Being an Important Artist: Creative Production and Artistic Branding on Social Media

The arts-based research in this thesis explores the status of creative labour and artistic identity on social media through the creation of branded Tik Tok accounts and multi-platform media content. The thesis addresses the platformization of artistic production on social media and investigates the ambivalent relationship between self-fashioned creative identity and corporate branding strategy, both within and without the arts academy. The project is composed of films created to highlight the labour of social media practice within a competitive attention economy that positions the artist as performer and product of consumption. Some of the interventions involve characters who aspire to become famous (e.g. @garbahje), some directly reference well-known celebrities (e.g. @celebritydeepfake), and others create self-referential collaborations with local influencers that highlight the labour behind online branding (e.g. The Real Alex Kazemi and @puppyteethstudios). These projects are situated within lineages of post-internet aesthetics and camp, developed to create an ambiguous tone that reveals the complexity of presenting or performing artistic authenticity within a neoliberal platform economy.