The artrepreneur's Kintsugi: ethics of repair in platformized creativity

Social media is the new kiln of creativity in the age of curated fractures, synonymously, celebrated imperfections. Artrepreneurs--artist entrepreneurs--use social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Etsy, etc., to mould and shape their careers. Social media platforms may appear as a democratic, open gallery, but the content curation is anything but impartial. Hidden under the latent and enchanting grids of an AI-powered mechanism, it is often influenced by algorithmic filters that prioritise visibility and content based on engagement metrics. Social media platforms tend to blur and downplay the vast content moderation they engage in, as well as the way they algorithmically rank and emphasise their content, which affects the discourse being discussed by people. As a result, platforms have the power to control visibility such that certain content is visible, therefore pushing other content or even a community of users out of sight (Gillespie, 2019). In this machine-mediated and AI-integrated virtual world, does the act of self-expression really matter? And so we ask a prominent question, in a platform dominated by likes, loops, and logarithms: What kind of aesthetic expression survives in the relentless heat of digital culture, and which imperfections are permitted to flourish? Besides, the conflict between what is rewarded by the platforms and what is desired to be created by artists can also be explained in terms of the difference between the beautiful and the aesthetic. Whereas the platform-friendly smoothness, symmetry and optimisation are those attributes that define the beautiful, experience, rupture and emergence qualities that are praised in Kintsugi and inhibited in algorithms are those of the aesthetic. The neuro-aesthetics and complexity theory inform that aesthetic experience is in the irregular, new, and deviated, often instead of the smooth uniformity (Chatterjee, 2013). In that regard, the beautiful is promoted by digital platforms, at the expense of the aesthetic, and Kintsugi is not only a metaphor of restoration, but also a counter-aesthetic position. For emerging artrepreneurs, social media platforms provide a promising climate in which to deliver their creative freedom, yet only things eerily closer to aesthetic servitude. Beneath the sleek interface of Instagram and TikTok lies an invisible machine: a machine that favours stability over spontaneity, predictability over exploration and enhancement over originality. In this paper, "artrepreneurs" refers specifically to creators whose artistic visibility and livelihood rely substantially on platform-based ecosystems (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Etsy). While some insights may extend to broader cultural and creative industries, the analysis is intentionally centred on platform-dependent art entrepreneurship, where algorithmic governance most directly shapes creative labour.Opinion PieceThe underlying reality invites the metaphor to the limelight -Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Kintsugi translates to "Golden Journey" and emerged in 15th-century Japan when a shogun sent a broken tea bowl to China for repair. The eventual dissatisfaction with the returned version of the bowl, modified using unsightly metal staples, acted as the muse for the creation of a new, aesthetically pleasing technique. Japanese artists renewed the bowl by mending broken pieces using lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Kintsugi is a lot more than a technique-it is a deeply rooted philosophy for an aesthetic cognition of finding beauty in imperfection and incompleteness. It highlights the damage rather than hiding it. Kintsugi is not reluctant to reveal and exhibit the flaws; rather, it amplifies them, turning fractures into features. It celebrates imperfections, teaching the value of highlighting the wound rather than concealing it. In this regard, Kintsugi stands both as a literal and symbolic act-it honours transformation and safeguards the quiet dignity of broken things. In contrast, AI that governs social media aesthetics reward only smooth and polished art, disabling Kintsugi from trending. The algorithm lacks polish, is unpredictable, and relies on seamless perfection for rewards. But it is high time the fragmented, patched and raw art gets its recognition, which it deserves in contemporary discourse.Kintsugi is not just an individual craft method but a reflection of profound Japanese aesthetic philosophies. It is grounded in wabi-sabi-accepting imperfection, asymmetry, and incompleteness-and mono no aware, the recognition that all things are fleeting and acquire significance through transformation. In the tea culture of the 15th and 16th centuries, bowls that had been repaired were valued not only for being fixed, but because their visible seams told a story of attention, time, and use. Often, a mended item acquired more cultural significance than an unblemished one due to its evidence of human presence and fragility. By situating Kintsugi within these customs, its ethical significance becomes more apparent: it prioritizes slowness over haste, deliberate focus over mechanization, and visible flaws over flawless disguise. Kintsugi is thus not an abstract metaphor from outside, but a contextual aesthetic principle rooted in a cultural legacy of mending and change.Digital platforms monetise attention, data, and labour by making them the central element of a new phase of capitalism where economic exploitation of data is the most significant characteristic. They act as market coordinators, and they have the necessary structure to facilitate transactions among various groups. One of the most important strategies is the exploitation of network effects, in which the value of the platform grows linearly with the number of users, which inevitably causes the tendency towards monopolisation as more users will result in more attracted users, which would result in a more efficient platform. Also, platforms use crosssubsidisation, where they provide a high number of services free to users, and then they monetise these services through other sources that offset the services provided in the form of free services. This provides an opportunity to collect enormous data with a high number of users and monetise it. Finally, platforms themselves have considerable governance compared to other actors since they influence the interactions, value creation, and distribution within the ecosystems of their platforms by defining rules of interaction, which makes algorithmic curation more of a type of economic control than technical mediation (Silva Neto, 2019). The concept of algorithmic governance is introduced as a constructive force, actively entailing social order, behaviour, and norms, and abandoning the notion of digital technologies as the passive mirror of the current social organisation. This model characterises algorithms as modes of social organisation, which involve sophisticated logics of computers to organise actors and to govern social situations in a non-state-centred, decentralised fashion. Claiming that the institutional nature of software as a form of regulation, the paper suggests that algorithmic curation is a kind of power that selectively controls the risk, changes behaviour intentionally, which is observable in such applications as predictive policing or automated content moderation. Finally, the paper disavows a techno-determinist perspective, in the sense that algorithms are closely tied to economic, cultural, and political circumstances, and as complex entities with the potential to be biased, they are not at all neutral, and can tend to reinforce the status quo (Katzenbach & Ulbricht, 2019). The Culture of Connectivity by Jose van Dijck assumes a non-neutral but coded system of social participation, visibility and influence by social architecture through social activities, which are coded to a computational architecture on the social media platforms. This engineering is studied within the framework of technology, usage/user, content, ownership, governance and business models. Technology (defined as software, hardware, and services) employs such components as algorithms and interfaces to shape social acts to draw a distinction between the connectness (social value) and the connectivity (automated, revenuedriven connections). Platforms affect user interaction by shaping the type of interaction and the production and flow of content on the platform through its technological affordances. This engagement forms an ecosystem of connective media in which the design of platforms and their usage are mutually shaped and show how participation, visibility, and affect are systematically designed in such digital spaces (Kaun, 2014).Playing the visibility game is a way of explaining the process by which digital influencers engage with algorithms on social media platforms such as Instagram in a conscious way, continuing the tradition of gaming the system. As this framework points out, although algorithms organise the behaviour of users, they do not dictate it in isolation. The influencers actively conduct research activities to learn the opaque structure of the Instagram algorithm and consider it an influential and enigmatic power that determines visibility. This usually means running their own A/B testing to figure out effective tactics to gain more interaction and more followers, which they consider necessary to win the game. These algorithmic cues are interpreted differently by them, resulting in different strategy selections, as informed by current discourses of authenticity and entrepreneurship to achieve either a relational approach based on truth or a simulated approach based on measurements and manipulation of strategy. This dynamic can explain why the algorithmic cues are internalised by the influencers that shape the creative and strategic work in a way that it supports its perceived platform expectations to manoeuvre around a landscape in which visibility is both a reward and an ongoing negotiation (Cotter, 2019). These platform dynamics echo the larger concept of the fact that contemporary art exists in what can be termed as an aesthetic regime, where art is characterized not by ideal representation but the capacity to destabilize what is seen, known or reasonable. Instead of following more traditional practices that prized harmony, symmetry and mimetic precision, contemporary creative practices tend to prefigure disruption, vagueness and independence. The algorithmic environments, however, have a tendency of reinstating a sort of representational discipline by giving precedence to formats that are predictable, polished and classifiable easily. Kintsugi, with its practice of fractures and open seams, is in line with this aesthetic inclination to disrupt and break expressively, and is a counter to the tendency of the platform to smooth out, optimize, and standardize creative objects. (1)Structural coercion is defined as restrictions in the platform architecture ranking rules, moderation tools, and optimisation metrics which constrain directly what can be done or how one is perceived by creators. This is a system-based external power. (2) Internalised coercion is a situation where creators internalize the expectations of platforms into their own concept of themselves, and punish themselves in an attempt to produce work that is friendly to the algorithms. In this case, creators change their style, pace, and even identity under the expectation of algorithmic judgement. Kintsugi answers to each of them differently-To structural coercion, it requires openness and exposed stitching. To internalised coercion, it offers an ethic of creative self-compassion, resisting the pressure toward optimisation-driven perfection. Under such conditions, creativity becomes a form of labour shaped by data analytics rather than imagination. Many artrepreneurs describe themselves as content machines rather than artists, and the dopamine economy of likes often leads to exhaustion rather than fulfilment. Original creators increasingly compete with AI-generated art, further diminishing visibility. The concept of the "visibility game" helps explain this dynamic: creators must learn to "fit the feed" rather than challenge it, making creative freedom conditional-artists are free to be seen only if they obey . This structural pressure is reinforced by the cultural economy of platform labour.The rise of the artrepreneur is tied to the conversion of cultural capital into economic capital within platform capitalism. The neoliberal ideology of selfbranding is described as a response to unstable labour markets-positions artists not merely as creators, but as entrepreneurial subjects responsible for their own success or failure (Khamis et al., 2017). Algorithmic systems intensify this expectation. Artists market themselves to stay relevant, optimise content to satisfy algorithms, and internalise market logic as personal identity. In this convergence of labour, livelihood, and self-image, artistic autonomy is eroded.The character of the artrepreneur is another aspect that should be examined more closely. Although the rhetoric of entrepreneurship, and more generally, portrays creators as nimble, self-empowered agents, scholars believe that this rhetoric tends to downplay the structural precarity that platforms exacerbate. Entrepreneurial discourse personalizes the risk, the labour where creators the but platforms gain value 2017). not only into a form of but also a process by which creative labour is and Kintsugi this by the of value to and as to is as a response to platform than an These are not TikTok where its moderation system from and creators on the of the that are automated often artistic or content as only to the following from creators. 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