She’s an Instagram Artist

The art of dismissal

She’s an Instagram artist, a friend remarked, about a beautiful, well-dressed woman we passed by in the street. She’d seen her around everywhere, in all the places you’d expect to encounter an Instagram artist, carrying out the lifestyle you’d also expect. My friend’s tone was flat, neutral, as if reporting the results of an anthropological study. And no follow-up required from my end; I had already filled in the gaps. Figurative work with a graphic style, bendy, expressive limbs fingering a martini glass or a coffee mug. Work which never strayed too far from these confines, resulting in a beautiful, cohesive grid. It didn’t matter that the attributes associated with Instagram artist might be completely different in my friend’s imagination.

Some days later, the same friend asked me about a new friend I had recently met for a coffee, excited about a potentially new face in the mix. He’s really nice. He’s an accountant. Also, he’s a rapper. He raps over acoustic guitar. An acoustic rapper. Her and I shared a tight-lipped smile. We were trying to rid ourselves of the habit of judging people who are just doing things, who are pursuing their interests, because, well… because it’s a horrible thing to do. We were sticking to the facts. Letting our judgements rest in the spaces and silences between.

When just starting to explore art, I remember trailing a couple at an art fair as they moved from piece to piece, flattening each one with associations executed like database queries (It’s giving Agnes. Richter squeegee knockoffs. Japonisme all over again.). I envied their ability to talk about art this way. I wanted to be able to produce something less trite than I love the colour palettes. I stood in front of a large painting by Vanessa McKernan (maybe it was this one) and felt the pressure mounting as the artist waited for me to speak. It reminds me of a scene from an old medical textbook. Like an operating theatre, with the students observing. The artist raised her eyebrows. She agreed with the interpretation, but had never heard it described that way. To me, at the time, this was the highest compliment. I left the interaction fulfilled. It took me a while to realize that I never expressed how strongly I engaged with her painting, that in trying to find the right sentence to conquer the work, I skipped the part about why its existence mattered.

Do you hate me yet? Let’s keep going. As I write this, I am sitting in one of those mansions whose innards seems picked feature-for-feature out of an interior design catalogue. Predictably, the house is full of rich boomer art. Do I have to describe it to you, reader? Perhaps you feel as smug as I do in knowing exactly what I mean. It’s a good feeling. It’s a weapon I can wield which allows me to not have to engage with the art for more than half a second. But I will resist the urge to stop here, as if I have already made a valid critique. Why is this one instance of uninspiring art causing me such spite? Perhaps it’s the knowledge that it likely costed $5,000 - $10,000, despite looking like it could have been ordered on artcanvasprints.com or similar, contrasted with the knowledge of the art purchases I would make with the same budget. In other words, before this painting had a chance to be seen, I smothered it with my context, which was largely one of bitterness towards its owner. I mentally consumed it and killed it in the same way that I killed the Instagram artist and the Acoustic rapper and the painting that resembled an Operating theatre.

It felt good though.

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I read the article from The Face about vibes being omnipresent and a hundred Substack letters proclaiming that slapping a core on something is not a stand-in for having experienced the thing, that our culture needs to move on from this cheap trick. Then a hundred Substack notes saying, Finally, a place where brains can come to be nourished after the long famine of TikTok. Oh, Substack writers, I thought, we are already becoming a caricature of ourselves. I was standing on those writer’s heads in a pulsating human pyramid, categorizing everyone below me into hard blocks to firm up my footing, to launch myself one rung closer to the top. Only, there were rows upon rows of people above me, stepping on my head, too. What’s at the top of this pyramid? I wondered.

In art, this pyramid is taller and more cut-throat than most other places. Death-by-categorization has been alive and well since long before terminology around vibes and cores and the diagnosis of a wider cultural phenomenon. Only it masquerades as being more cultivated, thanks to the academic backing of genre and movement. I respect other people’s ability to eloquently pave a path through the art historical record or apply meaningful technical critiques — this takes practice and passion. But I don’t know why I felt (and still often feel) the need to participate while clearly lacking the skills or interest to do so. This angle of commentary provides value for a fraction of people who enjoy art. Not unlike those guys who watch sports predominantly to rattle off stats and argue with the other guy doing the same. We encounter an unusually high concentration of folks doing this in art and feel like it is the prerequisite to entry. And since most of us can’t do it, terms like Instagram art, Designer art, Bro art are wielded with glee.

I recently went on some dates with an Instagram artist. She had something like 80k followers, and I was one of them, and had been for a while before we matched. This led to all sorts of questions about how best to navigate my parasocial relationship to her before meeting for the first time. I already knew her cat’s name, for example. Do I mention her art, or that I’m familiar with it? Of course, it wasn’t that complicated. Her line of work came up naturally. I admitted that I had seen her on Instagram. She admitted, on a later date, that her life was nothing like what her Instagram feed suggested. In fact, it shocked her how little of the perceived success had trickled through to her career. She made nowhere near enough sales on Instagram to earn a living and still worked a day job; the good galleries had yet to show any interest in her, perhaps because she was too visible, too commercial, already discovered. I studied her work more carefully than ever before. There was much more to it than the handful of attributes I had originally plucked from the grid. It didn’t at all deserve the categorization of Instagram art.

It took time and many such regrettable judgements for me to recognize the tools I do possess with regards to viewing and interpreting art. I write fiction, whose task is almost always exploring a visceral response. Perhaps this is something I can do for art, too, with a level of care and attention that helps others do the same. I started welktober because I thought that’s what art writing is supposed to be, but rarely is. Capturing a response and channeling it into another thing that might even be considered art. In a time where the tendency is to vibe check 100x more than we consume, and to consume 50x more than we produce, I hope this line of inquiry can help rid ourselves (myself) of our (my) worst tendencies.

Sincerely,
a Substack writer

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