How Artists Can Avoid Becoming a Content Creators
by Galina Bakinova
Burnout, Social Media, and the Fight for Attention
We drown every day in endless visual content, with social media being the main supplier. Spending five hours a day scrolling through Reels? This is no longer a record for today’s user. TikToks, Reels, Stories, Shorts – all of them are fighting for our attention. It is the time, or rather the number of seconds we get stuck on a video, that is the most important value for corporations, and all forces are thrown into extracting it. We know that the pace of storytelling is accelerating, the viewer gets bored watching long and monotonous videos. More and more recommendations on how to make social media short-form content dynamic and captivating literally from the first 5 seconds – or better from the first 3 seconds – are being published. Content creators in such conditions try to make their videos as dynamic as possible, add special effects, create a unique delivery – intriguing and, most importantly, attention-grabbing. Creators, in search of their audience, post everything in a row on social networks: from funny series with silly plots to pseudo-educational content and expert posts. Creators drown in ideas, and consumers drown in the amount of this content, automatically flipping through flickering, fast, dynamic, and often meaningless videos.
An artist finds themselves on this battlefield for viewers between two fires. On the one hand, they create art and are viewers of content in search of ideas and inspiration. On the other hand, they are told: you must create content to be a visible and popular artist. The artist is shouted at from all sides: publish storytelling – it’s popular now; show yourself – viewers love following a personality; show your creative process – art buyers must see your studio; and don’t forget to post exhibitions with your works – this will emphasize professionalism and demand.
Artists are in shock; they just wanted to create art, and they are still struggling with periods of no sales, periods of lack of ideas, or stages of declining inspiration. And if, on top of that, you add the demands of daily content posting, the demands to be visible on social media – and not just visible, but “to go viral” – then the result is neither an artist nor a content creator, but a deeply burned-out person.
Personal experience
I am an artist and I faced the same problem. Besides creating works, I constantly think about how to stay visible on social media yet not post artworks that have not been exhibited yet; how to show the creative process yet not reveal all the secrets of that process. In search of at least some understanding of how to make these unfortunate videos, I myself drown in tons of content and, I admit, sometimes realize that I have already spent more than an hour or two on Reels, wasting time on all sorts of useless cat videos. And the main conclusion I came to is: useful content in social networks is an illusion. In reality, most people get stuck on absolutely useless information or peek into someone else’s life as if watching a series. It is an illusion that one can learn something useful or gain new knowledge in 10 seconds on social media. The viewer reassures themselves that they are watching valuable information, but in fact they are simply spending personal time on social media. Content creators also reassure themselves that they are creating useful content, but in reality they only receive valuable seconds of viewer attention, which they then try to monetize through selling courses or redirecting the audience to other platforms. Social media is content for the sake of content. Endless replicas of the same videos, following trends, multiplying the same useless information, which is more like chewing gum for the brain than something truly valuable. In this endless stream of flickering videos, one can sometimes find a new idea or see a new trend, but it is important to remember that these are social networks, not educational platforms or informative resources.
For an artist in the era of ubiquitous content, there is no need to be upset that they cannot be a storyteller, that they do not have the strength or resources to show their creativity daily. An artist is not obliged to be a continuous source of news and inspiration for others. They are not obliged to expose their creative process or their personal life. Silence can be part of the creative process, and sometimes even a necessary condition for it. An artist does not and should not have the goal of churning out works just to constantly showcase them. An artist is not a clown trying to capture the attention of a capricious child, constantly juggling balls or changing their appearance. An artist is a person who constantly creates something new, and therefore, sometimes, for new ideas and new images to appear, one just needs to spend some time in silence.