IT WAS A slow Saturday on the second-to-last afternoon of this past December’s Art Miami, one of the city’s longest-running art fairs, now eclipsed by the much flashier Art Basel Miami Beach. Ethan Cohen, a dealer with a gallery on West 17th Street in Manhattan, was sitting in his booth showing a sculpture by the Rhode Island-based artist Thomas Deininger called “Macawll of the Wild” (2024). From head-on, the work appears as a realistic depiction of a blue-and-yellow macaw perched on a branch. But the piece changes as the viewer moves around it, revealing itself to be a perspectival trick — from the side, it’s not a sculpture of a macaw at all but a seemingly random cluster of cheap found objects: unclothed dolls, a plastic palm tree, an action figure of Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” On closer inspection, the bird’s tail is made of an unpeeled plastic banana, an orange bottle cap, a No. 2 pencil and a tangled tape measure, among other things. It was priced at $60,000, but Cohen had yet to sell it when a woman came by and shot a video of the piece.
By the next morning, Cohen had numerous messages from people he hadn’t heard from in a long time — a former assistant, an intern who’d worked for him a decade ago, a collector in Indonesia. The woman had posted the video on her TikTok account, @gabrielleeeruth, and “somehow,” he told me, it “tripped the algorithm.” Not only did the work quickly find a buyer but there were now hundreds of spectators at the booth, leaning over one another to shoot their own videos, so many that Cohen had to find somebody to handle crowd control to protect the art. It wasn’t until his son, who’s in his early 30s, suggested that Cohen check TikTok himself that he truly understood the magnitude of what was going on: The original video already had 16 million views by around noon on Sunday. By 3:30 p.m. it was up to 50 million. At 6 p.m., the fair was over and the video had 90 million views. The tally, as of this writing, is 118 million and counting.
Thomas Deininger’s sculpture “Macawll of the Wild” (2024), which went viral after appearing on TikTok in December.
The sculpture by Deininger is part of a small but growing canon of art that, though not necessarily made for social media, is best understood through its reception there. At a time when A.I., pseudoscience and political misinformation have made us suspicious about what’s actually real online, social-media art offers a kind of pared-down comfort. It’s often literal, with little room for disagreement regarding its intentions. Yet in its conceptual ambitions or technique, it can seem just clever enough to make viewers say, “Aha!” (rather than, “My kindergartner could’ve made that”). Other examples include 2018’s “Love Is in the Bin” by Banksy, a painting that was timed to partially self-destruct following its sale at Sotheby’s in London; Marco Evaristti’s 2025 exhibition in Copenhagen, “And Now You Care?,” in which the artist placed three baby pigs in a cage and left them to starve to death (someone set them free); and Noah Verrier’s completely sincere paintings of junk food like a Taco Bell Crunchwrap. Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present” is arguably the original viral moment for contemporary art, a 2010 performance in which Abramović sat in a chair at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for seven or eight hours a day and invited people to take a seat across from her for as long as they could manage. There was no Instagram or TikTok at that time, but it did inspire a Tumblr called Marina Abramović Made Me Cry — a collection of dozens of images of people doing just that as they stared into her face.
On the surface, these works don’t have much in common other than capturing the attention of the public. This is a genre of art that’s often only as interesting as the response to it, which makes it especially interesting to the people doing the responding. In an interview, Deininger, 55, discussed how wild macaws are frequently poached in Miami, where they aren’t protected. These deeper concerns were largely lost on the work’s audience, many of whom, at least according to the thousands of comments on TikTok, came to the same confident conclusion: “Now that’s art.”
A PIVOTAL MOMENT in the history of social-media art was the first show by Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner gallery in 2013. Visitors waited for hours to see one of the Japanese artist’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” which Kusama, now 96, fills with mirrors and lights to give the illusion of boundless space. Instagram was still novel, with a just-introduced video function, and hordes of people lined up to claim some time in this seemingly optimal environment for selfies. “The first time I ever posted on my social media was a Kusama show,” Hanna Schouwink, a senior partner at Zwirner, told me. By 2017, there were Kusama “Infinity Rooms” at institutions around the world, with timed entries to accommodate the crowds.
Kusama inaugurated a new era of art specifically catering to smartphone engagement. The conceptual artist James Turrell soon had a brief crossover moment on Instagram thanks to his 2013-14 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when Drake (before his beef with Kendrick Lamar blew up) visited the exhibition and later used it as the inspiration for a music video. In 2019, when the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach, the work’s sale for $120,000 made it onto CNN, an outlet generally uninterested in art fairs; when the piece was resold, with a different banana, at a Sotheby’s auction last year for $6.24 million, it was international news.
Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Room” installations have become perennial sensations on social media, providing optimal environments for selfies.
If there’s an explanation for viral art, it’s a tautological one, reminiscent of Don DeLillo’s riff on “the most photographed barn in America” from his 1985 novel, “White Noise.” Why is it the most photographed barn in America? Because people keep taking pictures of it. Why do people keep taking pictures of it? Because it’s the most photographed barn in America. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” DeLillo writes.
This poses a unique dilemma for artists in an industry that courts a mass audience while remaining generally suspicious of populism. The former New York Times art critic Roberta Smith believed that Kusama “might be the greatest artist to come out of the 1960s” but was dismissive of the “Infinity Rooms,” favoring her abstract paintings, which are virtually invisible on Instagram. There’s always been a palpable disconnect between the high art celebrated by critics and the art to which the public pays attention. Consider Thomas Kinkade, the painter of twee cottages and gardens, who died in 2012, the same year Facebook purchased Instagram: He was, commercially, anyway, one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. In 1999, Robert Rosenblum, then a curator at the Guggenheim, said of Kinkade, “He doesn’t look like an artist who’s worth considering, except in terms of supply and demand.” Social media has further corroded the boundary between popular and praised but, beyond that, it’s also helped extend art world snobbery to the masses. Love is one way to go viral, as was the case with “Macawll of the Wild,” but hatred is just as powerful. To quote one of the less unhinged replies to Cattelan’s banana, “This planet needs to get hit with a meteor and start over.”
Social media may have given artists a direct outlet to speak to an audience without the backing of an institution, but it’s telling how few artists have made work explicitly about it. (One exception is Amalia Ulman, whose 2014 series of Instagram selfies features a fictional character she created to critique the manners of the terminally online.) While Deininger said his prices have gone up since the fair in Miami, no serious artist wants to be pigeonholed as “that person you saw on Instagram.” As Schouwink told me, “I know a certain younger generation is very well versed in the medium of Instagram and happy to exist in that space. But I don’t think that’s a very long view. I wonder what will happen to all these brains that have this constant stimulus that doesn’t lead anywhere.”
M.H. Miller is the features director for T Magazine.
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