BRUSH WITH VIRALITY. Mark Rothko’s trending rectangles
| Photo Credit:
STEPHEN HILGER
For the last few weeks, I have been trying to understand the social media algorithm. I have been reading Dan Koe on the attention economy and Kane Kallaway on virality. I started wondering what would be the perfect example of the algorithm. Something that demonstrates the logic of the machine itself.
And then I realised it might be the long dead American abstract painter Mark Rothko. The Rothko viral trend on Instagram, that is.
Which is strange, because Rothko seems to be everything the algorithm should dislike. His paintings are large, quiet and slow. There are no faces, no plot, no action. Often there are just blobs, rectangles of colour, floating into one another.
Yet Rothko has become a social media phenomenon. His paintings are being turned into outfits, personalities, playlists and memes. Creators are assigning moods and identities to individual Rothkos.
The algorithm doesn’t see content
The mistake is to think the algorithm rewards a particular kind of content.
Okay, it doesn’t really know whether something is a Rothko painting, a cat video or a political rant. It watches behaviour.
Do people stop? Do they stay? Do they react? Do they share? Do they return? The definition: A machine for measuring attention.
And Rothko turns out to be very good at attracting it. Put a Rothko into an Instagram feed and it looks almost wrong. We are used to faces, movement, food, travel and people talking into cameras. There is suddenly a large field of colour. It is recognisable, but different enough to interrupt the visual flow.
Then Rothko makes you stay
This is where Rothko becomes more interesting. Stay with the painting and colours begin to shift. Edges become uncertain. The apparently flat surface acquires depth. Rothko captures attention and then removes stimulation.
Then comes emotion. Rothko didn’t tell the viewer what to feel. A Rothko can be melancholy to one person and peaceful to another. The viewer supplies the missing meaning.
So it becomes: Which Rothko are you? A colour combination becomes a mood, a personality, a wardrobe, even a soundtrack. The artwork becomes a piece of identity.
The painting becomes a format
It made me think about Indian abstraction too. VS Gaitonde is an obvious reference, although I wouldn’t call him an Indian Rothko. But his luminous, layered, non-objective paintings possess the quality of making the viewer stop. Nasreen Mohamedi offers another example — lines, grids and space. Her work seems incompatible with Instagram’s visual excess, yet its language is extraordinarily distinctive.
We now live in an algorithmic culture. Once, media was one-way: Newspapers wrote, television broadcast, publishers published and the audience received. Today, the distance between making, distributing and consuming has disappeared.
A news story is clipped, commented upon and reframed. A brand campaign is remixed by its audience. The algorithm learns from these reactions and feeds them forward. The audience is no longer simply receiving media — it is helping make it, shape it and give it meaning.
The audience has become the medium. As Marshall McLuhan said — sometime in the 1950s — the medium is the message.
(Shubho Sengupta is a digital marketer with an analogue past)
Published on October 5, 2026
