Artmaxxing to the Minimum
The forces of optimization are seeping into the art market, further complicating ideas around success and creative accomplishments
It seems like the internet is now done with maxxing protein intake and supplements and is finally ready to fully consume your art practice. Welcome to artmaxxing.
In my last post, I wrote about how the murkiness of success in the art world contributes to a sense of confusion around defining accomplishments: how the goalposts shift up to where they vanish out of sight, and how that is actually a function of the system and the economic conditions that define the market—a feature rather than a bug. So let’s look deeper at how the system functions in this context by addressing a strategy that now deeply impacts artists’ ability to situate themselves and their achievements.
What I have in mind is the translation of ideas and rhetorics surrounding productivity, efficiency, and output into art making, appreciation, evaluation, appearance, and trade. Let’s throw artmaxxing into the mix—the idea that one’s participation in the art world can be optimized, or that a certain aesthetic can be maximized. Artmaxxing is the idea that art, as the name implies, could be maxximized in order to gain cultural cachet, either for the artist or the collector, the buyer or the seller.
But optimized toward what end? If the system masks the markers of success by design, what are artists expected to optimize? The absence of a clear answer is another hint (or a huge, neon-lit warning sign) that the system does it for its benefit: that maxximizing feeds the algorithm and keeps audiences (users) engaged with the system, not the artists or the messages they’re hoping to convey. And the term itself has variants that land it in social media, in commercial industries, and in art fairs and other public events, further highlighting the slippage between them, and revealing how this idea is a strategy that exists outside of the work (unless the work chooses to purposefully utilize it).
Artmaxxing is a social strategy that seeps into art’s relationship with commercialism and further infects it with perspectives that might have little to do with what artists are doing in their studio, and everything to do with how their work is seen and measured. In that sense, gestures and strategies that derive from other domains of culture further push expectations laid upon artists, deepening the sense of confusion or the inability to fully comprehend how to successfully function in the system. Simply put, artists are made to worry about the metadata of their images, not the images themselves.
Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar wrote about artmaxxing as the notion that aesthetics and creative life can be maxximized for cultural power or skill amplification, whether through personal taste or creative output. Artmaxxing considers art as a social technology, as a tool that can be designed to enhance one’s currency through culture. Through this logic, art is utilized, rather than practiced or experienced. Its productivity is masked as art practice and collegial sociability. Artmaxxing was born online, from and into a world that promotes supplements to maxx physical abilities, or measures any output through metadata that pushes content forward through algorithms.
Last October, Jonathan T. D. Neil articulated how the tech world artmaxxes beyond and at the expense of artists, and how this conversation does very little to actually help creative output. Well, if it helps with anything, it is with becoming much friendlier to the algorithm (and maybe with the crowd that will buy your NFT, bruh). In other words, it’s a value system that derives from our lives with technology and it is circulated through technology, and it is now making its way through the commercial realms of the art world.
Artmaxxing has become a strategy to add the perceived value of art to commercial objects. As Ana Andjelic noted, artmaxxing refers to “the strategic transformation of fashion into objects of art, in order to de-emphasize their commercial nature.” Think Louis Vuitton at the Frick Collection, think Christian Dior at the V&A. It’s a cultural legitimization that further blurs the distinction between art objects and commercial products, and brings both closer to one another until they might seem indistinguishable. With the push of social media, and the large institutions that grasp at available tools to declare and maintain dynamic presence in a deeply incongruent market, artmaxxing is swiftly becoming a defining element of the cultural zeitgeist.
Optimization becomes an issue when it is embedded within systems that cannot be easily optimized. As computer scientist Benjamin Recht recently suggested, optimization is only useful when models can accurately reflect reality and “a singular objective function,” or where models can predict the shortest path to problem solving. Life—and art—rarely offer a linear path to solutions. In fact, culture often turns to artistic output in search of unexpected ways to address the permutations of reality.
What does artmaxxing mean for aesthetics? Optimization means enhancement to its full extent—pushing one’s perceived advantages to the maxx—but when it comes to artmaxxing, this goes beyond the aesthetic of the image itself. Artmaxxing is a way to consider the image’s relationship with the algorithm. Kretzschmar also refers to Brian Droitcour, who wrote how artmaxxing constitutes an excessive push toward what the system prefers until it ultimately seems to collapse; quite literally, optimize the aesthetic the system responds to - opt in to tear it apart. If the system is infected, what does it look like when artists immerse in its contaminated regions? It is the “new bad image,” an image that brings the friction optimization removed back into the image “through excess.” Artists give the algorithm what it wants, increasing the output of certain images, and the ways in which they circulate. Artmaxxing is the discourse around the work, rather than the work itself.
I was moderating a talk yesterday by artist Lucas Foglia about his 2025 book Constant Bloom, which follows the discovery of the longest butterfly migration, spanning Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It’s a poetic approach to exploring nature and its interconnectedness with humans, a way to capture interpersonal moments across the world. It’s a musing about migration and finding a home, it’s deeply personal and universal, a project that involves the natural world and scientific explorations—and it took five years to complete. When I asked about his creative decision-making process, what he chose to photograph and how he captured different scenes and people along the way, Foglia spoke about how he is never concerned with adhering to the same visual mechanism. Foglia wants the image to feel connected to the story he seeks to share, without worrying whether viewers will recognize the work as produced by him.
And that is not to say Foglia works outside of the system: his work is collected by major institutions, the book was published by Nazraeli Press, and along the way he also received a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship. But I share this to note that perhaps the response to artmaxxing lies in immersing oneself in the work, not in the discourse around it, or how it is shared and outputted into the world. Tracing butterflies across the world for five years is a laborious process that requires presence and dedication. It can happen away from the algorithm. And maybe that’s the point: rejecting the pressure to optimize one’s practice for virality. And if you’re maxxing, maybe use it as a way to gently interrupt the system from within. And don’t forget your supplements.
