Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Rooms, Tate Modern, London 2022.
Instagram has over 500 million daily users, and its focus on images has made it
especially popular among those who make and appreciate art.
We are all just powerless humans attached to the ground incapable of moving farther than a few kilometers from where we live - without technological help -, but Instagram gives us access
to creative production all around the world, whenever we want it.
This is just incredible.
But what is it doing to us?
Is it changing the way we interact with and experience art?
The benefits of using Instagram became clear pretty soon after it launched in 2010, for
institutions and individuals alike.
For photographers and designers and artists of all kinds, Instagram is your own free gallery.
Well, if you don’t count the cost of giving away your data and attention to advertisements.
But it does give power to artists to represent themselves outside of traditional systems.
You don’t have to wait to be taken on by a gallery, or make the kind of work a gallery
thinks they can sell.
You hold the reins and can show your art how you’d like it to be seen.
You can share aspects of your process, and demonstrate that you are a person outside
of your work.
Art history has tended to provide us only a handful of iconic images of artists, seriously
engaged in their work or posed with a painting conveniently in the background. The perceived authenticity of black and white, early 20th-century images of abstract expressionists aren’t but a fraction of the articulated, machine-disciplined, mad production of artists like Oskar Kokoschka.
In our times, Instagram gives us views into the daily lives of a multitude of artists, making visible the diversity of the individuals producing art today, and allowing each the ability to
represent themself.
The social network is an outstanding networking tool, allowing you to not only build and cultivate community among other artists, but also speak directly to followers, fans, and potential collectors.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Rooms, Tate Modern, London 2022.
When most commercial galleries take 50% off a sale, the ability to connect to potential
buyers without a middle person can be a real boon.
Adding to the fact that, while showing your work in person may be the ideal scenario, it’s not always feasible, especially if you live in a place that isn’t a cultural mecca.
Which is most places.
Does Instagram favor particular kinds of work?
Heck yes.
Square.
Bright.
Easily legible.
Immersive.
Some artworks comes across better in photos than others, but most can figure out a way
around these problems if they want to.
And plenty of artists have used the platform as a strategic aspect of their work, recruiting
participants and fundraising for performances and events, and sharing documentation with
those who can’t be there in person.
Some have used the images they find on Instagram to make actual works in real life.
Ai Weiwei has consistently shown us the power of social media to bear witness to his own experience of censorship, and to injustice and suffering around the world, all of which are integral to the work he presents in museums and galleries.
But Instagram can be a limiting influence for artists, just as it’s an empowering one.
Like the rest of us, artists are susceptible to the dopamine rush that comes from “likes”
and instant feedback.
Artist Andrea Crespo admitted in a 2018 Vulture article: “Reward systems in social media
were influencing my decisions while art making.
I would think about what people would think based off of likes and comments.”
Artists have long sought out insight and criticism from friends and colleagues, but more often
than not the feedback offered on Instagram is superficial, or purely congratulatory.
Or when offered by anonymous strangers, unconstructively cruel.
Exposing your work on Instagram can make it vulnerable to copycats--other artists as well
as companies just trying to decorate their stores.
And the best is that artists don't even have to have their own account for this to happen, either.
Anyone can snap a pic of your work and post it with your name associated, making you present on Instagram even if you don’t want to be.
And what about Instagram’s effect on museums and galleries?
Most not-for-profit institutions have missions that involve sharing their collections with
the public.
Today, their conception of “public” can be much more expansive and inclusive.
They can now try to create meaningful experiences with art for anyone with an internet connection. And Instagram plays a big role in these efforts.
Museums have the problem of only being in one place.
Social media platforms give museums a way of reaching people where they are, sharing
works from their collection, promoting special exhibitions, and luring people with glimpses of the cool things they could be doing out in the world.
And the magical part is that it doesn’t have to be one way communication anymore.
For so long museums were the authority imparting their knowledge upon the silent masses.
But with social media, the masses can easily impart their knowledge on the authority,
explaining what they value about their experiences and what they don’t.
At the end of the day, cultural institutions might not mean much without an engaged audience, and the virtual but unrivalled power of global connectivity has overturned the sceptre holder.
When visitors hashtag and geotag their posts, museums gain insights that can inform future
exhibitions.
Which is called free marketing!
Why spend money on advertising when you’ll spread the word for them?
It’s actually a great way to support your local nonprofits even if you can’t afford
to donate directly.
But museums do make programming decisions based off of users Instagram habits too.
Both museums and their funders want to see visitors and engagement, and Instagram-friendly
shows definitely help with that. It’s not by accident that spectacular installations and sometimes even newbuilt event venues are now focussing on offering jaw-dropping shows.
It’s so that you’ll Instagram it, what else? (by the way, ever heard of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms?)
The awe-factor that is now so deeply embedded in the production and programming of art shows, that it’s hard not to think of all the amazing, brilliant, talented artists that have been put aside in the gallery calendar because it might have been not as photogenic.
If art museums are trying to show us the best of what’s around--the peak moments in human
creativity-- do we want them heavily weighing Instagrammability when deciding what shows
to devote money and scholarship to?
The answer doesn’t have to be yes or no, and museums often navigate this by creating
Insta-worthy moments within exhibitions, even if the art itself isn’t so Insta-friendly.
And I’m not talking about Madame Tussaud’s, The Museum of Illusions and those types
of places.
Those places are not technically museums, even if it’s in their name, because they
don’t have permanent collections of objects they’re committed to preserve and display.
I find Instagram-oriented experiences fascinating and worth thinking about, but they are basically a series of sets for taking pictures.
Which is both cool and weird, and also something I hope we look back on, and think of as an
amusing step in the direction of a more technologically sophisticated future.
But what’s behind our desire to take pictures in museums and galleries in the first place?
What is it that we want to capture and communicate to our audiences when we’re in proximity
to art?
For some it might just be: “Art is cool. Me is cool, too.”
But I think there’s more to it, or at least I hope there can be.
The research on this is just beginning, but a study of one exhibition in 2014 suggested
that visitors use Instagram in meaningful ways to promote the exhibition, not replacing
the in-person experience but encouraging others to see it for themselves.
The study found that visitors’ use of Instagram was actually connected to their aesthetic
experience.
They captured mostly close-up images of the objects in the show and focused on their details.
Only 9 percent of images in the data set including people.
And sure, this is just one example which might not be exhaustively representative, but it’s still showing, at least in one case, what I’d call real engagement with the objects.
What we’re really getting to here is how we construct meaning around art.
Like, the old way was to just look at the thing, walk around it, walk back for some perspective, observe it closer, and maybe read about it in the card nearby. If it’s a particularly engaged cohort, maybe d talk about it with others.
Since I started studying the optimal way to displaying objects of cultural value arranged in an exhibition (curation), it’s always been clear to me that disconnect between the art object and the audience. The classic arrangement of sometimes too many objects in a room whose relation between one another might not have been clear to all audiences, is a sure way to put people off, as it’s asking the public to take an action, before announcing what it is that they could get from it. A silent promise. Too much to ask from two hours of leisure time.
I’d love to think that perhaps the camera and Instagram are tools people now use in this construction of meaning, revealing details they might not have noticed through their eyes alone the first time, but nobody will ever convince me that you’re actually going to look at those photos again. Especially if you haven;t really experienced the artwork during the live moment.
The best of both worlds could be in theory found in those so-called immersive exhibitions, where projections of major iconic paintings are scattered around a several-feet large room, where the impact of the moving colors and the wrapping sound system can give a stronger emotional kick you’ll definitely bring home with you.
The caveat here being that, at the time being, only blockbusters have been organized in this format, given the prohibitive production costs.
Perhaps, with technology getting cheaper and cheaper, we can expect this sort of engaging display diffused to more niche art types.
In the hope that, if something is engaging enough, you won’t even think about taking your phone out.
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