POSTING IS THE NEW ART

On the art of small gestures

My X feed has been recently flooded with “traitmaxxed” NFTs, a style associated with Solana’s experimental “Gay NFT” scene that intentionally breaks the pfp format. Instead of assembling randomized traits—glasses, hairstyles, hats—into a coherent image, these works undermine the logic entirely, using the same process to create schizophrenic, multi-layered collages that draw from internet pop culture and renaissance painting alike.

Drifella III, 2025

Schizocollages like the Drifella and SolfusSisters0 collections capture what being online actually feels like, swarmed on all sides by so much information that drowns out all sense of coherent narrative, just like—as Brian Droitcour points out—the excess of “traits” in these works overwhelms any discernible form.

It’s art that’s meant to be shared, to bless/curse the feed, depending on how you look at it. There’s an element of digital performance in these spaces where the act of sharing an image or changing your profile picture mark your affiliation with the community.

Movements like Gay NFT tap into the idea of the internet as an arena of digital self-performance, where the ritual around distributing the art becomes part of the art itself. Given the structural constraints of the algorithm, the artistic gesture has become miniaturized to fit: a tweet, a photo of your green tea in the morning, a 30-second video, a Gay NFT minted for 0.066 SOL and shared to the feed. On the internet, art is made of small gestures.

TikTok trends are asynchronous performance art, distributed choreographies of minimal movements, short phrases, and easy premises that propagate through the network and then die out. In a sense, they inherit the logic of instruction-based art, taking form through replication, like, for instance, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, with each iteration realizing the same idea in slightly different terms.

There are also swarm performances, like those of the Remilia Corporation. Affiliates of the schizocollective, donning the characteristic anime-style profile picture, echo across X with a chorus of “milady,” driving memetic amplification of posts made by their own kind. This collective micro‑performance directly exploits the mechanics of viral propagation. Participants mimic bots, enacting swarm logic as a form of performance only made possible by the internet, one that feels native to the medium of the networked collective.

As Remilia founder Charlotte Fang writes:

it’s psychotic engagement: put [the pfp] on, follow every milady you see, like every milady post you see, rt & reply milady to any that resonate, steal repost your favorites. Becoming milady is entering the network as a lucid schizo agent.

Another genre of feed-native art I’ve recently been loving is that of the worldbuilding girlblogger. These usually pseudonymous posters craft the stories of their lives with diaristic openness, carefully curated around a tight emotional core and aesthetic, in a practice recalls the confessional style and moody worldbuilding of the Tumblr posting tradition.

Sometimes, like @mothintoflames, their worlds are peaceful and quaint, anchored in the cozy imagery of the home. Sometimes, like @stardripiv, they’re dark, messy, and melodramatic.

My favorite of these worldbuilding bloggers is sotce, who, after spending time in a Buddhist monastery at 19, started sharing her insights online. Her content is a mixture of Buddhist philosophy, musings on girlhood, and quietly poetic portraits of her daily life, all filtered through her uncanny, sometimes-silly, internet-native brand of wisdom.

To her 430k TikTok followers, she shares videos of herself engaged in daily tasks—hanging out in her room, eating an octopus tentacle—often accompanied by cryptic captions. On Instagram she posts memes, often assemblages of random-seeming images with spiritually-inflected quotes that make little sense on the surface, but somehow feel right. On Patreon, she offers guided meditations and life advice. On her website, she shares the more intimate details of her life in a digital diary that lives behind a paywall.

I <3 sotce

Across multiple content streams, she leads us into a life that feels gentle, quiet, a little odd—and yet intimate and honest. She feels like the cool, weird, wise older sister every girl wishes she had.

Like other worldbuilding creators—and like we all do when we post online—sotce performs a character that is both self and non-self, an autofiction that uses selfhood as the starting point. In an interview, she describes the tension between her two personas:

sotce is a perfect ego and amelia is a regular human girl who knows how to try her on really well. i think amelia’s personality pops out sometimes, and that grounds sotce in the world. it is an ongoing dance, a push and pull between being human and being holy.

The works of this genre of influencer/content creator/poster/digital performer are composed over long stretches of time, through posts that pop up on the feed then disappear into collective memory, each one a small gesture in a bigger project. Because these works are distributed algorithmically, they are always being encountered in pieces, with no two viewers receiving the same subset of the work.

As art evolves to meet the constraints of algorithms, it starts to look more like social media posts. Posting is not only art, it’s the most prevalent and most influential art form of our time. It’s art made not for the gallery, but for the feed, meant to be viewed not in a space set apart from the rest of reality, but as part of the texture of our daily lives, encountered whenever we open our phones.

That great art is now social-media native has another implication: the lines between artists and influencers and internet trolls and performers and spectators are no longer clear, which also means they’re no longer relevant in describing the creative drive of the online world, which is also the real world. When art is composed of minimal gestures, everyone can be an artist, even in a small way.

I am less interested in the gallery show that must be explained to be understood than I am in the Gay NFTs on my X feed. I want to see sotce eat an octopus for breakfast. I want to spam “milady” because it makes me feel something to do it with other people.

This is the way the world is now. Art is on the internet.