Social Media Paradox

'Ship of Fools' Fred Fabre - 120 x 90 cm 2017

Art doesn’t disappear under censorship, but under accumulation.

A short reflection on art, visibility and attention.

The botanist Francis Hallé once said that “if one does not fight, one is already placing oneself on the side of the destroyers rather than the protectors.”In the age of social media, that line feels uncomfortably close to home, not because we fight too little, but because we are constantly told what fighting is supposed to look like.

Public space is now organised around visibility. Expression is expected to be continuous, opinion immediate, identity permanently available. This inevitably spills into art. What matters slowly gives way to what performs well. Platforms reward speed and reaction rather than thought or consequence. Posting becomes work, a steady output of positions, affiliations and clarifications. Silence, once a position in itself, is now read as failure or, worse, complicity. To exist is to be seen.

The problem is that this demand does not sharpen meaning, it thins it out. When everything must be said constantly, nothing carries weight. Excess communication flattens experience. The signal disappears not because it is suppressed, but because it is buried under repetition. Expression turns into background noise.

Art does not escape this logic. It absorbs it. Work is pushed to be legible, shareable, agreeable. Ambiguity becomes risky. Slowness starts to resemble absence. Artists are encouraged, rarely openly but persistently, to treat visibility as part of the practice itself. In smaller scenes, this quickly solidifies into a closed loop, familiar names, familiar language, familiar faces rotating through the same spaces. What looks like community often functions as reinforcement.

From there, the slide is quiet but predictable. Some exhibitions present themselves as curated statements, yet function less as arguments than as containers. The language of selection remains, but the logic underneath is transactional. Calls for entry replace dialogue. Participation is framed as opportunity, though it often comes at a price. Artists pay to enter, pay to be seen, pay to belong. What follows is not so much an exhibition as a temporary congregation, work installed briefly, largely viewed by the other contributors, circulating in a familiar, convivial loop. The work matters less than the appearance of participation itself.

In this setup, curation drifts from responsibility toward self-maintenance. The gesture serves networks, profiles and future visibility. Money circulates, attention concentrates and the hierarchy politely reproduces itself. Nothing has to be stated for everyone to understand how it works.

Online, this passes for engagement. Posting feels like action, but mostly it functions as circulation. The system absorbs the gesture, counts it and moves on unchanged. Visibility becomes the goal rather than a by-product. Expression replaces consequence.

Trying to point this out is already compromised. Critique adds another layer of noise. Calling for restraint becomes another form of output. There is no clean position outside the system.

But in a culture where constant speech is framed as moral responsibility, choosing when not to speak may no longer be retreat. It may be the last remaining form of attention, not passive, not virtuous, but deliberate.

Ref: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (2015) and Vita Contemplativa (2023)