Instagram: A Platform for Artists

As mentioned in my last post, I will be going over the two most prominent kinds of art that are found on Instagram: illustrations and photography. This week, I’ll start by exploring the types of content that make up illustrations. Such Illustrations aren’t produced through one particular medium, with artists across the platform specializing in a variety of tools and methods that work towards making their content unique. However, I’d like to primarily focus on digitally-produced works this week, as the physical ones require photography to capture.  One of the most common approaches towards being an artist on Instagram is to post illustrations that have been produced through digital means. An advantage that this approach has over other more traditional means of illustrating is that the artists can directly upload their content straight to Instagram. Any kind of physical art, such as sketches or paintings, would have to be photographed first; these added processes add additional wo...

To get this blog kicked off, I wanted to start by identifying the most common kinds of art that one would expect to find on Instagram. To determine this, I decided to search for #art under the explore page, as doing so would bring up all of the latest and trending posts that happen to fall under this broad category. Doing so resulted in a massive catalog of 598 million posts, with the content that made up these posts falling primarily under illustration, photography, and a combination of both. This distribution of content applied to both the top posts and most recent posts under this hashtag, with the majority consisting of digital illustrations or physical ones that were captured with a camera. I was at first surprised by the fact that photography didn’t make up the majority of the results, considering how the platform inherently seems to favor photography as a medium. However, I soon considered that many posters of these works likely omitted using #art to categorize their content...

Hi! I’m going to be using this blog to explore how Instagram is being utilized as a platform for artists. Today, Instagram is one of the biggest platforms for sharing art, hosting an expansive collection of works that only continues to grow.  Credit: @vexx (Instagram) But what makes this Instagram particularly so compelling to artists? I hope to solve this question by examining some of its specific users, the kind of art they post, and the features that they utilize to share their content. As I continue this blog throughout the semester, I plan to begin focusing on how businesses, organizations, and professionals have been able to take advantage of this platform and art-related media to market their ideas, products, and brands to targeted audiences.  I am excited to conduct this blog, with the topics of social media and art being of great interest to me. Seeing as how I am going to be creating and running my own art-related Instagram account for my Digital Enga...