While Instagram has made the arts more visible, it has also made them less private—and privacy is often where great things are born. I don’t want this to read as a boomer-style rant about how Instagram has ruined everything, because, in truth, it has done many good things. But like most expansions, it comes with some erosion.
As a millennial, I occupy a useful middle ground. I had a childhood free from social media, right up until the dawn of the seminal MSN—the cowboy days of the Internet, the wild west of the World Wide Web. Being the tomboy I was, I had little interest in the Internet and far more in pranking my unassuming neighbours.
It wasn’t until after university, when I discovered Tumblr, that I developed a penchant for the online world. Tumblr, the original Pinterest, was a place you found yourself: an endless loop of static images so perfectly attuned to your inner world it felt as though the computer had reached inside your mind and laid your dreams out before you.
But this came after I graduated from the National Art School, which at the time was proudly anti-tech. The focus was on atavistic fundamentals. Each week, we had two full-day drawing classes, where our tools were charcoal, pencil and ink. In lectures, my best friend and I drank wine, poorly disguised as tea, and everyone smoked cigarettes on the grass. There were no computer-oriented classes, and we lugged around what was possibly the largest arthistory book ever printed.
And while I have Instagram to thank for much of my later success, I am eternally grateful for its absence during my time as an art student. Presenting your work in front of peers, lecturers and, eventually, the public is daunting enough. Adding the pressure of likes and instant reception would surely cloud the process and muddy the waters.
When you are developing, evolving, that time needs to stay quiet, sacred, free from the eyes of the world. One day you might be Pollock, the next Manet, until eventually you discover who you are. To remain free from judgment and expectation is to give the work room to form.
Some of the greatest art movements in history existed free from the shackles of the Internet—open to interpretation, retold through memory and myth, and reshaped with each retelling. One of my favourite moments in art history is the approximate point believed to mark the dawn of postmodernism.
A slightly marked, tormented piece of beige paper now sits framed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some pass it by, dismissing it as the art world at its most ridiculous. I, however, can think of nothing more thrilling than this almost blank, ragged sheet of paper, because the story behind it is so charged with life.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg was largely overlooked by the heroic New York art scene, dominated by Willem de Kooning, among others. Quietly working in his studio, erasing drawings only to begin again, Rauschenberg looked at yet another rubbed-out sheet of paper and thought, This means nothing. If it were to mean something, it must once have been something of undeniable value. He decided the greatest act of triumph and rebellion would be to erase a de Kooning.
A nervous Rauschenberg walked to de Kooning’s studio and knocked, half-hoping de Kooning wouldn’t answer. The door opened. De Kooning, after some consideration, agreed to give Rauschenberg a drawing to erase, deliberately choosing one he thought would be near to indelible.
Rauschenberg returned to his studio, sat down and erased the drawing entirely—a solitary act that became a conceptual turning point: the erasure itself was the artwork. Authorship, originality and heroism were undone. In its place came a new wave of conceptualism, where the idea behind a work could outweigh the work itself.
I can’t help but wonder how differently such a moment would unfold today. Would it be livestreamed? Captured with a fuzzy lapel mic? Would the act become performance rather than process? Thankfully, Instagram was still decades away. But there is something to learn from that moment. Perhaps some things should live online forever—or just long enough to become themselves. Some ideas need time to brew, away from the gaze of the grid, cut free from appraisal before being released into the world.
As our appetite for online intake reaches saturation point, it may be time to look backwards, to the pre-social media movements that unfolded quietly, imperfectly, and were passed on through memory and storytelling rather than digitisation.
Writing in the late 20th century, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard became fascinated with how images and signs gradually cause reality to collapse beneath them. He argued that modern life drifts towards what he called hyperreality—a state where representations become more powerful than the realities they once reflected.
It doesn’t mean the world becomes unreal, but that the more we try to stitch reality into a single coherent picture, the more fragile and unstable it becomes. And the more we de fine our existence through aspiration, objects and simulations of the real, the more insecure we become. Baudrillard died in 2007, before Instagram, before influencers, before the feed became a primary site of meaning. And yet his thinking now feels uncannily prescient. We no longer simply experience things; we rehearse how they will be received. We don’t just make—we perform the making.
Some ideas need time to breathe, to grow, to take shape away from the glare of social media. Returning to atavistic fundamentals—drawing, painting, sculpting, gardening—reminds us that creation can be slow and tactile. Using our hands, moving deliberately, making without witnesses allows work to develop in its own time. These are acts of quiet resistance, and they are radical in a world that covets instant recognition.
Perhaps another lesson from Rauschenberg is that subtraction can be as powerful as addition. Instagram, like all platforms, is a tool. It can illuminate, inspire and connect, but it can also constrain. In contrast, true creation often happens when no one is watching, when mistakes are made, when failure looms.
To create in privacy is not to reject connection but to preserve the conditions in which originality can flourish. One day, a private act of creation may reach the world, fully formed and unburdened by expectation. In the end, the arts in the age of Instagram are not de fined by the visibility they receive, but by the care, patience and courage invested in them when no one is watching. In an age obsessed with visibility, privacy may be the most radical creative act left.
