On Annekathrin Kohout’s two recent publications about the hyper-reactive and social media’s take-over of the art world
“Art that generates klicks. Careers that depend on the number of followers. Critics who exchange memes instead of reviews. Museum directors who shut up, in fear of shitstorms. Welcome to the Brave New Art World.” This is how the September/October 2025 issue of the German art magazine Kunstforum, titled “Art Meets Social Media,” opens, edited by Annekathrin Kobout and Wolfgang Ullrich. Such a timely topic. Finally, after 30 years of sparse attention for video and sound art, electronic, multimedia and interactive art, new media art, net.art, locative and post-digital art up to the recent craze over NFTs, the ultimate revenge on the contemporary art world is at hand. The submission of the art world to the digital is a fact, for everyone to see. Look at all of them, functionaries and hipsters alike, parading through their exhibitions, with the smart phone in their hand. However, putting such all-too-obvious observations into writing is something altogether different. Two German media theorists had the guts to state the obvious. Why was the digital dependency of the art system such a taboo topic in the first place? Is it because of a fear for a uncontrolled democratization of the field? Are gatekeepers such as curators, critics, and collectors no longer in charge of defining what’s en vogue? Have their roles been taken over by influencers and the Big Tech algorithms that steer them?
The Leipzig-based Annekathrin Kohout is one of the most prolific media theorists in Germany. In April 2023, I conducted my first email interview with her about her two books on nerds and K-pop. This time it is a double interview as well. Simultaneously to the Kunstforum issue, her new book, titled (translated into English) Hyperreactive: How Social Media Struggle Over the Power of Interpretation (Wagenbach, 2025), came out. The German concept Deutungsmacht emphasizes who has the right to define the public discourse (read an interview with her aborut this in German here). The intriguing premise here—at least from the German perspective—is the reality that this is no longer in the hands of ‘mainstream media’ such as newspapers, radio and television. To dive deep into social media controversies in the German context these days is a paradigmatic jump from the dominant historical-hermeneutic approach that defined German media theory. It took decades, but finally we’ve arrived in the Internet age. At some point, it seemed that German sociology regained lost territory with books like Triggerpunkte, Gekränkte Freiheit and Polarisierung, but Kohout managed to reclaim the territory with a fascinating ‘humanities’/media theory classic on ‘re-action’ culture.
To understand both publications in an international context, we need to take the ‘Habermas’ legacy in Germany into account. The institutional support—and framing—of what was once called ‘critical public discourse’ remains considerable to this day. This makes the culture clash with the brutal informality on social media channels even harder. Discussions, disagreements, arguments, rhetoric, and political positions in Germany are still deadly serious, and have consequences, as ‘Gaza’ has shown over the past years. Especially if you come from an anti-intellectual, pragmatic country like the Netherlands, the debating culture in Germany (but also France) is serious stuff. Words, still matter. Cynical blabla judgements miss the point. All the more shocking is what happens when these discourse-heavy societies are confronted with the de-facto hegemony of social media platforms. Everywhere in Europe, people are obsessed with swiping. Young people read less. Let’s not repeat the statistics here. All this makes the confrontation between the formal and informal discursive worlds in Germany even bigger.
Let’s dive into what Kohout means with the term hyper-re-active: “The hyperreactive human not just consumes news to stay informed but to respond. The content is not only shared to spread it; it is also shared to help others. The aim is to raise visibility. Comments are made to position oneself, not primarily to contribute. The actual content has become secondary in comparison to the response itself. It primarily functions as material on which the reactive performance can reveal itself.” In contrast to this impulse, the answer grows out of a willingness to understand and that “recognises the real existence of the other.”
The new system that emerges amidst all this is what Kohout spells out as various forms of ‘hyperinterpretation’. This is a cultural technique used by social media actors, editors, influencers, and other tech-savvy professionals to zoom in on a detail to go viral. The detail (a gesture, phrase, background sign) will then be picked up by algorithms programmed and trained to instrumentalize sensitive content. The example Kohout mentions is Greta Thunberg’s octopus cuddle that was interpreted as an antisemitic symbol. In such cases, the line between critical analysis and conscious manipulation blurs. We see interpretation unfold in real-time. Kohout distinguishes five forms of hyperinterpretation: forensic, comparative, historicizing, psychologizing, and data-analytic. What all these have in common is that they are probes, attempts to launch a case that may or may not go viral. Another common aspect is that we are all treated with suspicion. There is a paranoid distance towards the object at play here. Both moralistic overinterpretation and cynical hyperinterpretation, Kohout concludes, work together to damage the flow—and reputation—of the discourse.
Instead of increasing difference and insight, complicating matters, and creating nuances, the result of the reactive is a loss of meaning through the spreading of distrust. Instead of adding depth (through new information or the inversion of the argument), the discourse is torn apart. While in Zero Comments, written in 2006, I emphasised silence not responding as acts of indifference and nihilism, Kohout emphasizes the compulsive responses of likes in the current re: culture. For her, social media platforms are ideological battlegrounds. Today’s users are deeply aware that Silicon Valley logic is to get feedback, or else it didn’t happen.
What I did not take into account back then is the slippery slope from genuine responses and contributions to discussion threads to shitposting, yelling and threatening as expressions of reaction. By that, I mean all forms of reactionary thinking. These are anti-revolutionary responses that align themselves to toxic-masculinity, racism, sexism and ethnic hate. While sharing may sound harmless and naïve, it is—and always will be—the start of an escalation spiral. If this is an era defined by regression, it is not merely a passive, subliminal act. What makes Kohout’s book so timely is her ability to situate technical defaults deep inside the political culture. Yes, Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel is the theory gesture of the day. This is what we see playing out on TikTok and Instagram. And this is the type of theoretical reflection we so dearly need.
Kohout concludes her theory of the hyper re-active with the remark that she has become wary of simple solutions to the communication crisis. There are no quick fixes to improve the situation. Her book is a call to reflect on the current state of affairs. She longs for a situation in which an answer is more than a quick reaction. According to the dictionary, a reaction is a “response to a stimulus.” – a desire that Sherry Turkle theorized so well, already in 2015, in her Reclaiming Conversation. The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.
Geert Lovink: Let‘s start the interview with your book on the theory of the hyper-reactive. You describe this phenomenon as a techno-social interplay between the user and software affordances.
Annekathrin Kohout: It was vital for me to emphasize the techno-social interplay because I have the impression that it’s too easy to just point at “the platforms” or “the algorithms” and declare them solely responsible for “outrage democracy“, “coarsening of debates“, or “polarization of society.” Of course, platform operators bear responsibility, mainly because of the architecture and infrastructure of their offerings. We are at their mercy in many ways. But at the same time, social media has produced a public sphere that we all create together, no longer just traditional news media as in the pre-digital era. And this is precisely where I see a fatal misunderstanding: Many still act (or act again) as if platforms were merely service providers trying to satisfy their consumers for profitability reasons, and as if we users were only there to consume content. In fact, the opposite is true. A public sphere has emerged that wouldn’t exist at all without our involvement. And toward this collectively produced public sphere, we have a responsibility, as posters and responders.
In the summer of 2025, Nils C. Kumkar’s Suhrkamp book Polarization was published. He shows very plausibly that the much-invoked polarization describes less a clear social division into camps than a communicative mode that is, to a certain extent, indispensable for political communication. You need polarization to be distinguishable, to generate attention, and to win voters. If you transfer this to social media, I would – for the sake of clarity – want to sharpen the point: Communication on social media, as soon as it takes place under public profiles, is always also political communication. You don’t simply talk with each other, just as politicians in talk shows or parliament rarely really speak with each other, but rather address an abstract audience that you want to win over to your own content, interpretations, and worldviews.
GL: For you, there is no such thing as ‘interpassivity’. This may apply to streaming services such as Netflix, but not to social media. However, some argue that interpassivity is indeed on the rise, as seen in doomscrolling on TikTok, Snapchat, and Insta. The swiping may be compared to the 1980s and 90s boredom of TV channel zapping (and Hartmut Winkler’s magnificent book about this). Is responding not becoming a niche activity for those who long for the golden days of forum software, mailing lists, blog comments and Reddit?
AK: I deliberately take the perspective of the machine. Everything that’s measurable counts as a reaction. Not just commenting, but already watching longer, stopping while scrolling, replaying. For everything that lands in the feed, I have to behave, make a decision: Do I scroll on? Do I watch it? Do I share it? Do I take a position on it? And most people know, even if only intuitively, that this behavior has consequences. They’ve communicated with the phantom “algorithm,” thereby helping certain content gain visibility or leaving it invisible. In this sense, doomscrolling is also not ‘real’ passivity, but participation in the platform order. That’s precisely why I consider the image of the passive user fatal. It depoliticizes our behavior, seemingly relieves us of responsibility, and ultimately plays into the platforms’ hands. If everyone is ‘just scrolling through’, you don’t need to worry about the effects of this scrolling. But in my book, I’m aiming for precisely the opposite: to bring our own activity more into consciousness. I show that we often act even where we think we’re passive. Only when we recognise these micro-actions as part of a larger reaction regime can we even begin to talk about how we might react differently, or consciously choose not to respond at all.
On top of that, there’s the social dimension that’s missing from classic channel zapping. When I like, share, or make it clear I don’t, this is registered not only by the machine but also by other participants on social media. Reactions have an addressee; they can be read as agreement, affront, or disinterest. This is precisely what fundamentally distinguishes social media for me from the television logic that Hartmut Winkler describes. Zapping in front of the TV took place in a comparatively sealed-off, private space and was rarely coded as social behavior.
The classic long responses in forums or blog comments have indeed become more niche. But that doesn’t mean fewer responses are happening; instead, the response formats have changed. Today, we respond with small gestures: likes, reposts, stitches, duets, emojis, screenshots. The reaction culture has become more fragmented, more granular, more fleeting, and highly formalized, but precisely for that reason, it’s not a marginal phenomenon but the dominant mode through which public discourse on platforms is produced in the first place.
GL: In Dutch, there is a term for your figure: the ‘reaguurder’, defined as “someone who makes hateful and anonymous online comments, similar to a comment troll.” (Wikidictionary) In the Netherlands, there is an emphasis on the reactionary aspect. Unfortunately, this term is not even touching the levels of de Maistre or Cioran (author of An Essay on Reactionary Thought, published in 1957), aimed at restoring ‘old’ powers. Neither does it reach the aesthetic level of the vulgar image, as Dean Kissick recently described the AI slop. How would you describe the people who take part in shitstorms? Diagnosis matters, right? What does it mean when we say ‘ordinary citizens’? Is it useful to develop a psychoanalysis of the (male) online user? Is the suggestion of being unknown and hidden playing a role here? They are not exactly ‘cute’. Everything seems over the top, for no apparent reason.
AK: I didn’t know the reaguurder term, but I think it’s exciting, of course, because it already carries the act of reacting in its word formation! At the same time, it also shows a problem. It narrows the figure of the online user down to the hateful, anonymous comment troll. That’s an essential and illuminating figure, but just one slice of a much broader spectrum of hyper-reactive subjects.
How would I describe people who participate in shitstorms? First of all, not as exotic nerds, but actually more as “ordinary citizens“. Shitstorms rarely consist of just a few notorious trolls, but of a whole ensemble: of “outrage entrepreneurs“ („Empörungsunternehmer“) as Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux and Linus Westheuser called them in their book “Trigger Points“ („Triggerpunkte“), who set the topics; but also of many ordinary users who like, share, and vary; plus ironic commentators who parody the whole thing while continuing to fuel it. Many of them are probably completely unremarkable in their offline lives. When shitstorm participants are addressed exclusively as „haters”, the problem gets outsourced to a small, supposedly clearly identifiable group, overlooking how much these dynamics emerge from the middle of society.
That’s why I’d also be cautious about gendering and pathologising the figure too much. The hateful male ‘reaguurder’ is a catchy but ultimately convenient fantasy. It diverts attention from the question of how very different people (men and women, politically progressive and reactionary) get drawn into these dynamics in specific constellations. In my book, I sketch the figure of the hyper-reactive person – not as a psychoanalysis, but as a social figure in which the desires and fears of the present are reflected. This isn’t the weirdo on the margins, but the completely ordinary user who is permanently addressed and permanently addresses others. The hyper-reactive person reacts constantly in micro-gestures that seem trivial individually but, in aggregate, can shift discourses, make or destroy careers. This figure is analytically essential to me because it encompasses not just hate but also agreement, solidarity, irony, fatigue, cynicism, and the entire spectrum of our online affects.
The suggestion of being unknown and hidden certainly plays a role, but not the only one. There’s definitely a sense of anonymity, even when you’re writing under your real name. You’re embedded in an affective swarm where responsibility is also diffusely distributed. Everyone says something, but no one quite feels like the cause. This is a fundamental driver of reaction culture: responsibility can easily be dismissed because, after all, you have “only” reacted.
GL: My prediction is that all channels for responding will be closed soon. Whatever may happen, you’re taking online responses seriously in a way that’s a new position. Most would just ignore them, see them as noise, as already filtered reactions that can never claim to be representative responses due to algorithmic and editorial interferences. Who takes responses on booking.com, Amazon or a news site seriously anymore? This is the everyday cynical reading. Your approach is different.
AK: The everyday cynical attitude that “it’s all just noise and not really significant“, is understandable, but also disturbing. The economist William Davies has described social media as a “reaction economy“. He writes that being in the digital public sphere without the ability to respond is like being trapped i a shopping mall without money. For that reason alone, I can’t currently imagine how social media would function without reactions.
I’m concerned with more than just platform logic. In the book, I wanted to show that these reactions have deeply inscribed themselves into our social, cultural, and political behaviour. Reacting always also means deciding, judging, evaluating, and taking a position. You can laugh off individual ratings or comments. But in sum, they very concretely structure what becomes visible, what counts as credible, who counts as successful, and who gets marked as „problematic”. That’s why I take these responses seriously, not because they’re representative, but because they’re effective.
Through this reaction culture, a new state of consciousness has emerged in which reactions have become more important than the content itself. It’s constantly co-thought: How will this be read? How will it come across? What emotions and further reactions will it trigger? This affects not only our communication but also our perception. We increasingly see things – texts, images, people – through the lens of potential reactions. This also has consequences for authorship and the work’s concept. An (art)work is no longer something complete that stands on it own but is permanently up for disposition, is commentable, remixable, scandalizable, and reinterpretable. Authors have to live with the fact that their works continue in this reaction environment through likes, memes, fan fiction, and AI edits. And that they themselves possess little interpretive authority anymore.
Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation Fake It, Fake It, Till You Fake It, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2024
GL: Let’s now switch to the Kunstforum magazine on social media and the art system you co-edited with Wolfgang Ullrich. In my experience, the contemporary art system and the internet were never close friends. Video was embraced as a medium in the 1990s, but not before the ‘video art’ system was taken down as a separate infrastructure with its own festivals, distributors, curators, critics and magazines like Mediamatic that I used to work for. This never happened to internet art (or immersive art installations, for that matter). Do you see the submissive and almost addictive dependency of museum directors, curators and their PR managers on social media as a result of their decades-long denial? While reading your Kunstforum issue, I felt sorry for their submissive dependency. There is no trace of any of the critical insights and internet (art) reflections that have been produced. How is this possible?
AK: I would say that “internet art” or “net.art” is indeed taken seriously in the art world, but perhaps I only have that impression because Wolfgang Ullrich and I studied and worked for a long time in the environment of ZKM Karlsruhe, where the artistic appropriation of browsers, interfaces, data streams, and later also NFTs was very systematically examined, collected and restored. Just at the beginning of this year, a retrospective on 30 years of Browser Art was shown there. Net art doesn’t seem marginalised at all. At the same time, you’re right. In the broader art world, it has remained a relatively niche art movement. What was then received much more broadly was “Post-Internet Art“, and it also touches more on an area that interests us, namely social media.
Wolfgang Ullrich and I felt it was absolutely necessary to view social media as an independent medium. There’s an internet before and an internet after the platforms. Unlike in Net Art, where topics like hypertext, networking, tracking, the browser as exhibition space, etc. dominated, Social Media Art is about the monetisation of attention, the newly designed public sphere, or the post-factual age.
But you’re also asking about the directors and curators. A significant part of our Kunstforum issue consists of a re-survey of the art world. Social media has fundamentally changed the way art is produced, received, and distributed. Artists build their careers partly directly through Instagram; collectors and curators orient themselves by follower counts; exhibitions are told through Reels and slideshows. “Submissive dependency” is perhaps a bit harsh, but the traditional gatekeepers are under enormous pressure to adapt if they don’t want to lose their relevance. After social media was long avoided or delegated to individual interns, at least the PR work has been professionalised by now. This professionalisation, however, usually consists of affirming platform conventions through story templates, trend sounds, “relatable content“, and edutainment. This is where your point becomes clear. Despite all the critical insights from early net criticism and the expertise institutions already possess, surprisingly little of it shapes their social media practice. This mainly stems from the fact that, for many, it’s still a very new field. There’s this imbalance. You depend on the platforms because you wouldn’t be visible without them, but you adopt their logics largely affirmatively instead of making them the subject of your own or even critical reflection.
GL: There’s great work of artists to be found on social media. Already, generations had had enough of begging for support and producing their own work on the net. This ranges from hyper-commercial NFT and influencer-type art to underground internet cinema, core, core, internet core, you name it. Which artists and tendencies do you like and find interesting?
AK: Last year, I saw the exhibition “Dream Screen” at the Leeum Museum in Seoul, curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija, which explored a specific state of consciousness among the millennial generation, shaped by digital culture and social media. The exhibition spaces were transformed into a giant haunted house where you moved through screens, avatars, and shadow figures. There, I discovered several artistic positions that really excited me. Among them, Kim Heecheon captures this by now very familiar contemporary feeling of suffering from social media, the loneliness, alienation and loss of self, extremely precisely, without simply pointing the finger in a culturally critical way. His works combine gaming perspectives, chat windows and urban spaces into something I would describe as “platformized interiority“.
But you asked about decidedly Social Media Art. I love the German artist Karla Zipfel! For TikTok, she developed a series of videos in which she explains how she photographed a puzzle she made, made a new puzzle from the photo, and photographed it again, repeating this until only an almost monochrome surface was visible. With the simplest means, she subverts exactly what platforms typically demand – clarity, hook, immediate comprehensibility. Instead, she produces a kind of absurd, self-referential over-processing gesture, in which, with each step, less information remains. She went viral because no one understood what she was doing or why. The most frequent comment under her videos, she said, was „huh” („hä“). I mean, this is artistic self-empowerment in the social media age! The audience reacts to something it can’t quite categorise, and precisely in that lies, for me, what good Social Media Art can achieve at the moment. It formally fulfils all conditions for virality and simultaneously sabotages them by offering no clear message, no simple „takeaway”.
Generally, I’m more interested in tendencies than individual “social media stars“. One development I find very exciting right now is the almost manic preoccupation with the supposed end of social media. Everywhere, TikTok, Instagram & Co. are being declared dead; farewell videos circulate, “I quit social media” confessions, and offline fantasies. This “end of platforms” itself becomes an aesthetic motif, almost its own movement, even if it doesn’t yet have a name.
As for internet trends, I like Weirdcore, also because it operates so strongly on the not-being-pinned-down theme. While everywhere else on the platforms, meaning is constantly being produced, everything interpreted and pressed into narratives, Weirdcore is really beautifully… well, weird. I also grew up with “Charlie the Unicorn” and am biased in that regard 😉 These strange, sometimes unsettling, sometimes funny image worlds have something relieving for me, precisely because they elude clear interpretation.
Kim Heecheon,메셔 – Every Smooth Thing through Mesher, Single Channel Video, 2018
GL: In your Kunstforum contribution „That’s fucked up”, you show that social media is already a mainstream theme in the arts. There is remarkable continuity in this respect, but it is not widely acknowledged. This is a paradoxical situation you keep coming back to: all that is digital, and pop is already deeply integrated into the museum and gallery world; however, it does not appear as a separate concern or category. While there is painting, performance, and even art cinema, the digital or media art needs to take a step back. Why is this?
AK: This doesn’t apply to media art as a whole, and also less to the early net culture of the 1990s and 2000s, but very strongly to what you might call Social Media Art or Platform Art. This first has to do with the fact that these art forms are more complex to grasp: Art that emerges on social media or uses it as its primary medium can hardly be clearly distinguished from the other content in the feed. Social media is a giant decontextualisation machine. The strategy so popular in the 20th century of simply transferring something from pop culture or everyday life into the white cube and thereby marking it as art no longer works here. Especially since appropriation, remixing, and quoting are now standard practices in non-artistic content.
At the same time, museums and galleries have gotten into the relatively comfortable habit of integrating the digital and popular on the level of motifs, but not on the level of genres. What’s welcome, then, is painting about influencers, performances that quote selfies or TikTok gestures, installations with phone light and notification sounds. But that then appears as “painting” or „performance” – and not as an independent media practice. Social media is treated more as a theme than as a medium.
And then there are quite pragmatic, market-related reasons. The classic media – canvas, object, edition – are collectible, conservable, and easy to handle. Platform work is ephemeral, placeless, tied to accounts, dependent on interfaces, and legally complex. They pose different challenges for exhibition operations.
GL: All this can hardly be a generational issue. Is it related to its virtual nature? To the fact that it is native to the net and not to the museum? That it has intrinsic pop elements that are trashy and anti-elitist? Or that it is still ‘technology’ and thus in the hands of engineers – and not artists? Is the lack of tech literacy among art historians and art critics also playing a role here?
AK: Interesting that you bring up the lack of tech literacy. There’s something to that! As a net critic of the first hour, you’ll smile, but while working on the volume we noticed that there’s still a big gap between those who are on the net every day and know and operate the mechanisms, and those for whom this is absolutely foreign and who look down their noses at “those people on the internet” from a bourgeois-educated vantage point. Social media then appears to them primarily as a marketing channel and a risk-management zone, rather than as an aesthetic or epistemic space in which new forms of authorship, the concept of the work, and the public sphere are transforming. And of course, despite all the proclamations since the 1960s that the gap between high and low must be closed, this separation still exists. There’s still a lot of snobbery, as I’ve noticed again and again in my engagement with cuteness. Many find it difficult to open themselves to such a popular, naïve, infantile – you name it – aesthetic. But it’s precisely at these margins where a lot is happening right now.
GL: While New York is still playing a dominant role in the cool vibe that circulates on social media, London and Paris seem absent. How about Berlin? Or Leipzig, for that matter? Or China? Is this still a valuable way of thinking?
AK: Paris is actually coming back! Berlin is mainly struggling with the cuts in the cultural sector. And Leipzig? It plays hardly any role in global art circulation anymore. Recently, I read an article saying the USA is no longer marvelous and is losing the fight for the teenagers. The article received widespread agreement. The author argues that the USA was considered the global centre of “coolness” for decades through its pop culture – from Hollywood films to music to brands like Coca-Cola – and thereby exerted soft power. But under the second Trump administration, this has changed. Political polarisation, isolationism, and cultural divisions, such as the break with neighbouring countries like Canada, have dethroned the USA as a model. New York is always somewhat exempt from this, of course. In contrast, some Asian countries are increasingly perceived as cool. Especially Japan and Korea, but China has also invested heavily in its soft power in recent years. It’s fascinating how this is staged in feeds. Influencers show art districts in Shanghai, new museum buildings, creative districts, cafés, and fashion scenes. When China is mentioned on social media, it’s often through hyper-aestheticised cityscapes, curated museum reels, and lifestyle vlogs. These images are highly selective, but they inscribe themselves deeply into our sense of where “something is happening” right now.
Whether this is still a valuable way of thinking. Cities today function less as real centres and more as aesthetic labels in the feed. “New York“, „Paris”, „Seoul”, “Shanghai” are, so to speak, style filters. Platform culture deterritorialises and reterritorialises simultaneously. You can sit in Leipzig and aesthetically live completely in Seoul – I speak from experience ;). In that sense, I would ask less which city is currently fabulous, and more about which places, images, and scenes our ideas of coolness are presently organising around. And who’s curating them?
GL: In the special issue, you also feature the work of cultural manager, producer and entrepreneur Alain Bieber. He points at the growing generation gap when it comes to ‘Instagrammable’ art. In the end, this is all about visitor numbers. All these issues are vital for the quantified art world, which needs to legitimise its existence to sponsors, funders and ministries. However, and I keep coming back to this, the topic you cover here is still new. Do you feel you’re covering new territory? Your co-editor, Wolfgang Ulrich, even talks to young paintings, referring to Isabelle Graw’s 2012 remarks that painting today is so irresistible as it is saturated with life.
AK: Since the 1990s, there’s been net criticism, media art, and theories of digitalisation. What was surprisingly missing for a long time was a systematic survey of what you call “the quantified art world“. How do follower counts, statistics, “instagrammable” exhibitions, and visitor curves quite concretely change decisions in the art world? Which works get produced, which careers become possible, which places become visible?
Alain Bieber describes this generational gap very well. For a younger generation, it’s self-evident that art must be instagrammable, because visibility in feeds has now become almost as important as visibility in the exhibition space. For many older decision-makers, this remains something suspect, often a bit vulgar as well. And at the same time, institutional legitimacy toward sponsors and ministries now depends precisely on these numbers.
In this sense, our topic is new. We treat social media not as a side issue but as a condition shaping the art system as a whole. Wolfgang Ullrich’s text on the renaissance of painting in social media, which picks up on Isabelle Graw’s idea that painting is saturated with life – that is, with access to the person behind the pictures – can be taken more literally today than in 2012. These images are saturated with biographies, networks, likes, reposts, and memes. Nowhere are social contexts as present as in social media, Ullrich writes. We try to take this additional layer of „life” seriously and to consider it part of their artistic status. It’s not new ground because these phenomena haven’t existed for long, but because they’ve surprisingly rarely been described coherently in the art world until now.
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Annekathrin Kohout, Hyperreaktiv, Wie in sozialen Medien um Deutungsmacht gekämpft wird, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 2025.
Annekathrin Kohout und Wolfgang Ulrich (Hrg.), art meets social media, Schöne neue Kunstwelt, Kunstforum International, Köln, Band 305, September/Oktober 2025.