They suffer from censorship on their content and what they post determine their place on Instagram’s algorithm. They must abide by Instagram’s community guidelines in order to be seen by their community and thus, continue to broadcast their art. However, the respect of the community guidelines is rather arbitrary. It is made thanks to IA, which tend to delete content without a real employee checking what is censored or not. During our inquiry, we created a Instagram account only posting pictures of animals we took and asked our relatives to report it. Within minutes, publications were already deleted, and within hours the Instagram account was taken down, even though it respected every rule asked by Instagram. Thus, this lack of control on censorship is having huge consequences on artists, for whom Instagram often enables them to get a living. If their Instagram accounts was to be deleted or some of their posts, they might not be able to get a living.
Nevertheless, we’ve been surprised to see that in most cases, artists posting their creations on Instagram haven’t felt restricted by the square format or the similarity of each account. Instead, most of them assured that this constraint was what great about it since they were all able to create their digital artistic gallery from scratch, with the same basis - no matter how much they were known (@noirdeligne). However, Instagram - contrary to Facebook - isn’t enabling content creators to gain money from the platform. They can only boost their sales on their website by putting it on their account or make a collaboration with a brand. Artists such as Emir Shiro emphasized how precious it would be if Instagram was to monetize artistic Instagram accounts, even if it would mean more advertising. It’s hard for artists to live from their hobby, even though they sometimes have thousands of followers. Yet, they are still those that are making the platform so lively.
Even if people have the same artistic account on Instagram, we’ve still observed that some artists managed to appropriate the platform by playing on both its restrictions and rules. Some artists are customizing their feed by cutting pictures on several posts for instance, whereas some others are getting around the platform’s rules as a way to protest: @genderless_nipples is asking for equality regarding women’s and men’s nipples on the platform, whereas erotic artistic accounts are being explicit in order to defend that nudity should be considered as art and thus, authorized. Instagram artists are often using their art and their community to share messages, which is made possible thanks to the platform which is permitting them to reach a wider audience. See the Instagram account of the Istanbul photographer Uğur Gallenkuş for instance.
Contrary to what we believed before delving into our inquiry, artists we’ve interviewed and users of the platform both contested that art made on Instagram could be considered as such. They all emphasized that artists were closely tied with reality and that Instagram was working well as a way to present an artistic style, but not as something on which to create. This may be because we didn’t interview many artists which created an new form of art thanks to Instagram: @fvckrender for instance, with whom we exchanged a few DMs on the platform was against this belief because his work as an artist is to create Instagram filters. Instagram is according to him, “Instagram is for him a canva, and photoshop his brush”, but as we saw on our survey, people seem not to be ready to consider art this way. Even if the artistic side of his activity could be questioned, he still has 401 000 followers, an agent and his artistic creations need a lot of digital and artistic competencies. On a broader extent, by sharing their art on Instagram, artists questioned its very definition itself in an ever growing digital world. Art is, may be because of Instagram, becoming more digital than ever.
The only thing on which our interviewees all agreed on is the fact that Instagram could be considered as a digital artistic gallery: 66% of our respondents claimed that they had tried at least once to use Instagram as an artistic device. Moreover, 98.2% of them declared that they were following artists on Instagram. 94% of them were sure that Instagram enabled certain types of art to be more easily expressed, as make-up art or tattoo art for instance. For some of them, Instagram is the only way they are consuming art: they don’t go to exhibitions, weren’t knowing the artists they are following before signing up on the platform or weren’t interested in a particular type of art before discovering it there. Thus, Instagram is very valuable tool for artists, which are more easily able to broadcast their art thanks to it. They can also target an audience that will be interested by their content. However, we may wonder if Instagram hasn’t been responsible of reducing the engagement of people interested in art in real life: museums have never been so empty according to Les Échos and are expressing a need to be digital (Atelier des Lumières in Paris for example). It’s not difficult to understand why: why would people take time to discover an exhibition when they can give it a like on Instagram?
Our main finding is related to the other five: no matter what, artists on Instagram are depending on the platform and not the other way around. Whether it be in terms of legal issues, on the format or to gain followers, artists must abide with the system implied by Instagram if they want to succeed. They must be deprived of some of their liberties as artists in order for their art to be widely seen. Yes, customization is possible through Instagram, but this comes with a price and few risks: being censored, seeing an time-paying Instagram account being deleted, seeing somebody else using our creations and even granting Instagram some of our intellectual property. What is problematic is that Instagram artists aren’t always aware of those conditions, especially at their beginnings on the platform.