Reckoning with the 21st century means, at least in part, reckoning with social media.
--Dylan Kerr, "'Like' Art: 7 Masterpieces of Social Media Art that will Make it into the History Books"
Artists using social media platforms are grounding the meaning of their work in contingency. Contingent meaning is certainly not unique to social media art and as contingency can be found in installation art, performance art, etc. Social media cannot be defined as utilising any specific mode of contingency, but rather, any analysis of social media art is best started from a rhizomatic perspective due to social media’s grounding in a contingent assemblage. A rhizomatic perspective allows for multiple entry and exit points to the artwork that allows for the meaning of the artwork to change contingently over time. This is different from other theoretical frames that may seek to begin an analysis by attempting to ground a medium within an essentialised medium specific perspective as Greenberg did when he said artists should use the features that are "unique to the nature" (Greenberg 1960) of a particular medium.
--Steven Aishman, "Social Media Platforms as Artistic Medium"
The “tweets,” as I’ve written before, are the new streets, giving us a rich new public landscape for exploring and expressing art to hundreds of millions and soon billions of people connected via mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktop PCs, and other future devices we’re only beginning to imagine.
It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before a social media artist working largely outside established arts institutions and centers finds the same kind of success that stars like Kara Walker and Jeff Koons have found through the standard system of galleries and museums. This artist’s work would be accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, co-created, funded, and promoted primarily through social media channels.
By then, of course, we may no longer think of the work as social media art, so blurry will the distinction be between our online and offline worlds. It will, perhaps, just be art.
On the one hand, this faddish obsession with "social media" is understandable. The Facebook Corp. has begun to wrap its fingers around every other aspect of life, so it is clearly logical to ask what effects social media might have on art-making. But at the same time, I find the chatter somehow sad, as if visual art’s power to inspire passion among a larger audience is so attenuated that it has to throw itself on whatever trendy thing is out there, to win some reflected glory for itself.
--Ben Davis, "'Social Media Art' in the Expanded Field"