I always hated Facebook. I have a Facebook account and I used to, at one time in my life, post and argue endlessly with propagandists when Facebook was fresh and new. But the platform annoys me. It’s bulky and slow, like a brontosaurus lumbering through the land and crushing the undergrowth with their long tails and solid oak legs. Instagram, on the other hand, is fun. Instagram is visual and pretty and clean. The interface has minimal distractions and the content, once, was all about art. For someone coming back to art after a break of 25 years, Instagram is a low-stress, no-pressure environment to get feedback on what I sometimes feel are clumsy, amateur attempts at watercolours.
Although it has evolved into something else entirely now, when it was first launched, Instagram was a boon for artists across the world. Like all digital tools, the platform was disruptive, a form of disintermediation that sidelined centuries of gatekeeping by traditional media, galleries, art schools, and art critics. The institutional hold jealously guarded by governments and government-adjacent organisations loosened. Instead of having to sell myself to a well-heeled gallery owner or be torn apart by the latest critic in niche journals and magazines, I could exhibit my works directly to people and find my own audience. Artists around the world found the same formula and Instagram was flooded by art typically discarded by the close and privileged community of high-end galleries and collectors.
According to Viola Lillhom, a business major who wrote a thesis on the online art ecosystem, a whopping 80 percent of buyers now find their collections online instead of in galleries. Over 50 percent of gallery owners admitted that they found new artists by browsing through Instagram. Artists have bypassed the magazines and photographers and gallerists who controlled who was and wasn’t famous in the art world.
Art set free
For a watercolourist, this is especially liberating.
For centuries, the West has been the standard-bearer of what constitutes a “real artist”. And for centuries, that standard has been oil painting. Watercolours is considered the hobbyist’s medium, and despite the popularity of John Singer Sargent (who, along with artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Winslow Homer, or Andrew Wyeth, are outliers, with just enough abstraction to merit the acceptable status of modernists), “serious artists” have always, always, been oil painters. This is a standard that has shaped Western art since before the Renaissance and, surprisingly, the Global South has willingly followed along. This is problematic, because from the Subcontinent to China, artistic traditions have always followed water-based media. Chinese watercolours are as exquisite as the water-based Persian/Indian miniature art that is, sadly, currently the sole purview of the National College of Arts in Pakistan. At my alma mater, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture – now one of the most influential art schools in the country – the oil painter’s standard has been deeply internalised. So, when approaching galleries, journalists, critics, or even other artists as a watercolour painter, it’s almost impossible to be taken seriously, even in Pakistan.
Social media, however, means that I don’t need to adopt Western standards in order to be seen as an artist. It has legitimised watercolour as a serious medium, introducing the works of astounding artists like Chien Chung Wei (a Taiwanese artist who might just be the God of Watercolour at the moment), Alvaro Castagnet, Joseph Zbukvic, and Eudes Correia to name a few, to a general public that may never have known about them. These are masters of the medium who paint what they see. They are neither abstractionists nor modernists (which is the badge of contemporary cool that all “serious artists” must wear in today’s landscape), and if they had been painters in Pakistan, their works would have elicited polite disdain from the art community. In a WhatsApp group with other watercolour artists, I see the brilliance of full-time generational artists like Arshad Maqbool, Saqib Akhtar, and Farooq Aftab relegated to a label of ‘traditionalists’ that disinvites them from any general discourse on art or the future of art in the country. (The only water-based art taken seriously is miniature art, for which Imran Qureshi is the flag-bearer and deserves all the accolades.) These artists are all on Instagram now, and getting the recognition among the common man that they never got from the elite art world.
Validating the craft
At an even lower rung than watercolourists, however, are craftspeople. We call indigenous crafts Lok Virsa and create separate “villages” where all the craftspeople of the country converge; then, once a year, we trot them out for the annual parade and expect them to (literally) dance for their supper.
Since the early 20th century, and despite a concerted effort by the 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement to remove any differentiation between art and craft, crafts have been systematically devalued and downgraded to a mechanical, repetitive skill that anyone can learn, whereas art is conceptual, imaginative, abstract, and based on individualistic genius. In fact, the value of an individual oil painter has no substantial validity over an artist who throws and paints clay pots or a group of artists who create architectural filigrees. A narrow elite—the gallery owners, critics, collectors, institutions, and ‘top’ artists—assigns an arbitrary economic value and cultural prestige to one over the other. In Pakistan, the government only sees value in local crafts when they see a verifiable economic return, which is why textiles are thriving. There will always be a consumer base for clothes; nothing else needs to be promoted.
Until, along came Etsy.
Etsy hasn’t had an outsized impact in Pakistan yet, but this is a platform that has refused to distinguish between art and craft. Both Instagram and Etsy have elevated traditional indigenous crafts from across the world to a global audience, making them both accessible and valuable in a way they haven’t been in a long, long time.
Social media started the great democratisation of the closed, stuffy art world.
There are artists on Instagram who have no connection to the art world, having never gone to an art school or studied art beyond K-12, and yet who have huge followings and lucrative careers. Their talent, in any form, be it representational works, crafts, or modernism, no longer depends upon a cadre of select promoters and buyers to be recognised or to make a living.
Social media has revitalised dying crafts from Uzbekistan to Arabia on the one hand, and on the other opened up a career path for people whose economic circumstances would normally drive them to conventional jobs like business, engineering, medicine, or law. The world of artists has visibly expanded, changing the definition of art and the way audiences interact with it. Artists talk to their followers on social media; individual pieces remain in the public eye indefinitely and conversations grow around them.
The cliché of the starving artist in a garret is a distant memory.
The downside of digital exhibition
The fine arts department at IVSAA requires students (or they did when I was there) to read John Berger’s excellent book, Ways of Seeing. In this groundbreaking work, Mr Berger posits that historical and cultural context changes the way we perceive art. Someone from the Global North, for example, may find a traditional Persian miniature painting overly ornate or awkward—the miniature tradition flattens perspective and depth in unique and interesting ways that most people in the West are unfamiliar with, while nudes would be censored in Muslim countries, dropping their value and hampering perception.
He also suggested—and keep in mind that he wrote this in the 1970s—that mass media affects our visual language, which alters not only the way we interact with art, but the way the artist paints. This is true in so many ways.
Mass media in the ’70s was television and cinema, glossy magazines, broadsheet newspapers, visual media that changed the way people understood imagery, bringing concrete visuals to concepts that once lived solely in people’s imaginations. But its reach was limited to areas, regions, countries, and kept the perception and valuation of artworks in the hands of elite gatekeepers.
Social media, on the other hand, exposed the artist’s potential audience to art across continents.
Visual language, as a result, changed dramatically. And not always for the better.
To begin with, the internet and social media is, as of 2026, skewed heavily in favour of the Global North. The largest platforms, the biggest accounts, the sites with the longest reach are broadcast out of the Global North, controlling the flow of information from West to East, from Global North to Global South. The internet is now the sole source of information for anyone with connectivity. This propagates Western values (already disseminated with deep ferocity through popular culture via Hollywood) across the globe, devaluing and eroding local cultures, traditions, and ideologies as a result (note the decay of native languages such as Urdu and its literary traditions because the proliferation of English has disincentivised the population from learning Urdu). Already burdened by the lasting effects of colonialism, artists in this part of the world absorb and adopt the visual language they see most often—that of the ‘advanced’ civilisation of white peoples.
In the art world, this translates into an unbalanced representation of Western art, a marginalisation of art coming out of the Global South, and the self-correction of artists in this part of the world. That self-correction is the homogenisation of local, cultural context. Ancient traditions are ‘reframed’ into the visual language of the Global North, not just because they dominate mass media, but also because the bulk of the wealth intended for art collections resides almost exclusively in the West. Local artists who have found an audience on social media have found a disproportionately Western audience.
Social currency
Add to that the dreaded social media algorithm.
When you are rewarded for certain behaviours, you’re likely to repeat those behaviours over and over again. Ask the mouse in the maze who gets rewarded for pushing a button, or the child burning his hand and forever staying away from the stove.
So, when the social media algorithm rewards you for a certain post, a particular style of painting, a specific medium or subject, you will invariably seek out the same reward by posting similar paintings and art. If watercolours of serene landscapes aren't raising your profile, you’ll seek out the subjects and media that are getting thousands of views, and post your own version of that. So, if sketches of cute cats are all the rage, most artists will post sketches of cute cats.
Where once a tiny elite dictated the definition of a ‘real artist’, now it is a mechanical, numbers-based system that breaks down an artist’s value into engagement, followers, and reach. And because the audience is overwhelmingly Western, the primary driver of the algorithm is the Western aesthetic. As a result, art that is celebrated on social media today exhibits a disturbing sameness, a glossy surface beauty, a repetitive style and colour palette (whatever is fashionable at the time), prioritising engagement over meaning, abstraction over observation, and surface beauty over critical reflection.
I often wonder, had Sadequain lived in our times and posted his work on Instagram, would he ever have painted the ceiling in Frere Hall, or would he be creating pretty pictures that a social media audience would happily repost and share? Would Allama Iqbal’s Shikwa Jawab-e-Shikwa become famous, or would it have been placed in cyber obscurity because it just didn’t ‘resonate’ with Instagram’s audience (too long, too difficult, too political!)?
To some extent, art has always been dictated by what sells. Now, it’s dictated by the social media algorithm. Social currency has replaced hard currency as the prime driver for what art looks like.
The greater loss, of course, is that the artist’s primary purpose—which is to reflect on society, hold up a mirror to its flaws, and comment critically on its shortcomings—has been sidelined in favour of feeding the algorithm.
Loud and proud
But it would be wise to remember that the artists most remembered have always been the ones who ignored the marketplace and were compelled to create works that reflected their inner ethos. These are the artists who might have benefited by a direct channel to the world such as social media, as long as they could divorce themselves from the metrics of the platform and the need to push the button for a daily dose of dopamine.
What it comes down to, what it has always come down to, is inner fortitude and balance.
Social media has affected art for the worse, but it has great potential to change it for the better as well. The challenge is to balance out the flow of information—what comes to us from the Global North needs to be given back in equal ferocity and strength. What we create, how we create, the forms of our creation need to be safeguarded and propagated without fear. Our aesthetic, our traditions, our values need to move out of the shadow of our long-standing gora complex, be recognised (by our own people—we have numbers on our side) and disseminated loudly and proudly. Our artists may want social currency, but it should be the side business they indulge in with the occasional cute cat sketch while they work on their real masterpieces.
The tools that subtly tell us we are inferior could easily become the tools that turn the tables. For that, we need to seek out, methodically, deliberately, and with obsessive purpose, the art of obscurity, the artists of the Global South, the writers and poets and thinkers whose tiny followings and rich works deserve to be seen and read and absorbed.
They’re out there—go find them.
The writer is an artist associated with IVSAA.
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer
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