Why Instagram is good for the arts

It’s a Saturday afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A young man and woman wander through the 19th- and Early 20th-Century European Paintings and Sculpture galleries. They pause in front of Henri Regnault’s Salomé, a portrait of the notorious biblical femme fatale who, after performing a sexy dance for her stepdad, Herod, requested John the Baptist’s head on a silver platter. “She kind of looks like JLo,” says the woman. “God, you’re right,” replies the man. They simultaneously raise their iPhones and snap a picture.

After they move along, I take their place in front of Salomé. Her dark curls fall seductively by her bare shoulders. Her head tilts with a smirk, and her right hand rests on her hip. She gives off a definite fly-girl vibe. I take out my iPhone and a few minutes later Instagram my portrait of the portrait. I use the most common filter, which is #nofilter. Others see it in my feed. Some like it with a heart. And thus, a French artist who’s been dead for more than 140 years, a random duo at the Met and my followers on Instagram and I are all in conversation. And isn’t that the point of art?

It’s easy to dismiss Instagram as the playground of voyeurs and those afflicted by FOMO (“fear of missing out”). Recently, Alex Williams of The New York Times highlighted the symptoms and effects of “Instagram envy,” and even went so far as to suggest that it “may turn out to be an epidemic with no cure.” However, Williams focuses mainly on the travel-porn, food-porn and Rockwellian family portraits (family porn?) that regularly besiege our feeds. While Instagrammed images of art exhibits or performances may initially smack of the same brand of voyeurism, they also allow for something deeper: a relationship and conversation between artist and observer, and an invitation to a third outsider to seek the work directly. When it comes to Instagramming art, the little square box, filtered or not, serves as more than a window: it’s an entryway.

This may be true for no one so much as French street artist JR, known for his large photographic installations around the world. His most recent work, “The Eye of New York City Ballet,” is a 6,500-square-foot vinyl photograph of more than 80 ballet dancers as they lie, solo and in clusters, amid a cloudscape of crumpled white paper in the formation of a giant eye. Commissioned by the New York City Ballet for its Art Series, the photograph covers the entire marble floor in the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater. In a video on the Art Series website, JR explains, “99 percent of what I produce is actually interaction. It’s something you can’t own. It’s a moment ... You can take photos, you can share them, but you’ll leave also with a little piece of that artwork.”

JR, who has more than 341,000 followers on Instagram and whose posts regularly show his art-in-progress, told The New York Times that he’s been “dazzled” by people’s posts under the hashtags #JRNYCBallet and #NYCBArtSeries. There are multiple photos of children emulating the poses of the life-size adult dancers, real men and women pretending to partner with their 2-D counterparts and a short video clip of a street dancer popping, locking and moonwalking across the ballet dancers’ classic lines. “People are always more creative than I can even imagine,” JR said.

Of course, there are the purists who think smartphones or social media have no place alongside art. In a fearmongering article in The New Criterion, Eric Gibson compares the allowance of smartphones and tablets within museums to a Trojan horse, arguing that “The first casualty is the art experience itself.” I disagree, though I do concur with Gibson that “Creating an environment where the visitor is invited to stop, look, and take something away from the experience is the museum’s first duty to its public.” I just think smartphones and Instagram can be part of this.

While most museums allow smartphones and nonflash photography, and 92 percent of arts organizations included in a recent survey by the Pew Internet Project agree that “technology and social media have made art a more participatory experience,” few theater venues or producers have allowed smartphones and their inherent cameras during live performances. This is for good reason; during a typical proscenium play or musical, photography of any kind could distract fellow audience members or performers. One notable exception to the unwritten no-camera rule is “Queen of the Night,” now open at the Diamond Horseshoe in the basement of the Paramount Hotel near Times Square in New York. The term “production” may be misleading, or at least incomplete. Part dinner theater, part circus nightclub, part gastronomical bacchanal, it’s an immersive fusion of performance and ritual that demands participation and engagement from patrons. In an interview, producer Nathan Koch explained that the decision to allow people to take pictures on their phones in the venue was an organic one. “Originally, the concept was that we’re in this subterranean space and ... you can’t bring anything. It’s like a supersecret society. Afterwards you would tell people, ‘I went to this thing, and you won’t believe it, and I have no record of it.’”

But this changed. From the first preview, upon entering the otherworldly and underground retro space, people immediately asked if they could take pictures. Producers relented. “People should be able to experience it the way they want to experience it. If you want to take a photo, and that’s how you want to remember the moment, that’s OK,” Koch said. If company members see patrons spending too much time behind their phones, they have been coached to gently, and within character, encourage them to be more present with the performance.

It’s turned out better than OK for the show. The images posted on Instagram under #queenofthenight and related hashtags have not only provided feedback and added to the artistic conversation. They are also, arguably, just as good as — if not better than — the press photos. The show has done little traditional advertising since opening, and instead word has spread not only by mouth but also by image. On the production’s website, producers have posted a Tumblr-esque social page with patrons’ shared Instagrams. It’s not only good (and cheap) advertising; it’s also a photographic summary, a visual review and a glowing endorsement by trusted critics, i.e., people’s friends. 

With art and Instagram, creativity begets creativity, and photo-op potential begets interest and long lines, too. The ability for people to document their own actions propels them to action and puts them in conversation with the art makers. As detailed in Richard Morgan’s article in The Wall Street Journal, aptly named “Art Exhibits for the Selfie Set,” immersive installations have achieved blockbuster status out of people’s desire to Instagram themselves there. If patrons didn’t have access to the platform of Instagram (along with linked shares to Facebook and Twitter), you would not see the same kind of engagement and support. That’s something that museums, producers and artists can be thankful for.

In a world where we have thousands of trivial interactions everyday, “IRL” and online, people want to participate and they want to connect to something larger than themselves. And they want proof of this connection — for others, yes, but also for themselves. This is what Ann Friedman labels in New York magazine’s The Cut — the publication’s online women’s section, complete with Instagram and Pinterest pages — as “the teen-girl aesthetic approach to the world: that you surround yourself with images that you feel reflect who you are or who you want to be.” This kind of visual curating may be teen-girl, but it’s also what fashion designers, artists, directors, poets and actors have done for centuries. Using images and collage as inspiration and aspiration has always been a compulsion of the creative. And this is another thing Instagram allows: thinking like an artist. Instagram may be art for the masses, but it’s also the artistry of the masses.

It's true that not every picture of someone’s lunch is art. But working with color and composition, playing with balance and form and trying to capture a moment — these are the start of the artistic process and a larger artistic conversation. It's only natural for people to disagree: there are as many Insta-haters as Instagrammers. But if Instagram gives everyone permission to be an artist, perhaps we can all be critics, too.