The (Social Media) Lives of the Artists
What will art history say about our Facebook news feeds?
During the dozen or so years that I worked at the Museum of Modern Art my office was located one floor above the Library and Archives. On a regular basis, as I rode up to my office in the elevator and the doors would open in that floor, I would be able to see researchers quietly sitting around, carefully examining letters and other documents, often piecing together the communications that led to important exhibitions and projects of XXth century art. I often thought to myself: when art historians try to piece together the history of our time period, aren’t they going to have a hell of a time trying to hunt down emails and text messages? Isn’t the paper trail, which we now have largely abandoned, a much more reliable document of personal communications?
Which brought me to another question: the day that PhD candidates in art history at the Courtauld, Essex, or at the IFA in, say, 2080, try to piece together a picture of the art community of this period, what will they learn from the surviving social media archives? What will they be able to gather from looking at the posts, feeds, and shared stories from our time?
The rise of social media networks presented an interesting dilemma to the artists who experienced their rise: it became another version of the public square, the artists café, the nightclub, and the exhibition space, all rolled into one. Like those media-savvy artists who used TV and newspapers to forge performative narratives of their persona (such as Dalí, Warhol, Beuys and more) social media feeds appear to offer another narrative avenue to build a “biography as art work” and to make oneself visible as an artist and craft a public identity.
In practice, and as we all well know, it has instead become an amplifying mirror of the various virtues and defects of each of us: a repository of interesting images and discussions, but also of frivolity and outright stupidity; a meeting place for debates and exchange of information, but also a stage of unabashed narcissism, incessant self-promotion, and of impulsive oversharing of every single superficial aspect of someone’s life.
Some artists — and I confess I am increasingly intrigued by this— from very early on refused to join the social media fray, thus (intentionally or not) contributing to the aura of inaccessibility that usually accompanies the idealized and desirable image of an artist. Time will tell if the benefit of not becoming ensnared in the daily chitchat might or not outweigh the disadvantage of not being present in the online world. These days I believe it might not have been such a bad choice after all.
Be as it may, those artists who have decided to utilize social media have taken vastly different approaches. Some wisely refrain from self- promotion and publish almost exclusively political material and commentary (this is the case of Martha Rosler, whose trenchant observations and ferocious criticism are something to behold). Others intertwine the personal experience and self-deprecating commentary while sharing what they are working on (Marc Fischer from Temporary Services is a good example, who humbly discusses his publishing projects intermixed with his teaching and life adventures:
Others are professional social media commentators (as well as art journalists) who capture our minds like Dushko Petrovic, who years ago introduced a now popular “Food Blog” type of aphorism:
And there are those for whose work and their patterns of thinking were born to exist in social media, as is the case of Nina Katchadourian. Nina lives nearby, and she often tends to post (often with hilarious observations) what she observes in the street —often things that I have myself seen around that time— so I often feel accompanied by her running commentary in my own neighborhood strolls. She recently has been sharing her dreams:
Social media feeds are of course the places of common celebrations (birthdays, awards, publications and exhibitions), and it is during those occasions where we most often hear cliché comments such as “it’s on days like this that it is worth it to be on Facebook”. Yet the moments of true interconnectedness where I find the art world collective psyche best invoked is in its moments of mourning. The outpouring of tributes of recently deceased art world figures such as curator Guy Brett and artist David Medalla attest to the significance of their work and the depth of their impact, but also —as it often happens with death— moments of recognition of individuals and legacies that often we did not value properly before. Those are the moments to which that future Courtauld PhD candidate should pay attention, as they reveal the most authentic attempts to identify our collective values as an arts community.
While there have been already infinite texts and books written about art and social media and its role in culture-shaping (in that area I would note the valuable book edited by artist Michael Mandiberg, The Social Media Reader) it might be time to start thinking a bit deeper about the art history of social media, including the many ways in which artists are embracing its platforms for experimentation and not only documentation or representation.
Which leads to the further suspicion that social media, like most movements, might have already reached the end of its art historical life. Many younger artists, uninterested in the pretension of posterity, instead publish images and stories that disappear after 24 hours, gravitating toward an online practice that is in fact fighting to be captured in any way. Others are not even present in social media, opting for other, even more ethereal forms of communication, and some engage in an art practice of the present, not designed to be remembered.
In any case, for those of us who still haven’t left social media we might want to take a minute to ponder: when all our profiles become legacy profiles, when nothing is left of us but our likes and shares, when that future research student starts clicking around your distant life, will we be satisfied by the tales that our feed might tell?
You might want to go back and delete those memes that you might not want to enter the art history books.