Scroll, Click, Cry, Repeat: The Rise and Fall of the Content Art Era

Art movements are usually recognised the way you realise you’ve joined a cult: everything feels normal until you look back, squint, and realise someone should probably write a long think piece about it. Historically, these movements were (sort of) dignified, Renaissance artists pursued symmetry and beauty; Baroque painters leaned into dramatic chiaroscuro like proto-emo moody teenagers and Impressionists murmured "vibes only" while sketching foggy harbours.

Then the 20th century arrived, and the art scene essentially became visual spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what stuck. Cubism pondered, "What if faces had five noses?" Surrealism questioned, "What if clocks melted?" Abstract Expressionism just screamed relentlessly at canvases until MoMA wrote them a cheque. And then... Then the internet happened.

Enter the Content Art Era. Art, Now Sponsored by Algorithm

Around 2005, with YouTube launching and Instagram lying in waiting with a sepia-toned filter called "Valencia," a new kind of art movement was emerging, not necessarily organically, but because tech companies decided they knew better. Content art wasn’t judged by thoughtful critics; it was assessed by metrics and algorithms designed by someone named Trevor from Silicon Valley who probably hasn’t blinked since 2011.

Previously, gallery curators determined taste (or at least they coordinated paintings with rugs). Now, success is measured by likes, shares, and views. Gone are berets, cheap wine open evenings and tormented backstories, instead we have ring lights and strict upload schedules. This is the era of "post a Reel or perish."

Imagine, Michelangelo sculpting David under Meta’s community guidelines: "Sorry, Mike, no nudity unless it's educational, oh and it must be captioned in three languages, and synced to the latest trending audio."

Content Art: Less Paint, More Panic!

What sets content art apart from traditional movements is its existential urgency. Classic artists painted to express emotions or protest societal norms (or simply because Netflix hadn't been invented). Content artists, meanwhile, run like performance hamsters on wheels built from diminishing attention spans, forced to create content that entertains, engages, and converts, all in mere seconds.

Singer-songwriter Halsey nailed this reality when she revealed her label pressured her to go viral on TikTok. Nothing says artistic integrity like lip-syncing your own chorus in a hoodie to appease an algorithm. This isn’t a critique of creators; they’re doing their best under dystopian conditions. It's simply acknowledging that the muses have been swapped for monetisation strategies.

Marketing guru Seth Godin sums it up: "In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing." Or put differently, if your art isn't screaming like a toddler denied sweets, the algorithm will ghost you harder than last weekend’s Tinder date.

Virality vs. Value: The Great Artistic Cage Match

When "good art" turned into "art that performs well," creators became strategists, analysts, and twitchy meerkats second-guessing every shadowy algorithmic preference. Nuanced, contemplative pieces about grief or healing rarely survive unless paired with trending audio or cats in sweaters.

Vimeo is a perfect case study. Once the cool, artsy cousin to YouTube, home to indie films, experimental shorts, and lovingly colour-graded personal projects, it quietly morphed into a sterile B2B (Buissness to Buissness) video file delivery service. Why? Because there's simply no oxygen left for creativity that doesn't serve the content economy. In a world where value is measured in impressions and CTR, there's no time for a slow burn when the fire needs to start with a click.

Art and mass appeal have always had a tense relationship. Andy Warhol turned popular culture into art, flashy, cheeky, and instantly recognisable. Pop Art enjoyed the spotlight unapologetically, Whilst some artists, like Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin, deliberately crafted quiet, reflective pieces. These artworks didn’t scream, they whispered, hoping someone was still paying attention.

Before social media, art had time to breathe. A painting could sit unnoticed until a critic discovered it at the back of an unknown gallery covered in dust and declared it genius because they needed something interesting to write about in their column. Today, that slow burn is extinguished if it doesn't' break 500 likes in the first 24 hours, it's not worth serving. Social media takes popularity contests to an extreme, demanding instant fireworks in vertical video format. Quiet, nuanced pieces are steamrolled by louder, brighter, snackable content competing with existential horrors and sponsored Better Help ads.

Marshall McLuhan famously said, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." And oof, have we been shaped. Social media transformed artists into their own PR reps, marketers, and unpaid interns.

Creativity isn't dead, it’s just exhausted and obsessively refreshing its feeds for validation.

Enter AI, Stage Left, Dramatically

Now, just as things couldn't get stranger, enter AI, not the quirky robot servants promised by 1990s movies, but tools like DALL·E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT, generating art faster than you can say, "Wait, wasn't that a human's job?"

The AI Art Era didn’t arrive gently, it crashed like a creative meteor. Artists now compete against machines trained on humanity’s entire artistic history, much of it voluntarily uploaded during Instagram's square-cropped innocence.

This isn't a minor shift, it's an existential reckoning. If AI can create endlessly without fatigue, what remains uniquely human? Is creativity about generating ideas, or can machines do that too now?

Surprise Twist: AI Was Always in Charge

Suprise suprise, algorithms are AI. Generative AI is like the bad plot twist in a black mirror episode we didn't realise we were watching. Long before DALL·E began producing 'haunted Renaissance astronauts in the style of Banksy', algorithmic AI had already been quietly curating our feeds, dictating visibility through data-driven metrics. Every app scroll delivers a curated chaos of dance challenges, watercolour pets, protest art, and whispering ASMR teenagers, thanks to AI.

So when discussing AI Art, we're not just addressing bots creating content; we're addressing AI’s decade-long influence in deciding what content reaches us. We've been living under AI's silent curatorship, following its ever-changing rules while it silently rewires the house around us and changes the locks when we’re not looking. Generative AI is merely the newest brand of nightmare dystopian hell we need to figure out how to live with before we've fully unpacked the damage done by it's predecessor. 

Art critic Claire Bishop wasn’t exaggerating when she said, "Social media encourages rapid consumption rather than contemplation." Now, the algorithm not only decides what we see, but influences what gets created. The tempo of creativity is dictated by machine logic, maximised for engagement, always demanding more.

Humanity, Now Featuring Extra Existential Dread

Yet, i think some hope remains. As AI saturates feeds with emotionally sterile creations, humanity’s hunger for imperfect, heartfelt, genuinely human art may intensify. We might begin craving the flawed, authentic works that evoke something deeper than mild amusement or vague existential unease.

AI can paint, but it can't experience heartbreak, can’t ugly-cry at 3 a.m., or spiral nostalgically for 45 minutes after finding  a pair old concert tickets. It can't create from love, rage, boredom, or therapist-assigned self-expression exercises. That raw humanity, that beautiful, messy magic, is something AI can't replicate.