The pornification of art

Painting in the age of TikTok

The first video I ever posted on my YouTube channel was a timelapse watercolor painting of a house sparrow. It's 2:22 minutes long. I remember speeding up the footage as much as I could in my phone, because I was so scared of boring people with what was otherwise a 40 minutes long painting process.

I later went on to publish two more speedpaints that I believe were even shorter. I have since deleted them from my channel because they were getting so few views and felt kinda pointless.

The timelapse-style videos seem to have risen and fallen in popularity sometime before I started my channel. I was late to the game. Everyone and their dog had put up a speedpainting online, it seemed. The new trend was "rapidly cut real-time footage", which I quickly caught on to instead. This editing style is the one you see everywhere right now, especially on TikTok and Reels: Everything but the bare essentials is stripped away from the creation process. There's no color mixing, no brush rinsing, no mistakes, no pauses. The brush never even leaves the painting surface. All you see is... brushstroke after elegant brushstroke, after elegant brushstroke, aaaaand done. Swish and flick.

There's a hypnotic quality to these videos. They suck you in by the eyeballs. You really want to see where it all ends, even if you have no idea who the artist is, or even like their art style. Even if you desperately try to tear your eyes away from the screen.

Painting, on social media, has become a magic trick. A stop-motion edited performance. There's almost no reality left in it, because reality is boring. Real art making is so tedious compared to this, it's amazing anyone of us puts up with it.

Whenever I (reluctantly) watch one of these videos, I get a little sad. Because my painting can never be as effortless as that. Real painting demands preparatory work and sketching. There are thinking breaks, and lots of going back and forth, fixing mistakes. Constant doubt - "am I going to pull this off?" When the finished painting is finally "revealed", it feels earned. You wipe the sweat from your brow in a moment of silence, to revel in the fruits of your labor.

And then you log into Instagram to see fifteen videos in a row of happy, smiling artists seemingly waving a magic wand at their canvas and turning their finished masterpiece towards the camera.

After years of being exposed to these types of videos every day online, and not being able to look away from them, my sadness have turned into a kind of disgust. An almost nauseous feeling in my stomach. Then it hit me one day, what the videos remind me of: Porn.

And the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. What's happening to art online is similar to what's been happening to erotica. It's growing shorter and shorter in length. Less build-up, more gratification. All the mystery and complexity is being stripped away. Instead the act is speeded up, simplified and perverted beyond recognition. It feels cheap. It feels inhuman. It sets wildly unrealistic expectations for what making art is like.

*stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke* “DONE! Thanks for watching, please like and subscribe."

I don't blame artists for this trend. We're simply doing what we believe is necessary to get our art seen. We're looking at our stats and realizing that no one wants to see our speedpaints or real-time tutorials anymore, and we adapt. The internet right now is one big dance for the algorithms. Or a dance around them. Our inclinations and weaknesses are constantly being used against us by behavior engineers, to get us to pay attention, or to buy stuff. And we're powerless against them. It takes more and more effort to simply look away.

I know that the best way to avoid drowning in attention-engineered art content is to not go on Instagram in the first place. But I can't stay away. My sister broadcasts her life on Stories and I don't want to miss anything important. And even if I reach immedately to switch the feed back to "Following" instead of the default "For You" (Fuck you, Meta), that's still enough time to shove some art porn into my face.

Same goes for YouTube, which is also increasingly saturated with instant gratification art content on Shorts. Even longer videos tend to be edited in the same way. (I've done it myself.)

Oh, and did you know? AI can now not only steal and imitate our art, but our art making videos as well. Yes, even analog art.

Sure, it looks about as realistic as the painting process videos we're already putting out ourselves. With everything sped up, the brush never leaving the canvas, the hand moving in strange ways. It's a perversion of what making art is like.

But that seems to be the general goal of AI right now: Pervert everything that's sacred to us, and screw us all over in the process.

This is a major reason why I've not published art content to my YouTube channel for four months now, and might never want to again. I don't want to film my art making anymore. I don't want to attention-engineer my creative process. I don't want my painting videos scraped by AI and used to mass-produce fake art videos. I don't want to participate in the pornification of art.

Not to sound like a prude, but from now on, I think I'll keep my art making for myself. I look forward to painting in secret, to taking my time, to not even sharing the finished piece online.

The thought feels almost...erotic.