Appreciation Post: Towards an
Art History of Instagram
Instagram is big. It is influential. Both popular and scholarly studies have interrogated and often expressed concern over how the platform is affecting social interactions and notions of truth. Yet for all that discussion and use, commentators have largely avoided addressing the particularly visual nature of the app. Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram seeks to redress that imbalance by applying art historical methods to the experience of the platform and asking the question: what does Instagram look like? The history of art is the sole academic discipline dedicated to interpreting visual creations, and at its best it can reveal key aspects of an historical situation through a process of close looking and contextualization. Ranging from the foundational techniques of the discipline, including artists’ lives, stylistic analysis, genre studies, and iconography, to more recent and political tactics, this book uses the tools of art history to describe Instagram as a structure of the visual, which is to say one of the ways that contemporary visual knowledge and power are organized. It will reveal how this ubiquitous form of social media is reframing our understandings of vision, revising our relationship to the creation of images, and revitalizing tropes of genius and manias for collecting.
The claim of this text is that Instagram is best understood as a structure of the visual, which 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. The trajectory of the book moves from viewing, to posting, to achieving Instagram fame, which is the platform’s own mythology for how it will be integrated into users’ lives. In particular, each chapter builds on the previous one by highlighting the ways the constraints imposed by the experience of viewing limit the kinds of selves that can be presented on it and then showing how the proliferation of technical knowledge, especially amongst younger women, has produced a revitalization of the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of masculine audience for art. Themes of speed, the disposable image, and the prioritization of persona over work are traced throughout. Intriguingly, this approach not only reveals how Instagram is shifting long-established ways of interacting with images, it also makes a sustained argument for art history’s value as a way of understanding the contemporary world and a set of claims about the visual nature of identity today.
Self-Styled: Sonia Delaunay-Terk and the Uses of Artistic Style
Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1885-1979) used a remarkably regular set of colors and shapes across a broad array of media and vastly different contexts including the Cubist avant-garde, 1920s haute couture, and Charles de Gaulle’s assertions of French power in the post-World War II period. Self-Styled surveys the life and work of Sonia Delaunay-Terk in order to show how the artist used style to respond to her environment and construct an identity. Taking inspiration from the late work of Michel Foucault, this book will revise art historical understandings of style in order to present Delaunay-Terk’s œuvre as simultaneously powerful and problematic model of the everyday integration of art and life.