The Quiet Migration: Digital Art After the Showcase

It's been a while since I've been sensing a shift in how social networks intersect with digital and contemporary art. Factors like digital-showcase fatigue, fake accounts, bots, and a growing nostalgia for genuine human interaction are pushing more activity toward semi-private, curated, or invite-only groups, communities, and forums — brilliant examples being Right Click Save and Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems. This still happens on social platforms, but with a fundamentally different set of expectations.
What's shifting isn't just where the conversation happens, but what's expected once you're there. Open social platforms operate on an economy of continuous self-proof: you exist only insofar as you keep performing, and value is measured in reach, likes, followers, impressions, accumulated by talking to an undifferentiated crowd. Semi-private and curated spaces invert that logic. Admission itself becomes the proof of value, so the pressure shifts from being noticed to being worthy of the room you're already in. Here, contribution replaces exhibition: you're expected to add something, as for example an idea, a perspective, real presence, rather than simply display yourself. And because the audience is finite and somewhat known, exchange becomes reciprocal in a way that open platforms rarely require, where pure passive consumption is not just accepted but structurally built in.

I come to this observation less as a trend-watcher than as someone who never fully entered the game in the first place. As an artist working since the 1990s, I never invested time in performing on social networks; not out of principle, but because that time went into my artistic research instead. My relationship to visibility was formed in a different economy of attention, one where the work itself, not its constant broadcasting, was the currency. This is perhaps the deeper nostalgia at play: not for the aesthetics of the 90s I come from, but for a mode of interaction where being seen required first being present.