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Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use, but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year, and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary, not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed, paid membership with connected payment account required. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Tara Ward about her book titled "Appreciation Post" towards an art history of Instagram, published by the University of California Press in 2024. This is a really cool book because it takes something that so many of us engage with all the time, Instagram, and thinks about it from an art history perspective, which I admit is not my natural default perspective, but I'm really intrigued by it now. There's all sorts of things we can draw from this discipline to think about Instagram and what is on Instagram, how things are created for Instagram, how watchers engage with Instagram, and so much more. So Tara, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast to tell us about your book. Well, thank you for having me, and thanks for that lovely introduction, glad it was exciting. I'm wondering if you could continue the theme of introductions, in fact, and introduce yourself a little bit, and explain why you decided to write this book. Sure. I'm an art historian by training, and in particular, I'm a modernist. My dissertation was on early abstraction and cubism and all of these very, very serious things. And I ended up writing a book about Instagram, which was not that different from all of those very high art things. And I got there because I was doing a lot of teaching, not just the history of modern art, but also on visual culture and particularly gender and visual culture, and students kept asking me about it. And so I would let it into the classrooms a little, and some really interesting things would come up. And then I'd let it into the classroom some more, and some really interesting things would come up, and finally I ended up teaching some seminars on it. And it just became really clear that there was a lot to think about, and so this thing that I've been sort of doing as a guilty pleasure somehow became a really interesting way of not only thinking about contemporary culture, but thinking about the history of my discipline. Hmm, I often think that interesting books come out of kind of accidentally accidental discussions in a classroom. And it is, it does seem to be a place where kind of ideas come up that then it's like oh wait hang on there's something here let's keep poking let's keep poking let's keep poking, and we've ended up with this book. So let's get into it. You talk about sort of early on that Instagram might be best understood as quote a structure of the visual. Can you take us through what you mean by this. We're taught to see it's a cultural thing, right, and obviously we get things imported to us through our eyes before that but we're taught to make meaning of what we see culturally. And our history has a lot to do with that we're taught certain forms and they come down to us in various ways. But with Instagram we're seeing so many images so quickly, and so constantly, that it seemed to me that it was starting to adjust that cultural training. And I wanted to think about that as a framework and structure came very naturally to me but very much in a post structuralist mode structures change, but there's something below the visual that's organizing it all. And it seems to be coming from this rapid fire taking in of so many images and trying to make sense of them. Okay, this is I think the scale thing is a useful thing to raise early on in our discussion. And leads me actually quite naturally on to, I have to admit, my really my very first question when I picked up this book. Instagram is massive. The scale is quite daunting. How does one research Instagram, how do you decide what to look at in conducting sort of a piece of research that at some point has to end and become a published book. Yeah, that's a big one and I'm pretty much every academic and most of the art historians that I talked to especially, we're like, but how do you choose what to write on how do you choose what to look at. And, and for me, it was about taking that question and the seeming impossibility of it, and turning it in to part of the process. So I can say that on the most literal level, I was working with a lot of students right so I would just say bring me examples. Here's what I'm thinking about bring the examples we're going to read this article bring me examples. So I was basically using my students to crowd source information. But also, I tried to trick the algorithm a lot. So I spent a lot of time trying to get it to think I was a different type of person. And when it started suggesting things that were very different from who I was or what it had been suggesting before that I knew that I was moving on to different parts of Instagram. On a more theoretical level. Art history is based in this idea that we can see patterns of sort of historical culture and that there is a way of grouping images or objects that helps us, helps us understand what has happened in the world, what those objects mean, who made them, why they made them. But of course, as art historians we're always doing this that with a whole history right so we have a canon passed down to us. And then we tweak it on the sides, but Instagram to me seemed like a possibility of almost starting that from scratch and of course it's not totally from scratch we're in a culture that has come from whole histories. But there wasn't this sense that I have, you know, walking into a classroom to teach modern art, like, well, you have to cover these things right if I didn't cover Picasso and Deschamp it would be a problem. Here, I don't know what those have to cover examples are, but I have a whole host of objects that I get to sort through. And so for me it was a chance to get rid of some of the heritage of my discipline and all of the sort of political problems that come with that heritage and start to ask, can these tools operate on their own, can they operate in new circumstances. And I don't think my examples are perfect, that wasn't quite the point, it was to start this process of sorting through gaining examples and starting a conversation around images without doing that in a way that wasn't just passed down to me. And that was exciting so as scary as it was to enter this endless archive, it was also a moment of really getting to use the tools of my discipline at the most basic and fundamental level. And so I was excited by that. Well, I'm glad you were I'm sure that it would have been very nice if it hadn't been an exciting process so thank you for kind of taking us through. I'm not surprised on the only person who's asked that question. In fact, speaking then about the tools of the discipline and how we might apply them in this case. The tools that kind of we have, I think that has transcended today beyond just the discipline of our history it's something that has entered the broader discourse is the idea of kind of the gaze. And who is gazing and what that means and how we think about kind of what that creates. To what extent are those traditional conceptions of the gaze changed by looking through Instagram even mitigated perhaps by Instagram. So, the gaze, you know, starting from the notion of perspective where the viewer is in a particular position and the images array before them. And then garnering all of these meetings on top of that about knowledge about questions of who is gazing and what they're or who they are gazing at right all of the power dynamics associated with the gaze. The gaze is something that takes some time and also has certain physical structures associated with it. And Instagram doesn't really lend itself to I'm going to stand at a clear distance away from something and look at it and take it in for a long time and garner all that knowledge and have all of that power. But that's still activated because we're in a realm of photography and photography comes from linear perspective and so it comes with all of that heritage and we still feel that feeling that we get from standing in the viewing position. Suddenly we're trying to do that really quickly on a thing that we hold in our phone and we're flipping through. And not only we're flipping through but to see anything you have to stop and adjust it. And so we're looking in a very different way. And there is so Norman Bryson who was one of the key theorists of the gaze sort of points, a few points without the book said maybe there's another way maybe there's a glance. And the glance is something other than the gaze. And Edward Casey, who's a phenomenologist took this up, and the Gant the glance is about the surface it's about the fleeting it's about moving through quickly. And that became a really important model for me for thinking about what it is that we're doing in the act of looking at Instagram. And so the gaze is still there undeniably in the sense that the framework of images is still there. Right. We are still getting perspective, but we've had to speed it up. We've had to do it in ways that aren't about absolute concentration. We have to do it while it's moving. And so another form of looking this glance comes into play. I think this is a really interesting combination of kind of art historical terms and then something that anyone who uses Instagram will be like, Oh, okay that immediately makes sense of my like actual experience. Which I think is so much of what this book is doing is kind of combining those things so that even if one isn't an art historian, this makes a lot of sense. I wonder if we can kind of go further into it though and look look in I suppose more precise detail at some of the examples you discuss in the book. And apply this to for example what happens when we look at like photo journalism on Instagram or perhaps more prevalently travel photos on Instagram. What is Instagram teaching us about how to look at these photos how is Instagram teaching us ways of glancing at these photographs. Yeah, so one of the things that I really wanted to do is to think about what Instagram is giving us and there's so much writing about it rightly so about what horrible things is doing to us. So I'm just to think about why we're going to it and what we're getting out of it and it seems to me that we are getting some form of knowledge it is a different form of knowledge than maybe we tend to think of when I use that word but there's something there. So we're going through images so quickly that we have to begin to understand them very quickly. We get to categorize them. And we all have slightly different categories but you know travel photos are pretty clear. You know when someone's posting a picture of their travels and it can be almost anywhere in the world but we know that category of image and you know to me it's going to be about a lot of sky. Sometimes water reflecting sky and so even if I don't know exactly where you are, I get what a travel landscape photo is. But that is a form of knowledge that I can say oh, these things go into the category of travel photo. These things go into the category of you know pictures of young women, et cetera, et cetera and again we have slightly different ones but we've learned to categorize and to categorize incredibly quickly. But categories aren't the deepest form of knowledge right and we are also categorizing very quickly so the question then for me became. Okay what makes us stop on Instagram and what does that do in relationship to these categories and that brings us back to the glance. So one of the things that Casey talks about with the glance is that the glance is very connected to surprise we are constantly glancing around serving things moving across surfaces. And we stop when something doesn't make sense. And same thing with categories we're flipping through scrolling scrolling scrolling putting things mentally into categories and categories and categories and then something doesn't fit. And that's a surprise. And we can relate to surprises in any number of ways we can write it off, we can think it's a trick. Or we can start to question categories, we can start to question what we thought something was in the first glance. And then it becomes an epistemological problem right what is our knowledge here what does it mean that this goes into the category do I need to reframe the category do I need to reframe what I'm putting in the category. And that set of questions became really interesting to me and sort of surprise as an epistemological question and then also as a political question so a lot of these categories are about identity on Instagram. And so if you're looking for surprises in identity categories, there's a lot of political work that can be done there both for good and for ill. So, you know, we can take the example of travel pictures right so I can immediately put things into categories. It's a travel picture to travel picture I may not even be thinking of where it is. I might not even be able to tell you what continent it is on, but when something stops that glance right and something doesn't quite work out in the travel picture and I have to go wait, what is that. Then I have to start thinking about where this picture is from what I'm expecting of that culture is this picture then undermining changing my expectations of that culture. And, you know, maybe it is, maybe it isn't sometimes it's really opening up things and sometimes it really closes them down and I spent a lot of time in the book thinking about where that happens and where it doesn't, especially in relationship to identity. But there's, there's some knowledge happening there that really, I think tells us in a lot of ways how we're starting to think about what we see and photojournalism becomes a really important place to think about that in the sense that we're supposed to be getting information from these images. So immediately taking them in and just categorizing them doesn't give us what we're used to thinking about as, you know, the photojournalistic image next to the newspaper text that is supposed to be lots and lots of information. And then we're just going, oh, it goes in this category, oh, it goes in this category. So that probably is changing the way we think about news. But we also have these openings where those images can start to, if they surprise us, get us to stop and think about a given category. It doesn't always, but there's hope there. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Hey, it's Kaylee Cuoco for Priceline. Ready to go to your happy place for a happy price? Well, why didn't you say so? Just download the Priceline app right now and save up to 60% on hotels. So whether it's Cousin Kevin's, Kazoo concert in Kansas City, go Kevin or Becky's Bachelor at Bash in Bermuda. You never have to miss a trip ever again. So download the Priceline app today. Your savings are waiting. Go to your happy place for a happy price. Go to your happy price, Priceline. I want to talk more about kind of these expectations that make surprise so effective. Obviously, that relies on us, not just kind of having categories, but also sort of having ideas of like what makes a category, right, rules to sort things into those categories. So what do you think are some of the key visual rules around portraits, particularly on Instagram? And to what extent do these match with the rules that we're used to with kind of portraits before Instagram? Are they changing them? Are they expanding them? Are they maintaining those rules? Yes, all. In the sense that, honestly, in the middle section of the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I call really basic images, which are images of young, white, skinny, middle class, able-bodied, female-presenting young women. And that is a mode of presentation that has a long history in the history of art, right? So that these are largely displays of the body. Certain points of the body are emphasized, and this goes back from you. Those parts of the body and how their array goes back through the classical period, the notion of the S curve very much through the Italian Renaissance, and really gets codified in the French Academy Depoza, where you have the female nude as the great training ground for all art. And it is about a presentation of the body that is designed to make it look like a unit to focus your attention on the torso region and to smooth it out in very precise ways. And so there's a long history here that Instagram is sort of jumping into, and it didn't sort of jump from high art nude to Instagram, right? This goes through advertising images. It goes through even pornography to Instagram, but it's a long line. But here's the thing, not only are we looking at all of these images, but people are making them themselves, so that there is a real training in how to make those images happening. And it's one that I relate to the 19th century artists model. And there are any number of these artists models who were also artists and train themselves to be artists by posing. And so a lot of people now are doing exactly that training themselves how to make these images by posing for them. And that means that they are doing this not just if they immediately fit the category that the history of Western art has shown us is what a female nude looks like, you know, white, a certain body type, etc, etc. But now, all sorts of people can do that. And what happens is that we start to see a push and pull on Instagram, where different identities are using these techniques, and sometimes that yields acceptance and sometimes it doesn't. So I think that Instagram has been really important for trans visibility because it works really well in this sense of, here's what the category of a female presenting woman is supposed to look like in terms of our cultural understanding. And then here's a slightly surprising version of it. And that surprise comes into effect there. And we start to see some shifts, some of the places that works less well because we seem to have cultural problems with acceptance is certainly with larger bodies. That becomes more tension in our acceptance that these are the same kinds of images, but this pushes and pulls in a lot of different directions it also pushes and pulls in terms of race. And so Instagram just sort of sets this operation in motion where we are making images and responding to other images that come from a long history, and then pushing the boundaries and seeing where there's cultural push back and where there's acceptance. This was such a fascinating part of the book to read and kind of think through, as you said at the beginning kind of the answer is all like, yes it's maintaining yes it's expanding yes it's pushing back on to think about kind of what is and being played with especially as you said because you're making it right the opening up of who can create things to be looked at has expanded and that has an impact. I want to talk about some of the other kind of I suppose examples that you mentioned in the book to think through some of these issues. And perhaps first with one that might be very familiar to our listeners before moving to one that perhaps is less of an overlap with the nerdy people who listened to us. First up though for the familiar. Why, and why do you think it's significant that scrolling on Instagram in some instances doing the research for this, reminded you of preparing for graduate school comprehensive exams. So, first because I like physically injured myself in the same way, you know, I, for exams right we're just sitting in the same position and reading and holding things and just looking and just you kept going and kept going and exhausting yourself and I mean, Instagram is a lot like that, especially if you're hooked and you're trying to think it through, you just keep going and you're taking more information and you're literally holding this thing in your hand and I had a carpal tunnel after my exams like tap my friends did and I got it again flipping through Instagram, just trying to see as much as possible, trying to categorize as much as possible. And also that, that quest for speediness that one gets at a certain point in one of one's exams so I don't know I started out like oh I'm going to read everything and really think about it and then by the end it was just like who said this what did they say okay that goes over here great keep going. And, and Instagram has that quality to it right what is this okay it's over here what is this okay it's over here wait I need to stop and look at this one okay and so they're that was part of what made me think this is the same bodily experience this is something familiar am I getting the same kinds of knowledge out of it and certainly it's a different kind of knowledge but it is a whole like a host of information and learning to process all of that information. So that there's a lot of talk about Instagram about you know how much time we're spending on it and how it's a waste in a certain way. But there is also a training to take in information and anybody who's done exams knows that that comes with pros and cons, but there's something of that on Instagram we're getting information and we like that. And that's part of what keeps us going. The connection between those two bodily experiences I think is probably going to resonate with a lot of people and maybe maybe make us think about both of those experiences perhaps a bit differently. Speaking though of the kind of using the tools to comprehend and make sense of so much information I'd love to turn to the example that at least to me was a lot less familiar. My particular bias is someone who doesn't go outside that inside with my books and so I'm not, I admit, a sneaker connoisseur out that is not a thing I spend my time looking at books, you know, less shiny sometimes. But you have gone pretty deep into understanding the world of the sneaker connoisseur on Instagram, and particularly investigating kind of how they use a whole bunch of art historical methods really to make sense of all of the information available. It was something of a new world for me too. But in a part of where it came from was, you know, we're not accepting all of this work that's being done to create these images of them presenting people as artistic skill. So where's our idea of the artist on Instagram. And what I started noticing is a lot of techniques that quite frankly art history has taken steps back from as a contemporary academic discipline started coming up around sneakers. The sneakers are being authenticated. They are going to auction. They are things that people are very aware of minutiae about, and they start collecting and you need to collect the right ones. There's a whole set of Instagram accounts around training you about which ones are the right ones and how to tell the difference and how to tell a forgery from the real sneaker. And it's like, wait, that was something art history was doing. And that really interested me that somehow a whole set of techniques had been picked up wholesale from the art world and placed down in this other setting. And we're functioning in very much the same ways that there were keepers of knowledge that there were people who were authenticators and they're authentic authenticators, and that you took things in to be authenticated. And these are the kinds of stories that you hear in the museum circles all the time, you know, like, oh, is this a real x, y, or z, you know, sorry. And remember sitting and being told stories about authenticating saisons and looking for under paintings that might have actually been saisons, and you get a very similar set of stories amongst people who collect these sneakers. And so I was, I started to wonder how it is that that's happening, but we're importantly why there's no exchange between those two things, and there is starting to be so when a South abuse and a Christie starts auctioning sneakers. There has to be some overlap there. But there's this very clear cultural separation around art for a lot of people until you get into that sneaker head culture, where there is a whole set of artists who are associated with it who are working not just on sneakers, but around sneaker culture, and it is really reinstating a lot of, you know, what used to be the canon and double checking that everything was authenticated, which fascinates me, even though it's not something that I have real personal access to. In fact, I've noticed that I change, I choose the wrong sneakers, right? The ones that I like are not the most expensive one. And that too interested me as someone so deeply trained in a certain aesthetic canon to have all of those tools happening. And yet, I didn't understand what the aesthetic was. I didn't understand what people were seeing. And that's intriguing, right? Because then we have sort of another culture operating in very similar ways. But with different values, and that has to be something we can think about. This is absolutely fascinating. And I think extends as well or leads us on to another aspect of the book that kind of we've been hinting at a little bit. I'd love to make more explicitly part of our conversation. The idea is not just the people creating the stuff that we see on Instagram, but there is also kind of who it's been created for, right? The audience, the people who are assumed to be looking at this. Have this phrase in the book where you say it's the genius of the audience. What do you mean by that? And what are perhaps some key examples we can understand to make sense of this concept? Yeah, so I say that coming from the framework of someone who's done a lot of work in feminist theory and spent a lot of time lecturing on how, you know, genius is something that we need to unpack. It's problematic. There is a limit to who gets to be a genius, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But with this sneaker head culture, there is that same pre feminist theory, pre Marxist theory notion of genius coming back. But it's a genius that is very much about knowing certain references, having its own canon. And the person that really became the emblem of this for me was Virgil Opplo, who made a name for himself by the screen printing Caravaggio on to second hand shirts, right? And, you know, calling attention to people like Duchamp and saying, you know, here look at this. And he always positioned himself as not just an audience member, but a fan. And he referred to it as a kind of teenage fan. Like, I'm doing this for my 17 year old self. And so, for me, he became a symbol of this idea that we're going back to a certain kind of looking, a certain kind of collecting of a canon. And then that can be shown to people as a kind of artistic practice. And he did extraordinary things with that. And reinstated a lot of this idea that there are certain people that you should know when we can position ourselves within that line. And, you know, it's, it's again a give and take a pro and con. On the one hand, we have a return to real interest in some really fantastic, historically important art, and bringing it into contemporary culture and using it again. And that's extraordinary. On the other hand, it is a reinvigoration of this idea of genius that there are certain magical people and do they all happen to be male, probably. Right. Not to mention this is a class issue. And one of the things that really happened with Pablo and the group around him is that this was importantly re raised. So, Pablo was African American and he would mix that cannon that came down to us as the Western cannon with all sorts of references, especially from hip hop culture. And so there was an opening in terms of race, but a return in terms of masculinity, and certainly also in terms of questions of class. So, it's a good one of those moments where we see a continuation, a slight change, but also a telling mixture happening that I just want us to start paying attention to again. And in particular, start paying attention to, for me as an art historian, as something happening to this history of art. I think that's a fabulous way to conclude our discussion on the book, both because it's such a clear example but also because it kind of speaks to this idea of what readers might take away from this, might kind of look at Instagram differently, having been engaged with this work, leaving me really with one, only one final question. And presumably you're going to continue teaching about Instagram. I didn't seem like a topic that's going to go away. Are you going to continue researching Instagram do you have any other projects, either related to this or not that you want to preview. I'm going ultimately the other direction. And I think I wanted things to touch again, or at least the idea of touch so I'm thinking a lot about textiles, which is in some sense a weird transition, but also a continuation of an interest of mind that comes from my interest in modernism to this Instagram project and now to the textiles, which is this weird in between space, where there are a lot of connections with what has come down to us as art capital A. And yet also a lot of things that have been written out of that category. And I always want to play in that realm, I think, of the relationship between the popular and the craft, the non art, and these historical art with capital A spaces. So I'm moving into doing that with textiles and I'm not sure exactly what that means yet, but it's a fun shift, but bodily shift for me to get to touch things and think about how they move around each other and have a physical presence again. All right, well that sounds very intriguing, and thank you for the sneak preview of that. And of course, while you are off touching textiles listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled appreciation post towards an art history of Instagram published by the University of California press in 2024. Tara, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.
