however, he will not be able to reach the crowds that an influencer or a creator who adapts his content to the platform’s desiderata are able to touch. And there is no shortage, of course, of professionals who also practice critical activity on social as a corollary to that which they conduct through different means (newspapers, trade journals, academic activity): the problem is that, as they are structured today, the critic who intends to replicate on social the tools of traditional criticism risks speaking to the same people who would read him or her through other channels, since today it is impossible to reach a wide audience without producing content that can exploit the mechanisms of virality, or without investing in advertising to reach an audience other than his or her own (and it is difficult to imagine a solitary critic who has the budgets necessary to reach a wide audience). As for the influencers or creators themselves, should they aspire to make social media their livelihood, there is little hope of criticism coming from these figures. The reasoning is the usual one that, on these pages, was made for newspapers: removed the daredevils and removed the outliers, all that remains is anyone who deems it sustainable to run any risks arising from the exercise of his or her faculty of judgment or who does not have to tie the fate of his or her profession to the moods of those who must read it.
Does there remain, then, room for doing criticism on social media? If one intends to do criticism as one would in a newspaper, obviously not: if in the past many have felt that the post published on a social was a substitute for a newspaper article (with the advantage of not having the inconvenience of an editorial staff that has to approve and publish it for you), it is because there was a time when the ways of using the medium could appear interchangeable, but that is no longer the case (always keeping in mind, of course, the goal of addressing a wide audience). It is certainly a viable path, while preserving the knowledge that, in the vast majority of cases, you will probably end up speaking only to those who already follow the critic in other mediums, or a few more. But with an influencer or creator who properly masters the medium, then there is no competition. There remains, of course, the power to invent innovative ways: the only one who, for now, would seem to have succeeded with some success in the field of art criticism is art historian Fabrizio Federici, owner of the page Mo(n)stre, born on Facebook and then accompanied by an equally successful Instagram profile, capable of gaining success at the price ofadapting the tools proper to criticism to the characteristics of the medium, and constantly leveraging the exercise of a refined, intelligent and above all engaging irony. We can then mention the figure of Luca Rossi, who for years has been conducting on social networks a sort of guerrilla-criticism, one might call it, made up of constant, pervasive interventions on his and other message boards, which have explored all possible means (from the textual post, long or short, to the reel, to the live broadcast and so on). However, Mo(n)stre’s criticism directed at cultural products (Federici focuses exclusively on exhibitions) and Luca Rossi’s criticism directed at contemporary art would appear less incisive if both did not flank their social presence with a constant presence on trade publications, where the insights launched on social are then explored in depth. More importantly, to date, no critic (among those few who remain) has demonstrated the same resilience on multiple fronts.
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