Art world, meet the new era of pay-to-play
What an indie music virality scandal means for contemporary artists
I see this grid of dollar-eyed, dollar-tongued emojis every time I close my eyes and soon you might too!
One way to write the history of the Internet is to chart when and how its manipulators have powered up. Ten years ago, niche opinions were already being supersized through manufactured follower counts and bought impressions. Now, as a minor scandal in the music industry just revealed, specialty agencies are being paid to engineer virality for artists by creative-directing thousands of TikTok posts from hundreds of semi-real accounts built by networks of trained collaborators.
But would mercenary-generated clout actually help contemporary artists as much as pop or indie musicians? On one hand, the entire controversy reinforces how alien the art industry’s traditional markers of success still are compared to other art forms (and how unlikely that is to change in this lifetime). But on the other hand, the pay-to-play virality game makes a surprising amount of sense for a certain tranche of 21st century artists, some of whom could capitalize on it soon—if they haven’t already.
To understand why, let’s talk about the firestorm surrounding Chaotic Good Projects. Co-founded by former music managers Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coren, the company’s MO is simple: “studying the internet and TikTok and seeing what’s working organically, and trying to recreate it at scale inorganically,” Spelman told Billboard last month.
Although Chaotic Good advertises these campaigns on its website under the acronym UGC (for “user-generated content”), Spelman and Coren typically call it “trend simulation.”1 The basic idea is to create a huge number of small but seemingly genuine TikTok accounts that then plant the same artist’s song into the background of thousands of posts that follow formats already popular on the app, from wistful or romantic quotes in yellow text to sports highlights and more.2 Crucially, Chaotic Good doesn’t perform this black magic with bots, just “a large network of both employees and contractors… and a lot of phones,” Coren said.
If done well, this fake mob can bully TikTok’s algorithm into channeling the song to many more actual users. And since TikTok posts live and die on Trending Audio—the songs and sound effects the app tells you are currently in vogue—the real users are incentivized to take the same song that Chaotic Good has been hired to work and re-up it in their own posts.
If this happens enough times, the simulated trend cascades into a real one that wins genuine fans. Spelman claims his company has “driven more than 500 million views on TikTok.” He also says flat-out, “We’re confident that we can train anyone to go viral.”
That might sound outrageous enough on its own. But what blew up this story was some digging from the (excellent) indie rocker and Substacker Eliza McLamb in a March 31 newsletter.3 Chaotic Good hasn’t just been working for mega-stars, she noticed; they’ve also mobilized for much smaller artists brimming with tastemaker cred, including Geese and its frontman, Cameron Winter; the fractured R&B innovators Dijon and Mk.gee; the French bedroom dance-pop phenom Oklou, and several more that she herself adores... after discovering some of them on TikTok.
And this weird tension between rising artists and engineered popularity gives us a good reason to ask whether visual artists, who are niche by nature, could hire the same kinds of experts to stoke a little benevolent havoc of their own.
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You can’t spell ‘virality’ without a-r-t
Despite the art world’s default toward ivory tower opinions, there are a few cases where massive popularity online has helped living artists cross over from mass appeal to the rarefied gallery and museum world. Some names worth considering here are…
KAWS, who eventually leveraged the rabid fandom for his collectible toys and illustrations into a spot on the roster at Skarstedt, as well as solo shows at SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Beeple, who built a mania for his absurd 3D renderings and NFTs into major projects with Art Basel, major works sold through Christie’s marquee evening auctions, and pieces exhibited at institutions ranging from Hong Kong’s M+ and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum to Crystal Bridges and LACMA.
MSCHF, the VC-backed, edgelord art-and-design collective that started showing at Perrotin in 2022, had its first institutional survey at the Daelim Museum in Seoul the following year, and continues to hijack the internet with everything from comically oversized red boots to crowdsourcing the fate of cattle.4
But these artists now all exist on the art-industry-approved half of a longer continuum. The other half—call it art-industry agnostic, if not art-industry antagonistic—contains the likes of…
Sunday Nobody, a pseudonymous conceptual prankster who has gotten tens of millions of social views for projects like sinking a bronze monument to a Spongebob character underwater to stymy future archaeologists… but who claims to want to steer clear of gallery shows forever.
Niclas Castello, the guy who put that $23m golden cube in Central Park for a day in in 2022.
Anyone who has ever briefly touched meme heaven by planting a satirical sculpture of Trump or some other public figure in a prominent location under cover of darkness or the ignorance of security guards (or both).
What’s the difference between the two halves of the continuum? Buy-in from the small but influential ecosystem of art industry insiders.
KAWS has been a longtime, very serious collector of museum-grade artwork; some of his holdings were just shown at the Drawing Center last year. His secondary market also took off in part after the Mugrabi family, a force of nature in the high-end resale market for decades, started buying, selling, and advocating for his work over the past 15 years, including with his eventual dealer.5
Beeple became besties with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the respected and ultra plugged-in curator of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli Museum. He’s also widely known to work with Loïc Gouzer, the former Christie’s-wünderkind-turned-private-dealer and auctioneering upstart. (Becoming the third most-expensive living artist off a deep-pandemic auction stunner didn’t hurt, either.)
Similarly, MSCHF only broke into the gallery world after connecting with Emmanuel Perrotin, whose program is largely built on the tightrope between mass appeal and art world credibility. Case in point: KAWS showed with him before jumping to Skarstedt, and the gallery also reps Daniel Arsham, an artist who seems to react to every conceivable opportunity for a brand collab like a bear that just caught the scent of a pie cooling on some cabin’s window ledge.
These examples show where trend simulation hits a wall within the art industry. Successfully manipulating the TikTok algorithm means that the interest faked by Chaotic Good puts an artist’s work in front of a critical mass of real people who carry it forward because they actually like it. Since pop music (broadly defined) is a mass medium, the goal is just to draw in as many fans as possible.
In the art world, however, your fans’ identities matter more than anything, including their sheer volume. Why? Because contemporary art is still mainly a niche medium. Traditional success for an artist is measured by selling a small number of high-priced works to buyers vetted as much for their connections within the industry as for their net worth, as well as showing at legacy institutions slipping further and further from the general public’s priority list every year. Which also means that an artwork “going viral” is, in a vacuum, as irrelvant to the exclusive, self-selecting art trade as if the person who made it had, I don’t know, swum the English Channel or won the Westminster Dog Show earlier in life.
In other words: If an artist racks up a few million social media followers but none of them owns an established gallery, collects at a VIP level, or even curates at a respected institution, they’re guaranteed to stay mired in the same side of the continuum as the bros creating golden cubes and entombing bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in human-sized sarcophagi.
The third way
The caveat is that avenues outside the legacy art trade have opened wide enough to enable an artist to maybe, just maybe sustain themselves through their work in 2026. This becomes apparent if you look at not only artists like Sunday Nobody—who sells editioned and unique pieces direct-to-consumer through his own website, usually for a few hundred bucks a pop—but also at Banksy or Mr. Doodle, who both stand right on the cusp between the approved and agnostic halves of the art industry approval continuum.
Despite being a household name, Banksy hasn’t worked with an agent, manager, or dealer since around 2008-09, when he cut ties with Steve Lazarides (who never really acted as an establishment-approved gallerist to begin with). His work regularly gets resold at major and mid-major auction houses—sometimes for millions of dollars, and with a dollop of viral, were-they-in-on-the-stunt shenanigans. But to my knowledge he’s been exclusively selling DTC through his Pest Control shingle for most of the past 20 years. And to date, only two modest institutional shows have ever been done on his work with his approval: one at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art in 2023, the other at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in 2009.6
Mr. Doodle, a whimsical and obsessive illustrator with 3.2 million Instagram followers, has done multiple solo shows with the veteran dealer Pearl Lam and exhibitions at regional arts nonprofits like the Holburne Museum in Bath, UK and the ARA Art Center in Seoul. But the bulk of his money is made through timed drops of his work through his web shop, brand collaborations, and licensed merch like t-shirts and mugs. He may not be what art school kids dream about becoming, to put it mildly, but the guy is making it work on a fairly impressive scale.
Although traveling this third path isn’t easy, the internet (specifically e-commerce and social media) has made it more feasible than at any other point in human history. It also transforms contemporary art into something a lot closer to a mass medium by relying on high-volume sales of lower-priced items that render the buyer’s identity or reputation moot.
That course correction, in turn, means trend simulation could help supercharge a visual artist’s career in the same way that it’s helped supercharge the careers of some indie musicians—at least, provided some magician could commandeer graphic virality on Instagram as deftly as audio virality on TikTok.
This is why it’s worth returning to Eliza McLamb, the indie artist who shined a light on the more surprising entries on Chaotic Good’s client list. Shocked as she was to see the names of so many artists she liked and admired, she also couldn’t help but look at the whole scheme through the eyes of a pragmatist who has spent years trying like hell to make a living doing the thing she loves and excels at doing. In her words…
“My utopia knows nothing of ‘short form content’ or ‘trend simulation’ or ‘narrative campaigns,’ but my utopia is a bedtime story I stopped telling myself the first time I got a $30 Spotify payout. This industry is a dirty one, and the cost of success has almost always been paid in dollars and cents — usually by a big label, a management company, or someone’s dad. If a label wanted to contract Chaotic Good on my behalf, I would accept such a deal handily and gratefully.“
In this sense, trend simulation is just the latest tool in artists’ age-old, never-ending quest to carve a foothold into the cliff face of a ruthless creative economy, one that’s been hardened further by the unforgiving algorithms controlling so much of what we see and hear. Is it really manipulative to turn these systems against themselves, especially if doing might be the only way to keep from plummeting into a bottomless chasm of debt—and the best way to be discovered by a fanbase that genuinely appreciates the work?
Coming up with an answer is now as relevant for aspiring painters, sculptors, and conceptualists as it is to indie singer-songwriters, rappers, and rock bands. Even in the best case, it probably won’t give contemporary artists everything they want. But it just might give them enough to keep going.
P.S.
I’ll be one of the lecturers in AI & the Art Market, a two-day online course from Art Market Minds - The Academy going live on April 21 & 23. My section will cover how innovative art professionals are already using advanced algorithms on the business side, and how their counterparts in Hollywood, fashion, music, and other culture sectors are doing the same. Space is limited, so go here for full details—and sign up with code AITGM15 for 15% off.
The process goes by other names in the industry, too, including “seeding” and “volume campaigns.”
Spelman mentions in the interview that certain types of post formats work particularly well with certain genres of music. The examples he gives: “Underground hip hop has been a lot of stretched-out video game clips lately. Singer-songwriter stuff has done well with yellow-text quotes.”
A quick plug for McLamb’s main thing: Her song “Quitting” was on my best of 2025 playlist, which you can find on Spotify here and Apple Music here if you’re curious. Ironically, she’s on it with multiple artists previously listed as clients on Chaotic Good’s website. (The company took down those references entirely after the backlash triggered by McLamb’s newsletter.)
ICYMI, Angus the cow lived.
Alberto Mugrabi told Eileen Kinsella at Artnet News in 2019 that he personally lobbied Per Skarstedt for a full year to sign KAWS.
The world is sick with unauthorized, for-profit Banksy shows slapped together at pop-up spaces across continents, headlined by lower Manhattan’s Banksy Museum, which, ironically, is neither licensed by Banksy nor a museum.