Friday 16th October 2015
Perhaps the most popular image sharing application on the planet, Instagram has taken the world by storm. With over 400 million users around the world, and over 30 billion photos shared as of September 2015 (yes, that's billion with a b), it's impossible to deny the popularity of the app. Most serious photographers have scoffed at the usage of Instagram, probably driven by the nauseating filters that were the hallmark of the app at the beginning of its tenure as an internet fixture. Since those vintage days, Instagram has matured incredibly and has even been at the center of a massive copyright scandal involving artist Richard Prince.
Many people don't regard the photos posted to Instagram as art, but yet when Prince took a series of images from random Instagram feeds, enlarged them, and published them as his own work, all of them sold for an estimate $100,000 apiece. Due to some complex legal trickery, this procedure apparently constitutes a derivative work, and therefore is protected speech in the United States and thus no legal challenges can be successfully made to stop him.
If people are willing to treat Prince's "derivative versions" of Instagram photos as art, does it not then logically follow that the originals themselves have artistic merit as well? Or is the controversy surrounding his work what gives it artistic value to the collector? The provenance of a work often increases its value to collectors, but it doesn't usually create it from the start.
One of the strangest elements about Instagram is its role as a social media magnet. Not just about photographs exactly, there is an entire community built up which has the power to make and break careers. Instagram celebrities hardly seem like a real thing, but some people - typically women, and typically attractive women at that - have built up such loyal followings that they actually get paid for photographs showcasing certain products despite having no traditional modeling experience. Do their photographs count as art? What if they haven't been paid?
The traditionally defined lines between the art world and popular photography are becoming more and more blurred, but it's hard to form an opinion about whether or not this is a bad thing. Instead of a closed world, perhaps it's about time that the art world developed its own meritocracy, instead of having gallery and collector kingmakers decide who succeeds and who doesn't.
Posted on October 16th 2015 on 11:29pm
