Rage Bait

New Art World Order | The Tabloidification of the Art World

by Rachael Lambert

A well-regarded figure in my industry, known for generosity, running one of the largest platforms of their kind, posted something that triggered me. Rage bait: a manufactured grievance, gated behind “comment this word to unlock,” leading nowhere but a paywall. My temper flared, and the flare itself surprised me. I didn’t expect this from them. Plenty of people in this industry have built followings doing exactly this, openly enough that it's become its own kind of shorthand, you know the account before you know the post.

The more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a story about one person’s ethics and the more like a story about a mechanism, one old enough to have a name, common enough to have a long list of instances far bigger than a single Instagram post.