Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram

By Tara Ward

What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Tara Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalizes on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780520398788

Tara Ward

Tara Ward is an art historian specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture. She is editor of Gender and Popular Culture: A Visual Study, and her work has been published by the Guggenheim Museum, Oxford Art Journal, and Excursions.

Book preview

Appreciation Post

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Judy and Bill Timken Endowment Fund in Contemporary Arts.

Appreciation Post

Towards an Art History of Instagram

Tara Ward

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2024 by Tara Ward

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ward, Tara, 1977–author.

Title: Appreciation post : towards an art history of Instagram / Tara Ward.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023038204 | ISBN 9780520398764 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520398771 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520398788 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Instagram (Firm) | Mass media and art. | Mass media—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC N72.M28 W37 2024 | DDC 700/.456—dc23/eng/20231206

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023038204

Manufactured in the United States of America

33   32   31   30   29   28   27   26   25   24

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

To Norman, my nugget, who grew along with this book, and all the friends, family, and colleagues who believed in it.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Insta-duction

PART ONE:   SCROLLING FRAME

1. Compare and Contrast: Instagram

and Art History

2. I Glanced at It

PART TWO:   SELFIE-PORTRAIT

3. Basic

4. Other, But Make It Attractive

PART THREE:   FOR THE DISCERNING INSTAGRAMMER

5. Sneaker Connoisseurs

6. 5G Genius

Conclusion: Spending Time on Instagram

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Photograph by Sam Rowley posted on ABC News (@abcnews), February 12, 2020.

2. Repeated images of Horseshoe Bend on Insta Repeat (@insta_repeat), July 21, 2018.

3. Instagram notification.

4. I Have This Thing with Floors (@ihavethisthingwithfloors) posting, accessed April 23, 2023.

5. Face Book by Daniel Rueda and Anna Devís (@drcuerda), December 29, 2019.

6. Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein , 1906.

7. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait in a Fur Coat , 1500.

8. Compilation of poses in front of Tracey Emin, Love Is What You Want , 2011, University of Michigan Museum of Art.

9. Suzanne Valadon, Woman Cleaning a Tub and a Nude , 1908.

10. Posting by the Kaplan Twins (@the_kaplan_twins), April 14, 2019.

11. Posting by the Kaplan Twins (@the_kaplan_twins), February 16, 2018.

12. The Kaplan Twins, #sat on your face (Basquiat) , n.d.

13. The Kaplan Twins, Allie , n.d.

14. The Kaplan Twins, Emily , n.d.

15. The Kaplan Twins, Lexi , n.d.

16. The Kaplan Twins, Nikki , n.d.

17. The Kaplan Twins, Rihanna , n.d.

18. The Kaplan Twins, Vanessa , n.d.

19. The Kaplan Twins, Boobs , n.d.

20. Posting by Max Emerson (@maxisms), April 29, 2019.

21. Posting by Max Emerson (@maxisms), April 7, 2019.

22. Posting by Robert Zumaya (@heartthrobrobb), photograph by Josiah Crawford, April 11, 2020.

23. Posting by Sneaker Freaker magazine (@sneakerfreakermag) featuring sneakers decorated by Keith Haring, July 6, 2021.

24. Virgil Abloh (@virgilabloh), Another 1,000 Words, August 12, 2018.

25. Virgil Abloh (@virgilabloh), Not the First Caravaggio Painting I’ve ‘Borrowed,’ June 20, 2017.

26. Virgil Abloh (@virgilabloh), Time Flies® Part 3 & 4 Presented at @coachella Weekend 2, April 21, 2019.

27. Virgil Abloh (@virgilabloh), Back When the @off____white™ Women’s Team Was Thinking Outside the Box and Rented the Barcelona Pavilion to Design a Collection in. . . , March 22, 2020.

28. Posting by Virgil Abloh (@virgilabloh), photograph by Tommy Ton, June 15, 2018.

INTRODUCTION

Insta-duction

I AM AN ART HISTORIAN. The twentieth-century French avant-garde—think early abstraction and Cubism—and its multimedia manifestations are where I cut my scholarly teeth. Thus, I have a taste for innovation that both encourages me to be open to things I haven’t seen before and a tendency to overestimate the excitement of originality. This is undoubtedly what led me to Instagram. With a small child and a teaching position at a large Midwestern public university, I found myself actively desiring new and different visual experiences. On my own in an urban environment, I would satisfy this longing by going to museums and galleries and/or engaging in window-shopping and people-watching. Stuck in the snow with an infant on my lap, I turned to Instagram. It was fascinating, worrying, time-consuming, instantaneous, exciting, comforting, and something akin to but fundamentally different from the kinds of viewing that had been my work and my hobby up until this point.

So, I began to compare and contrast. Using the brilliant but flawed ur-technique of art history, I began to understand that practices on Instagram ran counter to some of the most widely held assumptions about art and thus suggested the emergence of alternative conceptions of images. Distinctions between maker and object, original and appropriated, and viewer and creator are blurred on the platform. While these are not unprecedented phenomena, their prevalence is new, as is the size and makeup of their audience. Just as interesting and troubling were the continuities, including the objectification of female-identifying human beings, conspicuous consumption, and a connoisseurial devotion to genius. It is the results of these comparisons that I present here.

So, this is a book about Instagram and art. However, art in this case is neither a collection of the most beautiful products of human creation nor a set of techniques for making painting or sculpture. It is an odd category that, despite the fact that it varies based on culture and time period, leads people to treat certain objects differently than others. When human beings collectively and often unconsciously devise a series of rules about what art should be and what should be done with it, they are not revealing the ontological nature of art. They are unveiling their concepts, beliefs, social structures, and aesthetics. In short, when we regard certain images or objects as special, it is our own particular (and often problematic) set of values that we are actually celebrating. Instagram is quite obviously a way of treating pictures differently. Like museums and illustrated books, it is a display of images that simultaneously opens up new vistas and limits what can be seen. It has a set of implicit aesthetic canons and unspoken tenets about how, when, and what should be presented. As in all forms of art, there are more and less esteemed examples as well as different ways of appreciating them.

Like Cubism and abstraction, Instagram is revising our expectations of images. It does not completely eschew pictorial traditions, but it does rearrange them enough to prompt a number of questions about what we want from images today. Thus, this is a book about how Instagram is affecting viewing and making. It is not a sociological or demographic report. Nor is it a complaint about what social media are doing to us or an ode to the possibilities of technology. This is something closer to a phenomenological account, but one that seeks to situate the experience of Instagram into cultural and historical frameworks. It describes what and how we see on Instagram and relates those experiences to earlier modes. All of which is to say, Appreciation Post is an art history of Instagram in which I will turn some of the theoretical tools of our trade onto a new visual experience in order to call attention to a few of the ways it is changing how we create, view, and understand images. Taking its place in the long tradition of art historical studies that reveal cultural values, it will show how Instagram gives visual form to our culture’s interest in surface interactions with vast amounts of information, its belief in the power of attractiveness, and the continuation of cults of genius and collecting.

ART HISTORY, REALLY?

Art history, it needs to be said, has a history of being bound to problematic ideas and thus complicit in their real-world consequences. ¹ From its origins in the work of Giorgio Vasari and even its precursors in the Classical tradition, historicizing art involved defining who could and couldn’t be called an artist, endowing these people with outsized power including the right to break with cultural norms, and making claims for the superiority of certain geographical terrains over others. These themes continued as the field became an established academic discipline in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tied explicitly to Hegelian notions of history and thus implicitly to the cultural hierarchies used to justify colonialism and fascism, art history also consecrated misogyny and abetted class bias. For much of the twentieth century knowledge of the history of art was seen as a sign of being cultured, that is, privileged enough to have an elite education. It was, therefore, a tool of hegemony, bolstering racism, sexism, and classism. Furthermore, this purportedly disinterested aesthetic endeavor had (and continues to have) real ties to the market. The monetary value of works of art is often determined by art historical studies (provenance, authentication) and increased by scholarly endeavors like monographs and exhibitions. ² Indeed, art history is entangled with not only the ordinary evils of capitalism, but also various illicit trades that use works of art as collateral. ³

Yet art history has also repeatedly reckoned with itself, using its techniques to question cultural hierarchies and revising its methods to become more inclusive. There have been so many new art histories that the discipline’s historiography remains a vibrant subfield. Key expansions and revisions include: shifts from individual masters to cultural production, the incorporation of new styles and their aesthetic values, widening the geographic purview of the discipline and narrating the influences and exchanges between cultures, investigating the roles of class and economics in the production and reception of art, feminist interrogation of the discipline’s methods and objects of study, methodological exchanges with other disciplines like literary studies and anthropology, broadening the types of works art historians look at via notions of visual culture, attempts to counter the Whiteness of the discourse, and interrogations of the relationship between the environment and art. While these shifts can be linked to specific moments, they are also ongoing themes that are revisited regularly. This is not to say that the important political and intellectual work associated with these questions is by any means done. Indeed, we are now experiencing yet another call for a new art history, one that can be experienced as both a continuation and a break.

To paraphrase Michel Foucault, disciplines discipline. ⁴ Academic fields establish rules that govern how knowledge will be created and judged, including who can do that work and what they can work on. This renders the academy rather conservative and turns many educational milestones into gatekeeping activities. However, the clarity of these conventions also provides a roadmap for how they can be broken. Since approximately the 1970s this questioning of disciplines has led to the creation of interdisciplinary fields that more often than not go by [category name] studies. Sometimes based in geography (American studies, Asian studies), at others focused on identities (Black studies; women’s studies; cultural, i.e. class, studies), and even directed towards specific media (film studies, digital studies), they concentrate on specific, though often contentiously defined, subject matter and incorporate a wide variety of methodological approaches. While the academic disciplinary imperative to determine canons and regulate information still affects these programs, they are also charged with the obligation to elude and expand the constraints of more established fields. That in turn has led some scholars to reformulate traditional academic disciplines using the studies model, which has led to fields like literary studies and religious studies.

Alongside this reorganization of the academy, scholars trained in many different disciplines have begun discussing images in what has been called the visual turn. Art historians have found themselves with dual and even primary appointments in other fields. There have also been attempts to establish Visual Studies as an interdisciplinary assembly of examinations of what we can see and thus an alternative to art history. Yet the sheer number of departments that are now named with various combinations of art history and visual studies or visual culture belies the notion of a clear split. Furthermore, the traditional organization of art history into subfields based in geography and time (Renaissance Italy, medieval Japan) has been undermined by both the external pressures of the studies model and internal methodological questions. In this complex terrain, it seems more appropriate to speak of histories of art; yet that also raises the question of the discipline’s viability as an independent department. Such situations are often referred to as crises in part because while to the lay public they are quibbles over names, these distinctions have a practical impact on the lives of professional academics in that they determine the availability of jobs and research funding.

So, what is to be done with art history? While I often encounter art historians interested in maintaining traditions, those who ask questions like but is that (good) art or where did this person go to school, there are also many art historians for whom this kind of education has been a liberatory process. My continuing training has involved a series of encounters with difference in a setting that has encouraged not just deep research into other cultures but also a willingness to teach myself to see things differently. Art history was always already interdisciplinary through its links to biography, text, and various histories as well as its baseline imperative to verbalize the visual. I have also been at this for long enough to know that what is happening in contemporary culture will filter into the kinds of histories that can be written. In short, art history has taught me to look and see more by getting me to question my own cultural assumptions.

Appreciation Post is a contribution to that ever-expanding art history. In particular, it situates itself within the tradition of visual culture studies while recognizing that the various culturally informed methods for defining and critiquing art help to construct identities and meanings. Asking readers to treat Instagram as a serious cultural product and to engage in the process of interpreting it, like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments for including of Roman and Gothic art in the canon, will likely to be seen as contentious to some. More importantly, it will prompt reflections on art historical methods and other types of art. To put it another way, there has always been a vanguard of art historians interested in studies that provide new answers to the question what is art? The polemic you are about to read proposes that Instagram might be an answer to that inquiry and traces the implications of that classification for both contemporary culture and the new art history.

ART HISTORY AND . . .

One of the things that art history today must do is continue to expand its transdisciplinarity by interrogating not only what it can learn from other disciplines but also what it can contribute to them. While there are long-established connections between art history and geographical area studies, cultural studies, media studies, communications, and Black and queer studies have yet to establish clear relationships. This is not to say that no work is being done at the intersections of art history and these other fields, but simply that they are still spaces where there is terrain to be mapped. The longstanding women’s studies–art history discourse offers a model for thinking about how exchanges with these fields might yield insights that develop into ongoing and generous conversations. ⁵ Scholarship in this area has been driven by a clear political project and thus has focused on including new objects of study (new artists and new media), critiquing implicit methodological biases, and developing or recognizing new theoretical perspectives. It has directly engaged with contemporary experience even when looking to the past and it has interacted, sometimes critically, with the social sciences. While also subject to conservative academic and social lures, women’s studies, including its art historical branch, has also learned from criticism of its racial, class, and heteronormative biases in a way that renders internalizing such critiques fundamental to full awareness of the subject. It is a mental space where it is possible to learn about difference if one is willing to listen, and it’s one in which art historians have repeatedly highlighted the ways identity and the interpretation of the visual are mutually constituted. It has been foundational to my thinking about this topic and many others.

Coalition, gratitude, service, self-reflection, and sometimes critique form the signposts of Appreciation Post’s relations with other disciplines. I will sketch a few of those dynamics here in order to help readers find them in the body of this text.

. . . Media Studies/Communications/Cultural Studies/Sociology

Meeting these interlocking but disparate fields at the point where they engage with not only the study of culture but how people interact with it, Appreciation Post is deeply influenced by the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Michel de Certeau, Dick Hebdige, John Fiske, and Stuart Hall, each of whom described not only the power dynamics of cultural production but also how the audience recrafts that material in response. ⁶ The idea of an active, meaning-producing audience is central to any understanding of social media. Instagram makes this form of participation visual and as such it demands methods for understanding the construction of images, ones that art history has at the ready. These include an awareness of how the formal elements of pictures convey meaning as well as a set of techniques for discussing references to other works. However, the most important methodological contribution the history of art has to offer these kinds of studies is the discipline’s nuanced approach to the scale of artistic production. Even in its most traditional forms, art history addresses the complexities of how to group objects of study, including the reality that categories must interact and overlap. It moves from individual work to artistic oeuvre, which is sometimes subdivided by time, to geographical and/or temporal division, which might be a neighborhood and year or a continent and century, or anywhere in between. Then it addresses examples of influence, continuity, and departure. In the process any one thing we are looking at becomes both highly specific and embedded in a network of historical relations. Even as some pieces are presented as paradigmatic examples of a given style, others are brought forth as outliers and alternatives capable of sparking new developments. In short, art history problematizes cultural generalizations even as it makes arguments for these kinds of categorizations, and thus it offers cultural studies methods for addressing the relation between the individual and the grouping that desolidify its ideas of (sub)culture.

At the same time, these fields nudge art history away from its reliance on institutional accreditation when deciding who qualifies as an artist and is therefore deemed worthy of study. Turning attention away from the museum and gallery with their hegemonic projects and towards other kinds of production is an essential part of unwinding the biases of the discipline and the concept of art. To do so with cultural studies in mind is to also avoid the traps of the folk or outsider artist by insisting that everyone is engaged with cultural meanings and embedded in power dynamics. Angela McRobbie’s Be Creative and Brooke Erin Duffy’s (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love are essential to this study’s conception of the artistic work done by Instagrammers. Both describe the coincidence of labor, artistic expression, and classed and gendered oppression in today’s new economy. ⁷ Emphasizing the paradoxical centering and denial of the underpaid feminine or feminized creator, they highlight how the fictions of artistic work help construct contemporary hierarchies. This study will add to that understanding by paying close attention to what is being made by these creators in order to describe both the pleasures of making and messages they construct. As the many references to those texts and related studies within Appreciation Post should demonstrate, treating Instagrammers as artists is not a denial of economic realities—indeed, despite the mythologies, traditional artists are just as bound to the market—but a way of holding up a magnifying glass to the microphysics of various forms of power and recompense.

. . . Psychology and Economics

It is the notion of audience artistic agency and complex motivations that separates Appreciation Post from the large psychological and economic literature on Instagram. ⁸ While it is undoubtedly true that mental health effects and economic incentives are produced by Instagram, their discussion is typically based on a unilateral idea of transmission from platform to user without discussion of the ways the experience is subjectivized or the forms of pleasure that might encourage use even in the face of negative effects. Taking a broader cultural approach, one that addresses the meaning produced by users, Appreciation Post will help visualize and thus conceptualize the structure of forces at work on Instagram. In turn, that will allow for a more nuanced evaluation of its healthiness and value.

. . . Technology and Digital Studies

Science and technology studies (STS) and digital studies offer alternatives to the idea that science is purely objective and technology is deterministic by addressing the sociology of work in those fields and providing histories of particular innovations that deemphasize notions of inevitability and progress. The concept that science and technology are social, established by these fields, is foundational to this study. In that regard, Donna Haraway, Peter Gallison, and Lorraine Daston inspired its attention to ideological issues that arise in the coming together of humans and technology. ⁹ Furthermore, Appreciation Post is a contribution to an emerging subfield that takes humanistic approaches to technology by treating it as a cultural product and source of cultural meaning. ¹⁰ As with the other social sciences discussed above, this shift involves actively discussing the interpretation of individual or groups of objects in ways that show how each is constructed within the work as well as by the context. That critical reading or looking in turn helps foster an awareness of the messages present in a given historical situation and a skepticism about accepting them at face value.

. . . Black and Queer Studies

On a parallel track Black studies and queer studies, like women’s or gender studies, have shown that identity deeply influences both production and interpretation. By bringing to the fore voices that have been unheard or underappreciated as well as demonstrating the biases embedded in nearly every established form of scholarly narrative, these fields reveal the multiplicity of cultural values and the necessity of addressing how the interpretation of the visual is culturally constructed in tandem with race, sexual orientation, gender, and class. In these areas Appreciation Post is particularly indebted to Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Whitney Davis, and Christopher Reed. ¹¹ By dealing with Instagram, which often produces new configurations of social groups, this book also addresses the ways the codes of one group can be misread, misapplied and even repurposed by others.

One of the contentions of this study is that methodological shifts and changes in the objects of study not only go hand in hand, they push and pull each other. That is why Appreciation Post simultaneously turns art history towards Instagram and views art history through Instagram. In doing so, it will ask a set of seemingly straightforward but ultimately thorny questions about both, including . . .

WHAT IS INSTAGRAM?

In October of 2010, Instagram was first presented to the world as an iPhone app. ¹² App is a small word for what are often highly limited bits of software that allow smartphones to perform some activity or another. ¹³ In many ways, apps have replaced reference books. They are dictionaries, travel guides, journals, maps, lists of calories, events, tasks. Alternately, they are games and minor diversions. Of course, there are also more practical applications; however, they tend to take the form of mobile versions of the software we use on our computers. These allow access to email, documents, and the internet in order to continue the work we do in other places. Instagram seems categorically different from these modes. Certainly, it provides amusement; sometimes it even delivers information; and it is a way of managing products and relationships. Yet what is striking about Instagram, alongside other forms of social media, is the way it erases the lines between professional and personal, public and private, commerce and recreation. Furthermore, that refusal of boundaries in turn creates new forms of work that do not get applied to our lives so much as they radically overhaul them. ¹⁴

What sets Instagram apart from other social media is that it is largely, though not exclusively, a photographic phenomenon. ¹⁵ Yet unlike the film-based version of photography around which the medium was theorized, Instagram’s photos exist entirely in a digital landscape. This shift undermines whatever was left of the notion that photography is indexical, which is to say that it has a direct physical connection to the real. Given the fact that now almost every photographer has the capacity to manipulate digital images, what is left of the automatic nature of photography is simply a set of formal, cultural signs that convey a sense of realness. ¹⁶

Yet Instagram has become something more than simply a collection of images. The technical jargon for this more expansive presence in people’s everyday lives is platform, understood to be a program or app that functions as a gateway and means of organizing other programs and apps. While not a theoretical framework, the idea that Instagram is a platform is important for understanding the ways it incorporates other social networks (Twitter, Facebook) as well as websites. The notion of a platform calls attention to the fact that Instagram is not self-contained. It also highlights the disciplinary qualities of its functionality in that certain combinations are easy (shopping) while others (getting a full news story) require multiple clicks and an external program. Elisa Serafinelli identifies the moment when Instagram transformed from app to platform as April 9, 2012, the day it was bought by Facebook. ¹⁷ This highlights the larger framework of controls and shows that Instagram has been integrated into some of Facebook’s techniques and practices. It also reminds us that Instagram is in competition with other apps and thus has added to its core offerings through aspects like stories and IGTV. But central to Instagram’s capacity as a platform is the visual nature of its information and the way that format, especially its still form, shifts the dynamics of social media.

The claim of this text is that Instagram is best understood as a structure of the visual. It is something that organizes and supports what I pointedly call visual rather than vision. The former is a broader category that includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom, as well as the means by which things are brought into view and left out of it. Yet studying Instagram does not reveal the eternal nature of optics. Instead, with a nod to Michel Foucault, it functions as a diagram of some parts of contemporary ocularity. ¹⁸ Instagram not only defines who or what can be seen, but also how those things are understood (knowledge) and their relative value (power). It is one model among many, but given the way Instagram has come to shape aspects of life outside the platform—one thinks of how interior design is being rearranged to produce attractive posts—understanding it as an organizational framework for what and how we see helps to make sense of its importance and effects. The very newness and clearly transitional nature of the platform insists that we not universalize or naturalize this organization; however, its pervasive and powerful status throughout the developed world necessitates a clear view of the broad, insidious, and sometimes liberating ways it configures the visual, including how we see ourselves and others. ¹⁹

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Appreciation Post’s explanation of this order is composed of three separable but interrelated parts. Part 1, Scrolling Frame, describes the phenomenological encounter with Instagram. Paying careful attention