To note that our lives are increasingly lived out and fashioned online is no hot take; social media has integrated itself into the routines and habits of work and play to a completion that borders dominance, with more than half of the world’s population using social media in 2020. But the most visible stakeholders in the online economy that social media bears on its colossal back deserve more scrutiny. If social media has so much influence on us, what should we make of the influencer?

The influencer is the love-child of celebrity culture and digital consumerism, midwifed by social media and wrapped snugly in an algorithmic blanket. Think Botticelli’s birth of Venus, but the shell is an open laptop, and each modestly placed hand clutches an iPhone 12. Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube furnish the shore - behold! The birth of the influencer. The current digital landscape has created the perfect storm for such a birth, and the rapid proliferation of influencers across the internet has earned them their own marketing sub-category. Social media influencers have access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pairs of eyes - simply, they have an influence on the buying decisions their audience makes, making them really valuable marketing tools. The rise of ‘influencer marketing’ means that making a purchase based on the recommendations of such social media moguls has pretty much become a rite of passage for any millennial Instagram user. Nearly four in every five brands are now tapping Insta for influencer campaigns, and the influencer marketing industry is estimated to be worth up to $15 billion by 2022.

Since art world buyers have a proclivity for buying with their ears as well as (and sometimes in lieu of) their eyes, it is unsurprising that an influencer-esque approach to creating and selling artwork has unlocked considerable success for artist Sophie Tea. She is, in her own words, ‘LONDON’S HOTTEST NEW ARTIST DISRUPTING THE ART INDUSTRY ON INSTAGRAM,’ boasting 163k followers on the platform and reportedly already turning over 1 million pounds. At 26, Tea has mastered the art of self-promotion on social media: her most recent #100daychallenge, where the first to comment ‘me’ on each Instagram post can buy the painting depicted for £2,500, has seen paintings selling in seconds. Sophie Tea is an influencer inasmuch as she promotes herself – she has cultivated her brand to the degree that, at least online, she is a brand, as well as the person influencing instagrammers to buy her art. Actual artworks aside, if her success is anything to go by, she has certainly mastered the art of influencing. Last year she opened her own Carnaby Street store which aims to be, complementary to an Insta-centric approach to selling art, ‘one of the most instagrammable venues in London.’

Instagrammability has, with the rise of social media, emerged as a potentially important criteria for exhibitions; Instagram represents free publicity and a chance for art to be immortalised online. Installations such as Yayoi Kusama’s enchanting Infinity Mirror Rooms and exhibitions like Olafur Eliasson’s dreamy In Real Life have received international recognition and renown on the platform – I remember pictures from the latter plastered across my Instagram feed for most of 2019’s stiflingly hot summer months. Aesthetic and performative environments are still popularly visited in the realm of social media engagement, but with most of us (many influencers, apparently, not included) spending an unprecedented amount of time at home, new kinds of content are gaining popularity.

Art therapy videos, previously a niche, are now rife on TikTok and Instagram’s new reels function, which is very TikTok-esque. I’m quite partial to them: they are calming and satisfying to watch, and it’s painfully easy to waste 20 minutes watching them. These, too, have been sucked into the internet vortex that is influencer culture, and they are now used widely to advertise various arts supplies. James Lewis started making TikToks in 2019; now, he shares his artistic process with an audience of over 4 million people globally. He has worked with Amazon, Samsung, Pepsi and Rolls Royce, has been named as one of the early recipients of money from a £54 million TikTok creator fund, and is currently flogging his own brand of precision art supplies. All of this he unlocked because of huge numbers of social media followers (and thus a whole load of influence, ready to be tapped in to), and all of those he gained because people like to watch his therapeutic painting videos. TikTok is revolutionising the online creator landscape, and Lewis’s success story shows just what could lie ahead for artist influencers creating short-form content.

Artist influencers like Sophie Tea and James Lewis are indeed exceptional examples, but it pays off to have a social media presence as an artist, even if your outreach isn’t influencer-worthy. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are mainstays for popular art consumption, buttressed by that unfortunate symptom of the modern condition that keeps us glued to our phones. But what does it really mean to construct a brand and an identity online, especially one sculpted by commercial logic?

There is, I suppose, a certain artistry to it – the creation and expression of an identity that exists beyond the physical self. If you do it well, it can have an influence. If you do it really well, it can have an influence and make you money. The process simultaneously affirms and denies anonymity: you can choose to share and hide as you please. You can be invisible (Lewis usually appears only as a hand with a brush in his content), or hyper-visible (Tea poses alone and with her art). Art history has seen artwork that is inextricable from its artist’s physical identity, uniting the two under a ‘brand’ in a similar way to how artworks and their digital progenitors are united online in the artist-as-influencer. Frida Kahlo is a good example: if you asked a room of people to visualise her Insta grid, you’d probably find a general consensus about the aesthetic. It has also seen artwork that is bound entirely to a lack of such an identity - fittingly, Banksy has 10.6 million followers and yet follows absolutely no one.

But this was identity construction before Instagram and before influencing; an artist-as-influencer has to grapple with more than just themselves as a physical artist with physical artwork. The social media marketplace is an enormous hot and crowded tumble dryer that reduces people with accounts to homogenous consumers. Negotiating it to begin with is like clutching for straws in a meaningless online kaleidoscope that is, somehow, also a straw factory. It is hard to think of art as just another product for another consumer, and where the artist and the influencer overlap sits a space that demands just that genre of mindset and vocabulary. Because art is supposed to transcend all this stuff, isn’t it?

Does art transcend social media? Does it have more influence than the influencer? I don’t know the answer. But I am certain that, if Banksy started recommending hair products, people would probably buy them – even though no one knows about his hair. Even though he might not have any.

Words: Alice Keeling

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