{"id":7261,"date":"2016-09-02T09:16:58","date_gmt":"2016-09-02T15:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7261"},"modified":"2016-09-03T08:25:43","modified_gmt":"2016-09-03T14:25:43","slug":"the-art-of-instagram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7261","title":{"rendered":"The art of Instagram"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jacob Mikanowski has, in The Point<\/em>, an invigorating\u00a0essay<\/a> on Instagram, that most civilized of social networks. It begins:<\/p>\n

Of all the\u00a0social networks, it\u2019s the easiest, the simplest, the least full of harm. Let\u2019s put it a different way. Facebook is Sauron. It\u2019s also your mom\u2019s couch, a yoga-center bulletin board, a school bus, a television tuned to every channel. Twitter is Grub Street, a press scrum, the crowd in front of a bar. Reddit is a tin-foil hat and a sewer. Snapchat is hover boards, Rock \u2019em Sock \u2019em Robots and Saturday morning cartoons. Instagram is a garden: curated, pruned, clean and pretty. It lets you be creative, but not too creative; communicate, but without saying too much. No embedding, no links\u2014just photos, captions and hashtags. Elegant. Simple. Twenty-three filters. A crisp square around each frame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Instagram, the charm of which seems fated to eventual extermination\u00a0by Facebook, its charmless owner, is the only social network, other than, maybe, Tumblr, that Jane Austen might have liked. It\u00a0is wrapped in unstated but almost ceremonious codes of conduct. It sometimes seems, as Mikanowski points out, like “an index of mores in the age of self-branding and self-surveillance.” And in its fleeting, multitudinous images we see, as in the bowl of a smoothie-making blender, a history of visual art. “Practically every photograph of nature on Instagram,” writes Mikanowski, by way of example, “stems in one way or another from the impact of the Romantic era.”<\/p>\n

But if Instagram is inspired by what might be termed an artistic impulse \u2014\u00a0“that need to make life itself aesthetic, to ask, over and over ‘What will this look like in a square?'” \u2014 it also subverts that impulse, drains it of its upsetting, dislocating energies: filters it, frames it, captions it. In the busy world of Facebook, Instagram is the museum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacob Mikanowski has, in The Point, an invigorating\u00a0essay on Instagram, that most civilized of social networks. It begins: Of all the\u00a0social networks, it\u2019s the easiest, the simplest, the least full of harm. Let\u2019s put it a different way. Facebook is Sauron. It\u2019s also your mom\u2019s couch, a yoga-center bulletin board, a school bus, a television […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7261"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7273,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7261\/revisions\/7273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}