The discourse on digital curation, post-internet practices and the circulation of images online has a rich history and has often been interpreted through a network lens with a particular attention to its varying nodes (Cook and Graham 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 to challenge dominant techno-capitalist platform paradigms.
The smart phone with its convergence of phone, camera, screen, and network fundamentally changed the landscape of media circulation and distribution and expanded art documentation beyond the realm of traditional cultural institutions (Sluis 2022, 27). Subsequently, social media and the proliferation of visual content came with curatorial limits and lack of control associated 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). At the same time, there is a widespread tendency in art institutions towards “the exhibition as a content farm” to describe the proliferation of artworks widely documented online – and often that digital quality of feed spam and the demand for attention outside of the institutional context “proves its very status as art.” (Yago 2018)
In this context, rather than thinking about crisis in political imagination and against the impossibility of new narratives within techno-capitalist content platforms, I propose a reading of the relationship between form and content production on social media as a form of an archive. Specifically, I position art-as-content on Instagram as a mechanisms of cultural innovation through Boris Groys’ theoretical lens.
Groys believes that value is attached to cultural objects through “cultural archives” -- public institutions such as museums, universities, libraries, archives etc. which structure and store cultural works in a particular value hierarchy. At the same time, cultural innovation is always achieved via a rational and “strategic” synthesis of “positive” and “negative adaptation” to the valorised cultural tradition (Groys 2014, 108) – the new is still defined in its position against the old. Groys suggest that there is a shifting value line separating the archives from the “profane realm” – what is thought to be vulgar, valueless, or extra-cultural (Groys 2014, 64).
In this conceptual framework, the process of cultural innovation as the production of the new (not as the new per se) is realised by movement from the profane space (“a reservoir for potential new cultural values”) to the archives themselves. In a sense, a process of institutionalisation through the mobility of values. Groys exemplifies this with the ready-made and its historical revaluation to become a dominant aesthetic (Groys 2014, 95). He observes that this process changes and modifies value hierarchies in the archives through the valorisation of the profane (Groys 2014, 147).
Following this conceptual framework, the profanity and vulgarity of “content” is re-valued in two ways. Firstly, by its integration into artistic performances the feed becomes a meaningful cultural objects, a sort of ready-made, a form for the presentation of artistic work. Secondly, by the use of the profile page by artists as a self-curated archive and a grid for documenting work.
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/.