Audience is a commodity. A commodity to sell to advertisers, Art Fairs, to sell to ambitious artists that want their work to be seen. A target group of people to captivate, thrill, and buzz whatever to. Mediated and visually captivating brand retention to ensure burgeoning cultural significance with a dash of sex and rebellion. Audience is what we want, the reason people once fantasized being on television game shows, the imaginary crowd that lets you finish your sentences.

As Brad Troemel stated in his 2013 essay ‘Athletic Aesthetics‘ in The New Inquiry: “...what the artist once accomplished by making commodities that could stand independently from them is now accomplished through their ongoing self-commodification. This has reversed the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have an audience. Today’s artist on the Internet or Art Fairs needs an audience to create art.”

Currently artists are freely sharing quickly produced content faster than ever before through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or other online social networks. Building a signature presence where the branding of the artist’s name is more important then an individual work or series. The more social relevance, the more expensive the art work. Aspiring to work with galleries to have work ‘flipped’, sold on the secondary market for speculative prices, all because of their insistent social presence and talent to find the aesthetic hot spot. Not the presence at local gallery openings, but international social presence online. It’s not who you know, but who follows you that will increase your chances in making it big.

Art adjusted to the specificities of the social medium in order to harvest more acknowledgment from the audience. The quantified social capital of attention through likes and retweets causes a measurable value differentiating artists, stimulating a competition based system where popularity wins over quality. Creating, in essence, pop art. How do we truly engage with this quantified audience, and how do we treat this commodified attention as a medium while aspiring equality and autonomy in expression? Can we use this material to express political concerns about populist art, art flipping, and social inequality in general?