Instagram and the Creative Process
Why are we still here?
I joined Instagram in 2013. Its simplicity captured everyone I think. Just a photo and caption, packaged up and sorted by the time it was posted for your 13 followers. It was that golden age when social media actually felt like a community. It was novel and exciting.
Now, over a decade later, each morning I see more artists, creators, and musicians announcing a departure from Instagram, or at the very least, a decentering. A conversation that’s been simmering for years, now finally reaching a rolling boil.
It feels like we are facing a collective clarity, a “why are we here?” moment. Why do we put so much of ourselves into a platform that gives back a fraction of what we put in? It’s exploitative, exhausting, and at the end of the day, leaves most of us feeling hollow.
I want to preface this all with: I owe a lot to Instagram. The abandonment of this platform has real economic / income repercussions for many artists and creatives, myself included. I dropped out of school after only a semester and started making work just for the fun of it. My work has always existed in a grey area between fine art and illustration, and I was unsure of where it fit. I had no industry connections, no roadmap, no formal training. And yet, thanks to a silly little app, I was able to grow an audience, connect with clients, and turn this into a career which is something I will always be grateful for.
For all its flaws, Instagram democratized discovery. Anyone, regardless of background or access, could put their work out there. No need for galleries, gatekeepers, or institutions. That’s beautiful. But I worry about what gets filtered out in the process. The type of work that needs time, that needs space to be misunderstood before it can be understood.
But, like many others, it became a critic. A collaborator. I let it guide my hand, pushing my work into safer, more predictable directions. We all do it. We see what works, what gets a reaction, and we lean into it. We run old concepts into the ground in the hope of striking gold twice, instead of following an idea into deeper, stranger waters.
I’m not saying this is new by any means.
The relationship between audience and art has always existed. Patronage, markets, trends, art has never lived in a vacuum. But what’s uniquely toxic about social media is the kind of work it rewards. Instagram isn’t a gallery or a museum. It doesn’t reward depth, patience, or complexity. Instead, it rewards the immediate and the easily digestible. The feed is an infinite scroll, and our work is tossed into it, given the lifespan of a couple seconds. What does that do to creativity? Inspiration?
Instagram has acted as a catalyst to push my own work into “content,” into its most easily digestible form. The tragedy is, I don’t know what gets lost in that process. How are you supposed to know what ideas never had the chance to grow because they were harvested too early all for an app that only rewards their smallest form?
It’s a homogenization.
The platform rewards a narrow slice of creative work, bright, legible, high-contrast, easy-to-consume. It favors speed over depth. Iteration over evolution. It is not designed to support difficult art, slow art, work that demands more than a passing glance. It discourages work that is unresolved, exploratory, or uncertain. It discourages work that is messy.
But messiness is where real growth happens. The art I love most is difficult, challenging, unwilling to offer easy answers. It sticks with me, rattling around in my head long for days to come.
At the end of the day, Instagram is a business. And artists, musicians, writers, creatives are the ones developing its product, for free.
The machine needs us to keep posting. It needs us to keep people engaged so it can sell ads. We are unpaid laborers in a system that rarely offers anything in return. We pour our time, effort, and energy into the platform, and in exchange, we get a fraction of the visibility we once did, a trickle of engagement, an ever-changing algorithm that makes us feel like we’re chasing a moving target.
It’s a recipe for burnout, creative stagnation. Or for artists abandoning their practice altogether.
I think we are all living through a time where complex, difficult concepts, abstract thought, and challenging conversations are going to be more necessary than ever. Social media has drastically changed the way we communicate and ingest information and content. That isn’t an inherently bad thing, but it’s something we need to be conscious of. Our tools shape us. The medium changes the message.
I don’t know what the alternative looks like. I hope we see a resurgence of physical artist spaces and communities. Or maybe more platforms like these that focus on longer form content.
I am more-so writing this as advice to myself to decenter instagram and social media in general, and allow more breathing room and independence for my creative practice.
Tech oligarchs should have no place in creative practice. Yet here we are, letting them shape not just how our work is seen but what we choose to make in the first place. When content dictates concept, when engagement metrics determine what’s worth pursuing, art becomes dangerously narrow.
Artists historically are the ones pushing those boundaries, creating space for abstraction, for mystery, and for things that don’t fit neatly into a caption or an algorithmic cycle. And it's especially important to avoid letting the platform have more influence over that process than it deserves. The need for engagement will never override the need for experimentation. And at the end of the day, instagram is not real. And one day, sooner than later, it'll be a relic of the past.
Good stuff. I echo a lot of the concerns and advice here. My natural instinct/ intuition, like a lot of people/ artists is to go the opposite direction that i see. Most artists do this whether they know it or not. Art is a form of rebellion with these platforms. Years ago I was commissioned to create the main lobby art (a vast complex chaos of thousands of lines intersecting with random thoughts and images) at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto (not the Disney campus- the new one designed by Frank gehry). I’d know the design director who previously worked for Barack and got him elected. I know a lot of these artists who work for Mark Z and they all hate him. I mean despise him. While working on the art they asked me NOT to include Mark in the mural but include themselves and their friends and loved ones. As I went about creating the art I discovered I’m not obligated to be a force of hate. I included him anyway. I was immediately fired and they went into my file and manually removed Zuckerberg and rendered some crap in his place. The lawyers redrew the contract to allow this to happen three weeks into it. Then they took the art and used it again for free for the LA offices. They had a “supplier” named monster pay my tiny little stipend and I told them never to contact me again. They did years later and i obliged reluctantly. All this to say, they don’t care about you, your work or even their work. Their mission is to move fast and break things. Those things are you. Don’t let ‘em have you.
This is excellent! I wrote a very similar piece recently for a print magazine that has yet to come out, even down to the phrase “creative stagnation”! Long story short, I quit Instagram a few years ago because I didn’t like the directions it was pushing my work in (as you say, the platform rewards what’s quick and easily digestible over more time-consuming, complex, or experimental work). While Instagram initially helped my work find an audience, the desire to gain and keep an audience began influencing what I created and preventing me from growing as an artist. Ultimately, removing myself was the right decision. I find the incentives on Substack much healthier, and I like to think I’ve matured enough to manage my relationship to the platform in a better way, but my IG experience will always make me vigilant about how the norms of a platform can influence the creative process.