Post-internet Postmortem: Discourse, Gossip & Criticism
April 6th, 2026
net.art and the Born Digital: Internet Art Practice 1990 - Present
Brad Troemel, 2020.
Installation view of Richard Prince: Portraits at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 2019. Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
Emily Ratajkowski, Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution, 2021. Image from artnet.com
“The paintings were going for $80,000 apiece, and my boyfriend wanted to buy mine. At the time, I’d made just enough money to pay for half of a down payment on my first apartment with him. I was flattered by his desire to own the painting, but I didn’t feel the same urge to own the piece as he did. It seemed strange to me that he or I should have to buy back a picture of myself — especially one I had posted on Instagram, which up until then had felt like the only place where I could control how I present myself to the world, a shrine to my autonomy.”
Emily Ratajkowski, "“Buying Myself Back,” in The Cut, 2020.
“And indeed, while his clips are staged as if they were spontaneous, Rodriguez has admitted [...] that he “gets advance permission from the person he wants to draw and asks how long they expect to be on the subway.” At this point, it seems that everyone involved is basically simply collaborating on a bit of theater to make a nice viral moment.”
Ben Davis, "TikTok Star Devon Rodriguez Is Now the Most Famous Artist in the World. But What About His Work?,” in ArtNet, 2023.
"Instead of art that gains traction over time via traditional channels and then breaks out to a wider audience, there are now regularly art phenomena that get explosively popular with an immense audience, leaving art institutions and everyone else to sort out what a particular cultural trend means after it has already happened.
Ben Davis, "The World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned,” in ArtNet, 2023.
Whitney Biennial installation view by Pat Oleszko, Blowhard, 1995.
Whether of not any of the 86 artists in the Biennial used AI (and most likely they didn't) art critic Hilton Als still referred to artworks in the show as "ChatGPT art"
"What Als encounters as aesthetic decline is the normal output of a system whose transformation is already complete. When storage becomes effectively infinite, nothing needs to be excluded; when nothing is excluded, nothing needs to be judged; and when nothing is judged, influence ceases to function as a problem requiring resolution. Earlier artists were forced into an agon with their predecessors because survival depended on differentiation. Under present conditions, inherited forms remain permanently available as inputs—searchable, retrievable, recombinable—circulated without risk and stabilized by institutions that no longer require decision.”
LG Williams, "On Hilton Als and the Problem of Influence at the Whitney Biennial: When Influence No Longer Needs to Be Resolved," March 2026.
Screenshot from Instagram of Aphex Redditor, Bedrot, March 2026, Montreal QC.
Alison Long performance in the exhibition come rot in my bedroom, February-March 2026, New York City, NY.
Qualeasha Wood, Attention Economy, performance, September 2025, London, UK.