Art on Instagram: Imaginary museums, counter-collections and moving images

Abstract

This paper addresses the impact of the photographic reproduction of artworks at the museums and sharing of these images on Instagram. Created in 2010, when the museum began to reconsider the prohibitions to use mobile phones in the exhibition rooms, the app followed the emergence of this phenomenon that is transforming our relationship with the original works, pointing to another culture of memory, which presupposes the museum's musealization mediated by the cell phone. The analysis of this issue is made from three different perspectives. The first is based on André Malraux's musée imaginaire, reflecting on the various displacements of the artwork from its original context, and how we access this digital platform. A second approach interprets the phenomenon in relation to so-called 'counter-collecting' practice, an emergent musealization counterculture beyond the institutional tradition of memorization policies and practices. The musealization of everyday life, a contemporary phenomenon which is related with our culture's fascination with the past, is also putting the museum as a source of big interest, acting as "repositories of temporality", as Manuel Castells has called. But what happens when museum themselves are “musealized”, shattering this established temporality by putting their collection on the noisy realm of social media? The third bias focuses on Instagram's interface to analyze new relationships that emerge between works from different periods and styles arranged side-by-side – either by the random configuration of these tags or by the attempt to create a curatorial narrative of these images.