Digital curation, post-internet practices and the circulation of images online have often been read through a networked (and sometimes socio-material) lens and referred to as nodes (Graham and Cook 2010, 158; Steyerl 2017, 144; Ghidini 2019). This attention to network curation and co-curation (Dekker and Tedone 2019) takes particular interest into the potential of digital curation to re-arrange digital spaces and also on the curatorial limits and lack of control which comes with the form of the feed (Wallerstein 2018). With its restrictive form, social media feeds allow for certain prescribed movements and ways of engagement. The interface has its own lexicon driven by verbs (likes, loves, shares) which relate to interaction design, as much as to traditional institutional needs of preserving, organising, categorising and archiving – and in this sense the experience of the feed draws on the vernacular of big tech as much as of cultural institutions (Hromack 2015).
Тhis text looks at the Instagram feed as a dominant form of artistic self-curation online and considers the role it has in value shifts in contemporary artistic practices and institutional contexts. How does content, limited by the form of the feed, perform documentation, and serve as historicizing tool of artistic practice? And could we consider this self-curation as also a practice of self-archiving and if so, what is its relationship with institutional discourse and thresholds of valuation and validation?
Dena Yago talks about “a widespread shift in art towards the exhibition as content farm” referring to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room at the Broad Museum in LA and other examples of artworks which were widely documented online (Yago 2018). She suggests that this digital quality of often feed spam and demanding attention outside the white cube (or any institutional context) “proves its very status as art” (2018). I’m interested in exploring this extra- or para-institutional context as a value-generating mechanism. Instagram’s system of values is metric driven and centered around engagement, visibility, and virality. These metrics translate to social and cultural capital and speak to the demands of the attention economy. Contra-institutionally, one’s own content feed also allows for agency in constructing a self-narrative, artistic “brand” and potentially non-linear presentation and historicization (as opposed to traditional archives or collections).
I’d like to consider these dichotomies through Boris Groys’ framework of “the new” to articulate the role of art documentation as content in cultural innovation. Groys reinforces a similar dichotomy by suggesting that there is a shifting value threshold which separates the archives from the “profane realm” – perceived as vulgar, valueless, extra-cultural things; and things become “new” when they travel from this profane sphere - “a reservoir for potentially new cultural values” - to institutional archives (Groys 2014, 64). Therefore, the new emerges in a process of intra-cultural “revaluation of values” (Groys 2014, 43). In that sense, the new is always already a re-value, a re-interpretation, “contextualisation or decontextualisation of a cultural attitude or act conforming to culture’s hidden economic laws” (Groys 2014, 57). If we consider the widespread perception of content as profane, how could these value shift and interactions between the feed and the archive represent cultural or artistic innovation through self-documentation and historicisation?
Bibliography
- Dekker, Annet, and Gaia Tedone. 2019. “Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation.” Arts 8 (3): 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8030086.
- Ghidini, Marialaura. 2019. “Curating on the Web: The Evolution of Platforms as Spaces for Producing and Disseminating Web-Based Art.” Arts 8 (3): 78. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8030078.
- Graham, Beryl, and Sarah Cook. 2010. Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media. Leonardo Books. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
- Groys, Boris. 2014. On The New. London: Verso.
- Hromack, Sarah. 2015. “Another ‘C’ Word: On Content and the (Techno) Curatorial.” Red Hook Journal, CCS Bard, Art Publishing & The Web, , March. https://ccs.bard.edu/redhook/another-c-word-on-content-and-the-techno-curatorial/index.html.
- Steyerl, Hito. 2017. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. London: Verso.
- Wallerstein, Wade. 2018. “Circumventing the White Cube: Digital Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Media Landscapes.” Anti-Materia. 2018. https://anti-materia.org/circumventing-the-white-cube.
- Yago, Dena. 2018. “Content Industrial Complex - Journal #89.” E-Flux, no. 89 (March). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/89/181611/content-industrial-complex/.