Quoting Marina Abramovic: today more than ever, “art must be beautiful”, just as the artist that produces it, bonding creator and creation in an all-too-often purely aesthetic link that seems to get more attention than the artistic content itself. In times of viral social activism campaigns and “influencer art”, the limit between self-empowerment and cynical exploitation of the flaws of an emerging system is often blurry and hard to determine.

We thus shifted our attention on the elusive concept of Hype, focusing on the mechanisms behind Silicon Valley’s often decried “attention economy”. As the powerful symbiosis between portable digital communication devices and social media platforms marks the latest phase of digitalization, information, so the saying, is no more the ultimate key strategic asset. In a world where endless quantities of content get produced and effortlessly delivered to every smartphone owner around the globe within fractions of a second, what is truly scarce is the attention of these final users - and that’s what everybody is fiercely and recklessly fighting for. As the false dichotomy of IRL and URL universes tries to hide inside the filter bubbles and binary gendered communication of mainstream social media, the arousal and excitement about the “next big thing” constantly reminds us of the hidden agenda set by the markets’ iron rules and needs. Again, this point invited a deviation towards a familiar topos already mentioned above: the struggle between the artist’s desire for free expression, and the need to get the public’s (and the market’s) attention in order to ensure her/his economic survival - a complex and conflictual dynamic well revealed by the conceptual revolution operated by Duchamp, or by the raging critique expressed by Piero Manzoni. The other side of the coin has always been the serialization and pattern-recognition exercise that every artist must master in order to manage the codes and languages of the markets, and get sufficient credit to survive from her/his work - a contradictory phenomenon that becomes all the more apparent in the widespread contempt by wide sectors of the art establishment (and the attraction of the art market) towards digital art and everything that can be labeled as “post-internet”.

The third passage in our stroll beneath the arcades of internet fame has then highlighted the complicated relationship that bonds Fame and Power, in which Art itself plays a non-secondary role due to the commodification and exploitation of another diffused and common human capability, apart from the relational one that power trades on: the expressive capacity. In fact, humankind never produced in its whole history expressive artifacts in such numbers as in our days: we are ceaselessly bombed by a numbing, ever-increasing visual communication stream, through multiple channels and in every thinkable environment. Victims and executioners in this bombing, we fail to see how all the effort we put in our digital identity is often what deprives us and everyone else of our free time. Even without quoting the harsh and dystopian reality of reactionary movements spreading like wildfire through the digital undergrowth, it’s easy to see why the optimistic rhetoric which still exuded from the Twitter revolutions of the Arab spring is radically different from the cold winds surrounding the first Twitter presidency. The structural question of power in the age of Social Media is just starting to be discussed, but it’s already clear that, for all its disruptive and emancipatory potential, digitalization is creating new, powerful architectures of inequality and hierarchy.

New structures of power are emerging in every sphere of social activity, and Art is no exception. Social Media platforms allow for a direct relationship between artists and public, potentially bypassing traditional gatekeepers of the art system. However, what may seem as the fulfillment of a long-held dream for generations of artists - the emancipation from curators, galleries, collectors and their desires and whims - comes at a price. The system doesn’t allow the monetary value of the symbolic capital created by artists to be dissipated or - even worse - harnessed by those who produced it. The pervasive logic of neoliberism demands from artists that they become their own brand, and the best way to do so is by creating a digital persona that satisfies the expectations of the public and keeps the circle of the attention economy flowing. As Warhol had brilliantly recognized, the artists can sell two kinds of products: either easily sellable objects that prey on the taste of the time and the aura of fame, or his own persona, as vehicle for brands and other objects. Thus, the figure of the artist as influencer was born. To close on a more optimistic note, we should point out that all the processes described above are still in full development. While many indicators strongly suggest that windows of opportunity that seemed wide-open just two decades ago are now tightly shut, everyday reality shows as that the status-quo has never been less stable. Art still remains the most powerful human practice to investigate what is going on in our times from a meta-perspective, an essential task if we are to find a strategic response to the challenges we are facing. It is encouraging to see that wide parts of the art world seem to be well aware of this challenge, as we are witnessing an unprecedented compenetration of science, research, art and technology. Utopia and Dystopia are still both within our grasp, as we keep hesitantly walking along the razor’s edge.