I never understood the concept of hate following. Actively dedicating part of your time to looking at content you don't enjoy seemed the most pointless thing ever to me. Besides, with a climate crisis, Brexit and Trump's possible impeachment on our hands, I like to keep my social media feeds a bit more light-hearted and positive than our current reality is. Hate follows do not fit those criteria. So picture my surprise when March rolled around and I found myself hate following Caroline Calloway.

Caroline Calloway caught my attention in the early days of this year. Like many others, I'd never heard of this New York-based influencer before a Twitter thread about her "creativity workshop" went viral. The workshops were supposed to be part of a tour, which was canceled, uncanceled, called "a scam" by internet dwellers and was ridiculed all over social media. I followed every second of the drama that ensued, laughed at Calloway's lack of skills in the event management department, lost it when she got stuck with over a thousand mason jars in her teeny tiny studio apartment and made sure to share this beautiful mess with my closest blogger friends. I checked Calloway's Instagram stories at least twice a day, until the drama blew over (at least on this side of the Atlantic Ocean). That's when I finally hit the follow button.

At first, following Caroline Calloway was just about being the first to see the next installment in the Scam Saga. But after a week or two, I was following with genuine interest. The hate, which is a strong word for me anyway, subsided. I was confused about the content she put out and absolutely unimpressed, but interested nonetheless. Later on, I learned that I'd joined the madness long after Calloway rose to fame with her long captions on posts about her time as an American student in Cambridge and that her current content had little to do with her original brand. Not that I cared. Because the things she does on Instagram now are oddly fascinating.


I can't say I truly like any of the things Calloway makes. "Like" is too strong a word for how I feel about her content. I'm also not interested in any of the things she's interested in. I don't obsess over art unless it's been spraypainted on a wall and I don't care for Oxbridge and the prestige linked with it. Neither do I like sharing every single little detail of my life online, the only thing Calloway seems to be doing these days. It dawned on me that I was hate following this girl just to see her make more dumb mistakes. I wasn't proud of this at all and told myself to unfollow her. But I couldn't do it. I kid you not, as my finger hovered over the button, I thought to myself: "I'm going to miss the plant content..."

I couldn't do it. I couldn't unfollow her. So I didn't. Just for her plants. Deep down, I did kind of like what Calloway showed the world in her Instagram stories: the small studio apartment, all the plants, her art. She showed me a variation of the life I was dreaming of, a life full of creativity. I hated to admit it, but I wanted that kind of life too. Minus the unexplainable Caroline antics. Every few days I found myself looking at her content and going WTF out loud. There are plenty of articles and Twitter threads to fill you in on all the weird and questionable things this influencer has done. Believe me, it's all highly entertaining. I often find myself laughing out loud over how disconnected from the real world she can be. And, in a weird way, that inspires me.

You see, Calloway sells her art on Instagram. It's not my cup of tea. If you want my uncensored opinion, I'd say that it's nothing more than an overpriced crafts project. She used to sell minimalist paintings of boobs for $40 and is still making copies of Matisse's Blue Nudes, which are usually priced at $140. Most of the time I just roll my eyes and move on when I see these pieces of influencer art, but sometimes I see something so bad that I just have to make my own version of it, to prove that anyone can do it, and that I can do it better. In some weird and twisted way, Caroline Calloway is now my muse when it comes to painting.


The first time I made Caroline Calloway inspired art, it took me two days - a long time compared to the two hours it takes her to cut out a shape created by Matisse, glue it onto store-bought paper and slap a $140 price tag on it. My own project started as an attempt to prove that you can be inspired by Matisse while still adding your own flavor to the work. I kept the position Matisse's Blue Nude is in, but redrew it in my own style. It took me an entire day to get the figure right, mostly because my drawing skills are a bit rusty. Since I do like the paper with stars and constellations that Calloway used when she first started her Matisse series, I kept with that theme and placed the figure in a black night sky. By the end of the second day, I had my own "dreamer bb". Art inspired by Caroline Calloway's Matisse-inspired art. Very meta.

During those two days of being artsy, I kept checking on Calloway's Instagram stories. It was almost like I was making art with someone else, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This realization pushed me into a bit of an existential crisis: I didn't genuinely like Calloway's content, did I? It all felt so paradoxical. I couldn't figure my own feelings towards this influencer out, so I did the only thing that seemed to fit the situation: Make more art. I sketched two more figures in different positions and painted their silhouettes onto pages of an old book that was on it's way to the dump, creating a triptych. I daydreamed about selling my art at reasonable prices. I learned more about anatomy. I learned how to handle my paintbrush better. I learned how to make a speed paint video. I learned so much.

In the end, I came to the finish that it really doesn't matter how I feel about Caroline Calloway and her content. The world keeps turning, no matter what I do. I don't have to support Calloway financially, which I won't, and I definitely don't have to follow her. But I choose to follow her, no matter how conflicting my feelings about her content can be, because at the end of the day, it leads to me making art and enjoying it. As long as it doesn't come from a feeling of hate, but a feeling of curiosity and confusion, I think it's a wonderful thing that could only come out of an era like ours.