I remember back when Instagram was launched 10 years ago, people were joking about that “Instagram is the simplified version of blogs, it’s for people who can’t write.” Now looking back I find this statement both arrogant and also weirdly foresighted. The internet world has become an ever rapid visual dominated place. The blog is no longer the media that people (especially artists) choose to display their artworks, smartphone and tablets have become so powerful that all of them are claiming, they are all you need to create art.
But is it true?
I had an Instagram account back in 2010 but rarely used, I heard how it has become a very popular platform for artists to share their artworks nowadays, so over the past few weeks, I decide to try it a bit. I can say I have mixed feelings. Okay, let me be honest, I didn’t enjoy it.
The Monalisa effect
I still remember how disappointed I was when I first time saw the famous Monalisa painting in Louvre. It was so small and hung so far away from me. Now I think about it, my experience by then was almost like using Instagram today: surround the tiny, details-hard-to-see image, full of people's shout of likes and noisy comments that made me just wanna leave.
In my own experience, the best place of looking at an art piece is in a quiet gallery or museum, at least should be viewed on a large monitor. However, when we appreciated people’s artwork on a phone or tablet, any powerful impression and details one brilliant art piece could have delivered, are lost. It also requires a lot of zoom-in and swiping and panning, which only adds further distraction.
When you visit someone’s blog or website, it can almost feel more or less like walking around in a virtual gallery. No pop-up Ads, not too much comments or flashing emojis. It is the moment between just you and the artwork, you admire the brush strokes then retreat afar for pause to your imagination runs wild, sometimes you even cry or laugh or being awestruck. It is intimacy. However, the Instagram interface has way too many things going. None of them has anything to do with helping people appreciate the artwork in peace.
If you're looking this my recent work Dancing Mushrooms on a browser instead of a phone, you can notice a lot more details. You can click to enlarge it, you can see the texture on the wood stump, also the dancing mushrooms' smiling faces, the fantasy worlds become closer to us. However, the screenshots below show what it looks like on my Instagram phone page, how can people connect with something so insignificant?
And the most ironic thing is, the one most important thing of the internet, that defines the purpose of sharing, hyperlink, can not be embedded in the Instagram post description! So despite it’s a media-sharing platform, there’s no way to share my inspiration for this work with my audience. ( whether it’s a book, movie, music, etc.)
The algorithm
Since Instagram has switched from a chronologically based algorithm to a new stupid popularity-based one, now your new post will not show up on your followers’ feed when you post it, instead, unless it's “doing well” the exposure remaining small. This leads to a cunning situation that the popular post gets more popular (quality is irrelevant), the less popular one stays undiscovered.
When I start to follow more people, it’s increasingly difficult to remember the individual’s username, so I rely on my homepage feed, but I just simply don’t get to see their post anymore. And the nightmare auto-refreshing means I have to instantly save the post I like when I see it, If I don’t, the post just freaking disappear forever and never to be found when you accidentally refresh your screen!
I also realized that there’re a lot of very talented artists who have very few followers due to their low engagement on Instagram, but an account with only 5 posts somehow can receive thousands followers. How? It just doesn't make sense and make me feel sad. Meanwhile, just when people can no longer see the thing they choose to see, the ads algorithm remains the same. I am so amazed by how quickly my favourite brands find me.
The Bathing Frog drawing (above) received a lot more likes on Instagram than the Lost Star kid Drawing (below), which I favor the latter a lot more. I spent a lot more time thinking and working on the Lost Star kid Drawing, only 30min on the Frog one. But I guess because of its ambiguity and the complex emotion I try to express, it just can’t be as popular as the funny Bathing Frog.
The community
As I mentioned before, the algorithm is almost against any artist who just starting to build their portfolio on Instagram. So very quickly people noticed this and wanna fight back. But this has pushed me in front of a weird line I don’t know if I want to cross.
On one side is the genuine art community want to help each other, on the other side is the trend towards people-pleasing. Maybe I made it sounded a bit harsh but I really don’t get why those "self-explaining" post, eg. what food I like to eat; also tagging and mention, are so popular on Instagram. When you being tagged once it feels heart warming, but when you being tagged 10 times a day it can become really overwhelming.
One positive way to look at it, I can see that’s people fighting the unfair system, in order to manually increase the exposure and help each other. But the system should not be designed like this to start with, when all your energy is devoted to so-call social, tweaking one animated sticker in the story post (and who can tell me why the images and videos become so blurry after uploaded on story?) Should we be really spending hours working on something that designed to last only 24 hours? The worst thing is, after all these hard work, I no longer in the mood to look at other people’s art.
I have to admit I did discover a lot of great artists from Instagram as well, but if they have their own website I will just save it on my browser bookmark. I also do very much appreciated all the comments and likes, I feel like I need to reply to these kind words but I just simply don’t have the time to reply to every feedback.
Productivity
Last but not least, as a user, I find it’s quite counterproductive when sharing my work on Instagram, compare with using Behance or Artstation, or just uploading drawings to my own website.
Since the smartphone ditched the physical keyboard, yet I find my typing speed reduced but misspell increased. Editing text on a phone is always a nightmare, looking for emoji to use is time-consuming. I have very small hands already and I can’t imagine how people with big fingers might struggle. Maybe doing it on a tablet is a bit easier? Because the size of the image on Instagram is restricted, in order to show more detail, I have to upload extra 2-3 zoom-in detailed images of the same drawing. But in order to that, I have to keep multiple same images in my phone gallery, Instagram just won't let you upload one image three times.
Why not try the web version I ask myself? Well, turns out the web version is even harder to use. First of all, you can only use it under developer mode in a browser. You can’t upload multiple images and the features are limited, basically, I feel the developers don’t encourage you to use the web version at all.
Should we (I) still use Instagram?
For me making art is way more important than sharing art. I will not draw just for the sake of growing followers and have more likes. But we are creatures of behaviour and we’re now live in a society that we’re extremely easy to be influenced by. I don’t believe the tools are completely neutral or innocent, nowadays social media tools are specially designed to keep us stay online as long as possible, do whatever they want us to do. You can watch the documentaries like The Social Dilemma , books like The Shallows & Amusing Ourselves to Death for more perspectives and analysis.
For sharing selfies, cat photos or just daily life snaps on Instagram is great and fun to use, but I really feel it is not the best platform for artists. It affects the way we should approach art pieces, it also drives people to create more cute and popular content instead of ones that speak for themselves. It not only wastes artists’ time trying to figure out what hashtags they need to use, what time is the best time to post but also wrongly suggests one artwork's true value with its numbers of views and likes.
And last week, Instagram changed the interface, again. Now instead of posting being the main button, watching short videos and shopping have taken over. That was the last straw for me. I think I’d like to reduce my engagement on Instagram, focus back more on my blog writing and search for a better platform.
Maybe I’ve been a bit old fashion and too cynical. But I have to remind myself, Instagram is a social media platform, not an art platform after all, it will always favour the social side instead of the art side, and social is actually what the artist needed the least in order to make good art.
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