When Art Becomes Just Content

Instagram Stops Inspiring me and Starts Getting in My Way.

A landscape reduced to surface, ready to be consumed.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how social media in my case Instagram because Facebook is basically dead for me. It has started to interfere with my mood and my creative process and the funny thing is that it all began with good intentions.

A few months ago, I decided to train my algorithm.I wanted to see more art, more photography, more culture.I thought, “If Instagram works like a machine, maybe I can turn it into a portable museum.” and for the first few days, it worked.Instagram started showing me more of the kind of content I was looking for: painting, photography, archives, creative processes, artists I’d never seen before. Motivated, I began refining the list of accounts I followed. I didn’t reduce it (actually, the opposite) I ended up adding nearly 200 new accounts that seemed interesting. And I did some cleaning too, as I always do: if a profile looks abandoned, there’s no point in following it. Even if I know the person. If they don’t post, what am I doing there?

But of course, the machine did what it always does: it pushed everything to the extreme.

Suddenly, it started suggesting all kinds of “artists”.Some genuinely good, original, with well-developed techniques. Great for them. But then came the rest: a flood of “abstract painters” whose work looked attractive at first… until you actually paid attention.

At first glance, sure, it works.Strong colors, clean shapes, pleasant compositions. On Instagram everything looks more brilliant than it really is. And even though I “just” consider myself a photographer, I fully understand that painting sets many of the foundations of photography: composition, color, structure, visual logic.

But the more I looked, the clearer it became:many of these “artists” keep repeating the same formula over and over again.They change the color, they change the shape, they change the size… but the idea is identical. A template. A shortcut. There was no narrative. No intention. No context. No search. Just “pretty” pieces, easy to consume, made to hang in a minimalist living room or the waiting room of a dentist. Nothing that stays with you. Nothing that makes you think, admire, pause, or feel anything deeper than “that looks nice.”

Once you separate decorative art from art that actually proposes something, there’s no going back and I started seeing it everywhere: works created for the quick like, not to last. Pieces made for Instagram, not for a museum, a gallery, or a book. “Artists” who, instead of developing their craft, simply make their canvases bigger so they appear more important. And yes, they’re “unique pieces,” but the bigger the canvas, the bigger the artistic emptiness behind it.

At some point I realized many of these “artists” aren’t artists at all for me (and I'm sorry I do not want to hurt anyone): they’re actors playing the role of artist. Performers. People building a visual identity instead of building a body of work.

All of this started influencing me more than I expected. My mood changed, my motivation changed. What was supposed to be a source of inspiration slowly turned into an endless stream of disappointments.

So I made a simple decision: I deleted Instagram from my phone. Not the account (I still check it on my laptop) but I removed the automatic, unconscious scrolling. I wanted to take back my time, my energy, and my ability to look at images that actually matter.

Because the truth is this: The best and healthiest inspiration doesn’t come from an endless feed. It comes from museums, from books, from galleries that show work built on years of research, with a thoughtful curatorial process that pushes you to think, not to swipe.

Instagram can entertain, it can show trends, it can open doors but if we’re looking for real inspiration (the kind that actually moves something inside us) it’s still where it has always has been: in serious, slow, carefully developed work that isn’t chasing likes, but meaning.