What Makes Up Art On Instagram?

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, and instead went with #photography. Using this hashtag to search for this kind of art resulted in over 529 million posts of its own.

Overall, the prior results I found weren’t too surprising, considering that Instagram is a digital platform with the purpose of posting digital media that typically comes in the form of images. Art in the form of film and music, while possible to post on Instagram, came up far less often while browsing. Searching for either through hashtags provided a vast amount of results, but most were merely related images/screencaps rather than actual self-produced content. Rivaling social media platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud are far more dominant when it comes to these categories.

Now that I have established that illustrations and photography are the primary media that makes up Instagram art, I would like to dedicate my next two blog posts to covering each of them in detail.