How Instagram became artists’ creative playground – from Damien Hirst’s dissections to Cindy Sherman’s selfies
It would cost thousands of dollars to gain such intimate access to creatives such as Ai Weiwei, but now it’s just a click away. The social media app has opened new channels for artists to share their work and the process behind it
“Got my blonde on,” writes photographer Cindy Sherman in a recent Instagram post. In the photo, a woman with a blond wig and a computer-generated symphony of neck wrinkles, faces down the viewer. “Looks like some women I saw at Mar-a-Lago,” reads one comment, referring to the Donald Trump-owned luxury resort in Florida.
Sherman seems to have tapped into the Trump era’s gaudy glitz and glares. But there’s more to this. “Yeah and?” the surly tilt of her head seems to be saying, even if her eyes – poised between vulnerability and defiance like so many Sherman-created women – tell a different story.
It’s odd that it took Sherman so long to put her work on Instagram. For decades, she was doing Instagram before Instagram. From Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) onwards, her art has dealt with all the stuff that captivates and disgusts about the photo-sharing site: the narcissism, the perils and pleasures of self-exhibition, the cunningly filtered fantasies masquerading as the real thing.
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Not all Sherman’s posts depict her as different women in delirious costumes and bonkers make-up.
And not all are the result of her playing about with Facetune, an app that allows her to reshape heads and eliminate wrinkles, or Perfect365, the make-up simulator she uses to give her subjects garish digital makeovers.
There are holiday snaps of lighthouses, Mick and Keith bumping and grinding at a Rolling Stones gig. But even the dullest moments of Sherman’s Instagram are incidentally fascinating since they reveal the woman of 1,000 disguises letting her mask slip. She goes to Katy Perry gigs? She gets inspiration from a Dior show? Her Instagram “besties” include Sex and the City siren Kim Cattrall? Cindy, we hardly knew you!
But here’s the twist: because we’re looking at an artist’s Instagram, rather than our friend’s, the everyday is transfigured. Just as Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery and called it art, so Sherman can put her day-to-day life alongside her art on Instagram and invite us to contemplate the mundane in a new setting.