So. Here I am, testing the waters. Night swimming in turquoise-cobalt blue with no horizon, islands, or stars in sight. It is the 1980s; After Eight. The deep blue future of Blade Runner finds itself under a fluorescent lamp. The airport duty free sells perfume & pop. The icey neon from the nightclub reflects in the hum of the wet-backed streets.

Even though VERO has a smudged lipstick & slinky-clad aesthetic, the word “vero” is Italian for truth. This dreamy landscape is the veil that Squarespace photographers like to filter their images through. Images flirt for attention here, even though the dopamine echo has not returned yet from the ocean coloured by my disembodied profile image.

Why here? Why now? A few tentative posts by artists on Instagram got me curious. We have come to tolerate & depend on Instagram as artists out of a perceived necessity to be present without being physically so. It is a metaphysical & existential problem that we haven’t yet fully faced. Blaming the algorithm is just a fetish, but one that might free us from the fetish that has become an obstacle to experiencing the ugly whole.

I’m here, but not here, wondering if this is another bad migration. First it was Facebook. Then Twitter. Next Instagram. Now VERO (kind of). What is this? What I have learnt is: a chronological feed replaces the algorithm of the Facebook empire; no ads; if the migration grows, subscription fees are eminent; clickable links & more allowed in posts; no push notifications; hashtags still exist; control over who sees particular posts through the “Close Friends, Friends, Acquaintances, Followers” categories. You can even choose a profile image for three of your multiple personas.

In 2018, during the Facebook leaks & probably lots of other reasons to do with the drifting & suggestive social media herd, VERO user numbers climbed from 150,000 to over 3 million in just one day (VERO has been around since 2015). Four years on, the murmuring of a current cobalt-turquoise wave is, from my algorithmic artworld perspective on a very localised level, significant. Artists are talking. The research and criticisms will come later & become more politically transparent if the platform becomes more popular: the accusations of Russian developers of the platform years ago will resonate more today; not to mention the Saudi Oger claims of migrant atrocities under the family name of VERO CEO and co-founder, Ayman Hariri.

Two days ago, artist & art critic Matthew Collings wrote: “Get onto VERO, it's supposed to be good, might be a solution to algorithmic disaster afflicting ASP people on Instagram.”

ASP stands for “Artist Support Pledge”, through which artists sell their work for €200 or under. The pledge part involves the selling artist pledging to buy an other artist’s work at specified sales milestones. On the ASP website they share their algorithmic grievances:

““The new format and algorithms are not working, and we have had enough. The old Instagram worked, that’s why we used it. It fueled business and allowed us to connect with friends, family, and colleagues from all over the world, regardless of nation, race, gender, or wealth. It allowed us to speak openly about things that mattered and things that didn’t. It was our choice, and we enjoyed and prospered from this freedom.

What we want

•Equal status for photos and reels (let us decide what we want to post and see).

•Give us back the old algorithms. The new ones DO NOT accurately connect us to our audience.

•Remove the suggested reels. They have made IG unusable and stopped our followers from making meaningful connections.

•Remove the black background and text overlays. They’re ugly and confusing.”

— artistsupportpledge.com/

The “ugly” criticism is interesting here, feeding into the whole capitalist mode of seduction. And maybe the algorithms & reels are a perfect fit for other business models, modalities or manipulations…

So what does this mean for artists? I think Matthew Collings emphasis on the marketing & selling of art, even if ASP is not as explicit as Jerry Gogosian's art-market obsession, is the wrong reason to migrate elsewhere. Instagram, ironically, has objectified art into a commercial fetish rather than experience. Marx, not Freud, was the orginator of the fetish.

Before I thought Instagram was bad for artists but good for art criticism. Once you could survey the explicit institutional & curatorial affiliations & hyper-networking by artists. Now the algorithms are so persistent & self-inflicted that the cavity of the echo chamber has been reduced down to a wall with barely enough space to stand.

It takes a lot of willpower to leave Instagram. Matthew Collings response to the comment “Are you leaving Instagram?” under his VERO post is telling: “no not yet.” Not never! He’s presumably selling, & with a network of over 10k followers, sold. Instagram has become more instrumental to being an artist than exhibitions in the lifeworld, which have become empty showrooms that promise reality without an audience.

So here I find myself swimming but drowning in Why’s? Why do we need to do social media as artists? Why are we doing it to ourselves? If it is a shop, then fair enough. If it is to feel or imagine you are part of a community of like-minded people, who find themselves outside the societal & institutional system so you can imagine allies in the virtual mist, wonderful. But I don’t think any of these reasons are the real reason.

Against this localised & nebulous backdrop, art experience in the lifeworld is starting to look a lot like the awful Katharina Grosse exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Espace in Venice I experienced a few months ago, where a large pearlescent blanket was found draped over the gallery walls, floor & some barely perceptible readymades, under the watch of two uniformly dressed-in-black invigilators, adjacent a shop of gross (pun intended) books & video promotion staring Hans Ulrich (again) Obrist.

Installation view of Katharina Grosse *Apollo Apollo* at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, 2022.

Artists excuse Instagram for its so-called democratising effect on the artworld, where artists achieve visibility & agency through a well-crafted image, even though it is a fantastical augmentation & enhancement of the real, ugly & awkward thing in the world. The only exhibitions that sell to a willing audience these days are the ones that promise an experience. That is why commercial gallery exhibitions with a 70-30 percent ratio of white to art objects is a thing of the past. Instagram is the new commercial gallery.

It is strange that it has come down to a decision between social media platforms rather than an outright dismissal of social media. There is no escape from the algorithmic loop even if it is chronological. Of course, some artists continue to make art without a dependency on social media, but it's rare, considering those who are visible in the physical art scene, more often than not, have an Instagram account, no matter how many times they profess to “hate” Instagram.

If we have decided that we need social media in our art lives, for whatever twisted reasoning, then VERO (or similar, as the exodus currently takes place after the Saudi Oger & misogyny claims come to light ‘again’) may be a good alternative. But if we decide to give it all up, would we make greater efforts to experience art in the lifeworld, or seek out non-avatar allies to make art once again a social, discursive, critical & physical event, that is not archived, documented or dopamine infected through empty symbols? Or is this just ideology or nostalgia speaking, as the artist cannot extricate themselves from the attention & validation they so clearly think they need since signing up to this thing called social media. “True Social” is a scary slogan to begin (and end) with.

James Merrigan

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