Last week I wrote about a girl who created a non-existing movie, made it a trend and used it as a marketing strategy. This week I decided to continue that post, by further examining other marketing strategies.
Social Media as an Art Platform
I feel like while social media has many toxic and unhealthy traits, at the end of the day it is somewhat related to the way it is used. It can quickly turn from being a place to relax and wind down, to a place filled with negativity and hate. For today let’s focus on the positive side and how it can fuel our creativity and even further, become a platform for art. I do not mean it as influencing art or how technology is affecting the way we make art, but how social media platforms are connecting different art forms and like-minded creatives in one place.
I want to now draw attention to one artist and tiktoker that actually inspired this all: Vita Kari. They are known as a multimedia artist and have had an installation named “VITAWOOD” in Los Angeles. They also have some songs on Spotify. None of these were the reason I came across her content though. One day when I was scrolling through TikTok, I saw one of their videos where they says “the craziest thing about being creative…” in a very calm, monotone tone and then all of a sudden show one thing in the frame that is actually printed and not real. The video I first saw was the one where they had a dog in the background, but ended up being just a print.
After that Vita just popped up on my feed every once in a while, and every single time that happened with their “the craziest thing about being creative…” videos I stopped and watched it to try to find what the printed object was in those five seconds before the grand-reveal. Every single time I failed, but still continued trying. Until one specific moment these were just fun, interesting videos for me, but then a video of them addressing a hate comment came up to my for you page. They were saying that they were a performance artist and that was the way they were creating art. Later I’ve read that they were doing this to experiment with the idea of how “unaesthetic” videos perform in these social media platforms and play with the beauty standards. Until then I’ve never considered that these videos I was seeing were some form of art. They were just fun videos where I was trying to find the printed object. After that whenever they popped up on my TikTok I started to question it and think about it even more. I mean surely if a banana taped to a wall was art, then this could easily be art as well. At the end of the day the question really is “what is art?” which is something that every one of us had to start questioning at least with the start of our studies if not before.
What’s the extent of art in social media
Yes, especially TikTok is just fun dance videos a lot of the times, but even some trends show that it’s a way of practicing art. Think of the “Wes Anderson” trend for example where people tried to create videos in the style of his movies. Then there are accounts who are known with creating cinematic videos and who use storytelling. “Fantasy” photography and videography is art itself I think. Does not being published in a “serious” platform/location reduce those videos and photographs artistic values?
I personally believe that social media platforms are more and more becoming a place for creating and turning into a new way of making art while we are slowly experimenting with it and trying to make sense of it all. With the examples I’ve mentioned today and on my previous post this is becoming clearer and clearer everyday.
But what do you think about all this? Do you think social media could become art itself?
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