Frictionless: How the pursuit of optimisation reshaped art, aesthetics and us

There was a time when optimisation was a technical term – the language of engineers, logistics managers and software designers. Today, optimisation is an aesthetic. In our algorithmically determined world, clarity sells. Design, at least in the digital space, is now about frictionlessness and legibility – all modular layouts, sans-serif type and white space.

We can trace the origins of this mindset all the way back to industrialisation, whose standardising principles formed the backbone of modernism, which rejected ornamentation in favour of functional logic. Minimalism extended this ethos by stripping design down to its essential elements. In architecture, the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Tadao Ando emphasised structural clarity and open space; in art, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt stripped away gesture and symbolism in favour of repetition and spatial relationships.

The digital revolution and, with it, UX (user experience) design – which requires efficiency and intuition – inherited these principles, and the rise of touch interfaces – demanding absolute clarity – intensified them. Early computer systems were clunky and dense but, over time, just as modernism rejected visual richness in favour of flow, serifs disappeared from typefaces and skeuomorphism – apps and icons styled like leather-bound calendars, yellow legal pads or detailed rubbish bins – gave way to abstract, 'flat' design.

This logic has begun to seep into physical art, often designed to read at thumbnail scale, colour-calibrated for screens and staged around ‘shareable’ angles. Artists like Petra Cortright produce digitally native work that turns everyday online culture – webcams, GIFs and Photoshop layers – into fine art. Martine Syms examines how Black identity circulates through media systems, while working fluently within them, describing herself as a ‘conceptual entrepreneur’ and borrowing from marketing, branding and corporate language. The contemporary creative is no longer just an artist, but a coherent visual system.

Designing the self

This logic underpins what is perhaps the defining 'exhibition space' of our time: the Instagram grid. Clean, modular and infinitely scrollable, its three-column layout is carefully designed to maximise content density while maintaining visual order.

‘Platforms like Instagram don't merely display images, they impose a visual epistemology,’ says Lev Manovich, a professor of digital culture at the City University of New York and author of The Language of New Media. ‘The grid, the square crop, the algorithmic feed – these are not neutral containers. They train our perception and affect how we process information and experiences outside of screens.’

Marquard Smith, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Visual Culture and professor of artistic research at Vilnius Academy of Arts, agrees: ‘In the context of [UX culture’s] user-centricity, as consumers, it seems like we are getting what we want. But in actual fact, it’s more the case that our desires are being produced, designed and shaped by it.’

If modernism privileged functional coherence in objects, late capitalism extends those values to people. The individual becomes a design project: streamlined, curated and legible.

This performance of self-optimisation plays out vividly on social media, where influencers document 5am wake-ups, regular workouts and ‘clean’ eating. It even spawned the digital aesthetic trend known as the ‘clean girl’ (as of February 2026, the hashtag had been used over 1.2 million times on TikTok): a persona defined by exercise, skincare rituals and perfectly curated beige homes. ‘The pressure toward coherence – consistent palette, recognisable style, legible “brand” – is not vanity. It is a structural requirement of platforms that reward algorithmic legibility,’ explains Manovich. ‘What looks like an aesthetic choice is often a compliance strategy.’

During its heyday, a critique of modernism was that it risked turning design preference into moral prescription – that ‘restraint’ was promoted not merely as a stylistic choice, but as an ethically superior way of living. Adolf Loos’ 1908 essay, Ornament and Crime – considered one of modernism’s seminal texts – condemned decoration as wasteful and culturally backward.

Similarly, social media’s hyper-curated lifestyles – frictionless, calibrated, free of imperfections – become inextricably tied to ideas about self-worth. ‘There’s nothing inherently neutral about optimisation,’ argues Smith. ‘It’s all part of a “civilising process”. The pressure to optimise – to succeed, to conform, to be “liked” – is bad for personhood, for wellbeing, for the world.’

‘Less is a bore’: In praise of messiness

In 1972, architecture theorist Charles Jencks declared modernism symbolically ‘dead’, based on a common critique that its ultimate expression could feel sterile or inhuman. This backlash set the stage for the rise of postmodernism, encapsulated in architect Robert Venturi’s assertion that ‘less is a bore’.

Now, a counter-aesthetic to our new ‘digital modernism’ is emerging: messy, awkward and visibly human. It foregrounds friction over seamlessness: grids are disrupted, kerning misaligned, typography hand-drawn and layers overlapping. On social media, it shows up as ‘lo-fi’ or anti-aesthetic culture – flash-heavy photography, screenshots posted to the grid and Instagram ‘photo dumps’ of blurry selfies and half-eaten meals.

Contemporary artists such as Cecily Brown, Mark Bradford and Charline von Heyl use loose brushwork, collage, tears, smudges and drips – a lineage that draws on the fragmented, gestural traditions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This emphasis on making ‘the hand’ visible was pushed further in Laura Lima’s ‘The Drawing Drawing’ at London’s ICA earlier in 2026, which reimagined life drawing as a participatory, shifting experience in which models and viewers moved on mechanised platforms. The process itself became the spectacle.

‘In my own art practice, I make iPad paintings that take 45 to 60 hours each, using slow manual processes. The work is dense, nuanced and deliberately “overworked” by platform standards,’ says Manovich. ‘It maintains a different temporality – a refusal of the efficiency imperative.’ (In this spirit, people are actively opting out of UX-optimised tech in favour of intentionally limited devices that add friction and reduce engagement, as reflected in our edit of ‘lo-fi gadgets’).

Could it be that what we’re seeing today echoes the pendulum swing that followed modernism’s apex – that people are beginning to withdraw from the labour of self-branding? Perhaps, but, as Smith points out, ‘anti-design is still a design aesthetic’. The photo dump becomes a performance of nonchalance. Evidence of process in art and visual culture becomes a trend. Which raises the question: does authenticity always become a strategy?

The aesthetics of optimisation are not inherently shallow – UX principles emerged to make systems more accessible. But under late capitalism, ambiguity, slowness and difficulty – qualities central to art and, surely, happiness – risk marginalisation. The turn towards the unpolished signals a desire to reintroduce texture and imperfection into life – to resist the expectation that everything needs to ‘convert’.