The Artist Is Present (Online)

Sophie Bishop’s new book tracks the pressures artists face to conform their ‘brands’ to the demands of the algorithmic boss.

By Sarah BrouilletteFebruary 20, 2026

• Art & Architecture

• Economics and Finance

IF YOU HAPPEN to have been in Times Square around midnight any night this past December, it may have seemed as though you’d walked into a kaleidoscope: “an immersive technicolor veil,” the project website describes, “surrounding viewers in a mind-melting dreamscape that blurs the boundaries between the digital and the natural world.” This is Drip Cascade (Times Square Edition), created by artist Jen Stark in collaboration with animator David Lewandowski.

A major installation in Times Square is a career highlight for Stark. Her interlinked Instagram and TikTok pages lean into it. In one video, she saunters down the sidewalk in a multicolor ensemble as the piece is displayed; she looks playfully over her shoulder to make sure the camera is tracking her energy and excitement. Or, standing with the screens some distance behind her, in a shimmery reflective dress that picks up the installation’s colors, she melds with it. In another post—a still image of her at work in her studio—overlaid text advises: “In your 20’s you’ll want to quit your 9-5 to pursue your dreams … It’s very important that you do.”

In her new book, Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture (2025), Sophie Bishop describes how competition for online visibility is pressuring artists to take their cues and strategies from influencers. Creating a successful social media account is not as effortless as it is made to seem. It requires dedicated and regular work and a careful construction of self. Based on interviews with artists who market their work online, Bishop argues that the pursuit of social media visibility is ultimately, also, shaping the very nature of their art-making.

Stark’s art is designed to look good on a smartphone screen, featuring bold colors and shapes. Every piece she makes, and every image produced for her Instagram grid, is consistent with what is now her brand—it can be identified as “a Jen Stark.” Her work nicely translates into her own suite of merchandise, from bags to jewelry, and she invites partnerships with brands who find easy affinity with her bold colors and positive vibes. (You know what else is super cute, safe, and colorful? Fruit juice.) At the same time, Stark fills out her social media with process videos that establish her technical proficiency and “authentic” artistry, and charming B-roll that presents a relatable person engaged in mundane tasks. Stark is young and white, conventionally pretty, with long hair and nice teeth. Her style of self-presentation comports with Angela McRobbie’s analysis of women in creative careers, Bishop notes. They are pushed away from performances of off-putting and antisocial “masculine” brilliance and into, instead, “exuberant enthusiasm” and “sustained cheerfulness” that is upbeat and fun.

This is the new world of online creative work, and people like Stark are dominating it. Stark uses Instagram to expand her celebrity and sell merchandise. If artistic success is measured by corporate collaborations, merchandising, and online visibility, then Stark is an art star. She is represented by a minor gallery in Los Angeles and her pieces have been exhibited nationally, but her most recognizable work has been financed through partnerships with brands such as Skechers and Coca-Cola. This isn’t necessarily representative of the aspirations of other artists who are presenting their work online. Bishop interviewed a range of artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many were laid off from their primary jobs and opted to try to make art full-time, marketing directly to clients. Some simply wanted to sell enough to make a living and perhaps get the attention of a gallerist or agent who would otherwise be, Bishop writes, “closed to all but the most well-heeled and well-connected individuals.” Bishop’s argument is that, whatever their goals—be it making it to the Met or making it on Meta—artists on Instagram encounter and manage algorithms that are designed to serve people like Stark.

Platform algorithms prioritize some kinds of content over others: consistent, positive, brand safe, anodyne. Claire Parnell makes this case at length in her recent work on self-publishing: platforms organize users into hierarchies that prioritize marketability. Meta is Instagram’s parent company. It works with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which is part of the World Federation of Advertisers, to determine “community standards.” Prohibitive posting regulations, shaped by the advertising clients who drive it all, push creativity in certain directions. Online environments have been said to entail “context collapse”: disparate audiences are flattened into one, encouraging people to produce a streamlined and consistent performance of self. When the context is the production of an environment safe for brands, social media identities collapse into light apolitical content conducive to a buying mood. There is little room for confusion about who you are, what your work is about, and whom it’s for. Companies background-check potential influencers for lapses in self-presentation, such as nudes or unpopular political opinions. Brand safety tools, often deploying shoddy AI, will do things like identify “queer” as a bad word that marks a creator as unsafe for partnering. At the same time, brands can withdraw influencer deals at any point, so the creators who work with them take on all the risk. They must master “self-surveillance and self-conditioning in the direction of commercially saleable values,” Bishop writes. This serves to “diminish the (scant) opportunities for flexibility and play within creative work.”

The opacity of platform logistics and the risk of being shadow banned—having your work flagged for violations—or even finding your account deleted, all contribute to an atmosphere of high anxiety. People talk to each other about how to manage this unease, and how to protect themselves while maximizing their visibility. Artists who successfully use social media to build a following and market their work learn from experience, of course, but they also turn to what Bishop calls algorithmic lore and gossip to interpret how the algorithm actually works.

Lore is provided by algorithmic experts in the form of “smooth and sensible information.” These experts often brand themselves as outsider bad boys—so-called “adversaries of platforms” who are nevertheless grooming creators to produce what platforms want. Creators are often frustrated by the difficulty of establishing an online presence; even paying Instagram to advertise their content doesn’t seem to work. To manage these feelings, creators engage with algorithmic experts, whose paid courses and consultancy services promise a way to make sense of a seemingly chaotic system. The literary world offers an example of this in the figure of Leigh Stein, a fiction writer who neatly satirizes online life and sells paid subscriptions to her Substack alongside her training courses and personal consultancy. Stein claims to know the algorithm: she promises to help writers figure out how to develop their brands and sell their work online without driving themselves to madness or sacrificing their authenticity.

For Bishop, algorithmic gossip is, in contrast to official lore, a more demotic response to the anxiety-inducing work of marketing via platforms. Bishop describes it as a form of “feminist epistemology”—a collaborative, community-based method of mapping how algorithms work and change as opposed to the kind that relies on experts. Christine Larson, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches the impact of technology on media and culture, has found a parallel case among self-published romance writers who use Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform to distribute their work. They share information about algorithms to maximize their chances of success, developing “social tactics,” Larson argues, to “foster a more equal and supportive cultural economy” and “an emergent, if weak, base of resistance to Amazon’s platform dominance.”

A problem here is that both gossip and lore about algorithms lead to strategies like trendjacking (brands jumping on a viral moment) and multivariate testing (changing variables like hashtags, video length, and posting time), which ultimately benefit the platform. Gossip is, Bishop writes, “a strategic and a soft negotiation of a deep power imbalance within platform work.” But it is also always a concession to that power. Some scholars have described this dynamic as an “algorithmic boss.” This inscrutable managerial presence requires that people persistently train themselves in understanding algorithms as part of their basic skill set. The algorithmic boss is inaccessible and capricious, using your dependence on the platform to make you accept constant flux and uncertainty as the foundation of your workday. In this context, “gaming the system” is itself a form of workplace discipline.

Bishop shows that artists are highly responsive to this discipline. Stark’s vibrant swaths of color aren’t just joyful creative exuberance; they are also a platform-ready content stream that sells digitality as such. This is happening nearly everywhere culture is intersecting with platforms, just as platforms are themselves working hard to expand into the ubiquity that Aarthi Vadde and others have described as our “computational surround.” Liz Pelly and Eric Drott study how Spotify shapes music production, by inducing musicians to create tracks with catchy opening hooks, for instance, so that listeners won’t skip them, or by proliferating cheaply made ambient mood music that makes a suitable background to reading or sleeping—activities that have otherwise long been done in silence. Will Tavlin charts similar phenomena in the making of passively consumable, moderately engaging films for Netflix, and Karl Berglund studies what kinds of audiobooks are made to suit the streaming age (spoiler: it’s not literary fiction). Just as the development of the “white cube” art gallery invited unique artistic forms and installations, artists on Instagram size and structure pieces in a certain way. The ideal work is bold, eye-catching, easy to understand, and readily identifiable with a particular artist. It must look good in a “flat lay”—a content genre that showcases a bird’s-eye photo of the work. Portrait paintings of faces, especially if they are light-skinned, are also highly popular.

The algorithmic boss asks artists to comport themselves in particular ways, not only to produce a particular kind of art but also to live a particular kind of life. No one can produce enough to fill an endless Instagram grid, but success requires a “content baseline,” the recommended minimum to ensure visibility. That content must be fresh and original; reposted older material is deprioritized by the algorithm. It also can’t be exclusively marketing and open self-promotion, which risk being perceived as annoying and crass. A variety of genres have emerged to fill the gaps, and the making of this material shapes and coordinates the daily life of an online artist: process videos, videos from the studio, time-lapses. Bishop points out that content about being an artist is now “a valuable secondary commodity produced during the artistic process,” able to earn creator-rewards money or attract commercial partners. We might compare this to a tradwife cooking dinner: the audience sees not just the finished meal but also the seemingly authentic process of cooking it. Of course, there’s nothing “authentic” about it—it is filmed with expensive equipment in multiple takes, interrupting and remaking the process as it’s being captured.

Creators further rely on depictions of their nonartistic daily routines such as commuting or shopping, which add to an overall performance of authenticity that makes them seem ordinary, spontaneous, and unfiltered. The aesthetic of this content is deliberately B-roll amateurish—accidents (like dropping or misusing equipment), outtakes, camcorder vibes. What would have once characterized the home video as domestic media for private consumption provides the aesthetic register for the construction of online relatability. One can’t be glamorous all the time, alas. The amateur look of the content helps underscore a creator’s positioning as “passion-driven, independent and unpaid,” Bishop writes, which builds their credibility as a marketer.

Artists want to seem accessible and authentic, but they also want to emphasize that they are legitimate and technically proficient. This often entails disavowing or softening the financial part of their online enterprise: “I’m not a business person,” they want us to know. Sociologist Pierre-Michel Menger has discussed the display of unfinished work (for instance, in artist talks or the inclusion of drafts and reworkings in exhibitions) as evidence of an artist’s technique, skill, and value. Bishop describes social media as a great conduit to this kind of display. Poppy Fuller Abbott, a weaver and textile artist posting as popstudio.uk, often focuses on her hands threading, emphasizing the sounds of a clattering loom, and compiling clips from her travels to research historic natural dyes. For the potential buyer, this creates a feeling of connection and appears to justify the cost of Fuller’s work.

Bishop spoke to another weaver who renovated her home to make it more presentable for social media. Her Instagram posts display her handweaving, made with homegrown willow, but they also cultivate a longing for her gorgeously aestheticized lifestyle. She makes lucrative content while doing her “real” creative work, earning enough that she can “stay at home, employ her husband, and flexibly manage her own childcare on-site.” But the art-making and the lifestyle branding cannot be separated. It’s “a linen-clad family located in a hand-built cottage-cum-studio within acres of pastoral countryside,” Bishop wryly observes.

The connection between art-making and lifestyle is not new. Secondary materials and evidence of process have long been part of artistic archives and have been commodities to be promoted and sold on the art market. There is a long history of artists using lifestyle, reputation, and legend to generate interest in their work and translate it into financial success. An iconic example is Andy Warhol’s Factory. In her indispensable book Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (1982), Sharon Zukin describes how Warhol partly established the credibility of his art by displaying his techniques in situ in his cool studios inhabited by his eccentric friends.

In this light, influencers have learned just as much from artists as the other way around. The flexibility and precarity that have long defined creative work—the need to self-brand and do entrepreneurial “self-invented work,” as McRobbie puts it, with no accountable employer—now broadly characterize the labor of social media content production. If influencers are the vanguard today, it is because the networks and platforms that induce them to act in certain ways become more inescapable by the day, compelling anybody who wants to be visible online to obey the algorithmic boss, who requires so much and promises so little.

Bishop is working in the tradition of Howard S. Becker, who argued that making art is always shaped by “art worlds,” the networks and institutions involved in artworks’ production, distribution, and evaluation. She is not interested in moralizing or claiming that influencers are ruining art; her goal instead is to understand how “influencer creep affects artistic production and how art becomes visible to audiences.” But a chasm clearly separates a Jen Stark from a newly emerging artist trying to make her Instagram account discoverable, and Bishop’s interviews with artists reveal that many judge influencer culture as beneath them and only reluctantly participate due to economic exigency. Their own ambivalence about social media is important information and grounds for a more pointed critique—not of what people do because they feel they have little choice, but of the very circumscription of their options and the nature of required compliance.

Many artists are using social media not because they enjoy it but because, like most of us, they must make money to live. Those who are “reluctantly shunted into marketing,” as Bishop writes, are invested in the distinction between “real” artists (themselves, naturally) and “Instagram artists,” who lack real artistic talent but are adept at and enjoy digital content production. That the distinction is difficult to maintain is precisely what propels people to invoke it: they are trying to establish legitimacy within an anxiety-inducing and overfull online environment. Bishop wants to avoid weighing in on who counts as an artist. She points out that such judgments are often loaded with gendered and racialized assumptions. But assessments of value, in all their bias, are materially important within art worlds as Becker understood them. The same is true for digital platforms, which have occasioned unique stagings of an otherwise perennial tension: the authentic artist versus the marketplace. This tension matters because it reflects a genuine frustration that many artists, including some of Bishop’s interviewees, experience in the face of relentless financial precarity.

Instagram-ready art may be just one small part of a vast and complex art-world ecosystem, but it reflects broader pressures that creative people face as opportunity is increasingly routed through platforms that reward stylized self-performance and constancy of presence. These expectations affect decisions about what kind of art to make to begin with, and they enmesh life beyond the platform within it: you need to outfit the cottage and the photogenic family with those yards of linen; you should try to avoid doing anything in your leisure hours that might jeopardize your career; and, if possible, you should organize any remaining free time around further content production according to the available protocols.

The platform and advertising executives working together to produce the vibrant stage for all this neat cultural activity aren’t in it for the love of art. They are making money. In their careful avoidance of any kind of responsibility to content producers, and through their efforts to make life online as continuously “shoppable” as possible, they benefit from the established capacity of artists to weather uncertain work terms and persist through the muck of the self-sell.

Bishop calls influencers our canaries in the coal mine, but the analogy is only apt if we are the coal miners. She is keen to emphasize that the circumstances that affect influencers are relevant to the general public and to workers in a variety of fields: “[I]nstead of dismissing influencers as frivolous, vain, and consumerist, we should see them as sophisticated architects of some of the very strategies that shape life as lived on social media today.” At the same time, the tenor of her own analysis suggests that these distinctions—frivolity and consumerism versus the shaping of “life as lived”—might not make a great deal of sense anymore: vanity is a media architecture; the appearance of frivolity is a work regime; “life as lived” is the forging of a brand-ready self. An artist—indeed anyone—has solid reasons to object.