Butter: Contradictions to my last article? The extractive nature of everything.
Instagram is a machine that never stops. It churns through images, trends, and aesthetics at an unforgiving pace. Every day, a new visual obsession takes over. Butter is trendy. Cherries (you know I love this one). Mustaches on your fingers in the early oughts. We watch it happen in real time, artists and brands alike mining the next niche, extracting its imagery until it’s been wrung dry. Then onto the next thing.
I think about how everyone was a podcaster, then a fine-line tattoo artist, then a rug maker. How platforms encourage not just creativity, but a specific kind of rapid, replicable, commodifiable creativity. The kind that sells well, that gains traction, that keeps the algorithm happy. It’s easy to get swept up in it, to believe that success is about riding these waves. But what happens when you stop? Can you step outside of it? Is it even important to try? Or does resisting these cycles just make you pretentious?
In the Renaissance, art was a craft meant to be mastered. It was exploratory, scientific. Artists spent lifetimes studying light, anatomy, the nature of perception itself. But as we move further from that tradition, what does it do to art? Now we have gallery spaces filled with box fans. At the same time, we have a market flooded with consumer-friendly pieces—Canva artists, craft fairs, digital prints designed for immediate impact. Both exist. Both are real. But do they serve the same purpose? Are they both art? And if so, where do they belong?
I’ve always thought the question of legitimacy was bullshit. There is room for the high-concept and the accessible, the fleeting and the enduring. But it’s worth asking what we lose when art becomes primarily about consumption. When it’s designed first and foremost to be sold, to fit neatly into homes and feeds and brand identities. The pressure to create within those limits is exhausting. You see it everywhere—artists bending their work to fit a niche, hoping to carve out a space in a saturated market.
I don’t know the answer. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe art has always been about responding to the environment it exists in. But I keep coming back to that feeling—the sense that something is being drained, that the demand for constant output is leaving artists burnt out and disconnected from their work. And I wonder, is there a way to reclaim it? To step outside the cycle, to create something slower, something that breathes? Do we just say fuck it and flip the table?
