How Instagram Became the Art World’s Obsession

Over the past eight years, the platform has become an indispensable, all-purpose tool for everything art related

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Aa he boarded a plane for Hong Kong in late 2016, Brett Gorvy, then global head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, posted an image of a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting on his Instagram feed. Upon landing, he found he had three text messages from clients interested in buying the 1982 work, a portrait of Sugar Ray Robinson and part of an upcoming private-sale exhibition. One client swiftly put the painting on hold and purchased it two days later, reportedly for about $24 million. Today, looking back, Gorvy claims it all happened by accident. His post, he explains, “wasn’t about marketing or selling. It was just like, I’ve got something really special, and I’d love the public to share it.” Despite his demurral, this sale—widely regarded as the first major blue-chip Instagram transaction—signaled the power the app had attained in the art world’s upper echelons, where not so long ago dealers staunchly maintained that no true collector would dream of buying from a jpeg.

Over the past eight years, Instagram has become an indispensable, all-purpose tool for everything art related. Dealers increasingly report making sales to collectors whose interest has been piqued by seeing work on the app. For museums and galleries, it’s an essential, cost-effective way to build audiences and market shows. Emerging artists have used it to establish themselves and find collectors, and high-flying art-market stars are embracing it as well, in diverse ways. Hollywood artist-filmmaker Alex Israel (81,800 followers) chronicles his world with photographs, videos and Stories that underline his sun-kissed golden-boy persona, while MacArthur fellow Kara Walker (60,800 followers) often uses her feed to shine light on social causes and underappreciated work. Last year, she posted obliquely in support of the painter Dana Schutz, who’d been widely attacked for her painting of Emmett Till’s dead body, which was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York. Several years ago, Richard Prince famously tapped Instagram as a source of raw material, making prints of posts that featured other artists’ photography—a move that rewarded him with a series of high-profile copyright infringement lawsuits.

Art itself is such a beloved subject on Instagram that #art was the fifth most popular hashtag on the app last year. Yet Instagram’s universal popularity is not just a simple matter of sharing pictures. It’s also a case of thoughtful design—the obsession of the company’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. “Kevin and I have a lot of interest in design and in art and in craft,” says Krieger, now the CTO and an avid art collector himself. When the pair launched Instagram in 2010, he says, “there were a lot of things we did under the hood,” like automatically applying a sharpening filter that made early iPhone photos look beautiful. The carefully researched filters drew on vintage photography, and the famous square format, which recalled medium-format cameras, “helped people crop before they understood the rule of thirds,” Krieger says. “You can center a photo in a square, and it’s going to look fine.”

The answer to Instagram’s popularity also lies partly in Krieger’s particular expertise. As well as being, in the words of a former classmate, a “stud engineer,” Krieger brought the app one of its secret ingredients: an understanding of persuasive technology, the study of how computing products are able to influence human behavior.

Krieger studied the field at Stanford University with one of its pioneering scholars, the behavior scientist BJ Fogg, helping Fogg with a seminal 2007 paper titled “The Behavior Chain for Online Participation: How Successful Web Services Structure Persuasion.” In one of Fogg’s classes, anticipating the widespread use of smartphones, Krieger built a prototype for a program called Send the Sunshine, which would prompt people in bright latitudes to email pictures of the sun to friends in darker climes. (He and his sister had recently moved to the U.S. from Brazil, where they grew up, and she, studying in Chicago, craved light.) Fogg admired the Send the Sunshine concept from the start. “I loved how simple it was,” he recalls, noting that “the pattern of everything that has gone big is to start very simple and focused.” It was the same with Instagram, Fogg says: “Mikey and his team just kept it very, very simple and limited the functionality.”

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