Art in the Age of Instagram | Jia Jia Fei | TEDxMarthasVineyard

[Music] [Applause] the image you're looking at here is a reproduction of a digital photograph of the Solomon AR gugenheim Museum where I work on 5th Avenue in 89th Street in New York City it's just one of the millions of digital and actual photographs that have been produced of this iconic Frank Lord W design building and according to Google sites map of photo heat mapping technology it's also one of the most photographed sites in the world the image you're looking at here is the interior of the museum during one of our exhibitions in the summer of 2013 of the light and space artist James Terell as someone who actually saw this exhibition on my own I was physically there I can tell you the repr uction of the actual work of art does no justice to the actual experience when you're actually in the museum and for the artist he's described his work as non viic any reproduction of that image is less than the experience itself and for that reason he requested that visitors not take pictures inside the museum he did not want mobile devices glowing mobile devices to impede your EXP experience of this light experience within the museum the results of our social media campaign however indicated the exact opposite with more than 5,000 photos on Instagram shared with the hash Terrell and it was also the most instagramed exhibition in our history this proved that obviously visitors come to museums to look at pictures and they also want to take pictures and in the age of the internet they put these pictures online on social media sites the images you're seeing here are the images on Instagram that have been illegally uploaded and disseminated um despite our warnings um and as someone who manages social media for the museum I'm interested in what it means to have these digital devices inside galleries inside these educational spaces and how the digital reproduction of these images changes the way we look at Art and the way we learn about art so does the rapid digitization of images reduce the experience you have is it reductive or does it expand the meaning of that experience and object in an entirely new form thereby reaching millions of people outside of the physical space who could never physically come to the museum in the history of art the work of art is now a social object in the the future I predict that the the digitization of the work of art will completely change the physical object and dematerialize it and turn it into a social object completely defined by the conversation happening around it rather than the The Experience itself for everyone who came to the museum their first interaction with art was completely digital they saw it online they saw it on their phones or they saw it because their friends were there and they shared it online this is an image of the interior of the Museum without the James Char installation you can see that visitors are there with their mobile phones they're taking pictures and not only are they taking pictures of art they're taking pictures of themselves Within These spaces so in the pre-digital photography era the message was this is what I'm seeing I have seen and today the message is I was there I came I saw and I selfied so when someone takes an image and puts it online they're contributing to a digital economy in the age of the internet when a piece of content is shared online the value of that content increases not only for the museum and the person but the World At Large so the more you share the the greater the value of that content and why do we share this activity is all ingrained within our brain brains social media sites are predicated on the idea of positive reinforcement every like follow every comment triggers a dose of serotonin in our brains which is the chemical that makes you happy and like any pleasure seeking activity the more you share the more you actually become happy the more you're addicted so social media addiction is also real phenomenon that impacts all of us on a global scale so according to the Pew internet Research Center 74% of Internet users within the United States are now on social media sites on a global scale the population of the number of people who use Facebook is now more than the number of people who live in China and India um globally apps such as WhatsApp WeChat LinkedIn are now surpassing the population of the United States and this is followed by Instagram Twitter and Snapchat who aren't even far behind so among all of the internet users 54% of them post original photos or videos that they take themselves 47% of them repost photos or videos that they find online on social media sharing sites on Instagram alone 70 million photos are posted per day and this is all coming at a critical mass because within the last two years we've produced 90% of the world's data so the question of technology and what it means for the art object isn't new to the history of art or the study of Art in 1936 the German art critic Walter Benyamin wrote in his seminal essay the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction that that which Withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of a work of art his warning was a warning about fear the fear of reproduction the fear that cameras even in such an early stage in the history of photography cameras were impeding your view of actually experiencing the object so the idea of visitors making images inside galleries is also not new visitors have been sketching inside museums for years and they've been taking pictures with regular cameras not just mobile devices so this is a photograph by the photographer ifred Eisen stat who's a Martha Martha's Vineyard local of two teenagers ing within the galleries of the Toledo Museum of Art in the 1930s also not new is the way we use art to communicate very common principles and ideas throughout the history of art art is there to ask some of life's most difficult questions who are we how did we get here and what does it all mean for Vincent Van go he examined himself through self-portraiture today that act takes in form of selfies and these are Selfies that visitors have taken in front of Vincent Bango self-portraiture Monae is most known for his Landscapes and fascination with light through abstract painting and today I would argue this is no different than our desire to express and represent the sunsets or sunrises we're seeing on Instagram seison was interested in still life painted food and for his entire career and today that contemporary interpretation is what you see when you search for food porn on Instagram so what's the difference between the images you see online and the images that you see in mums for centuries museums have been an authority when it comes to the interpretation of art artists art movements and all the intellectual content that is surrounded by that individual work of art in the traditional publishing model museums were the experts that disseminated content and were probably one of the last culturally acceptable institutions that can dedicate resources to a tremendous amount of research but the internet today is now a two-way stream of information anyone has permission to upload images online edit articles on Wikipedia we used to trust museums in the way that we trust dictionaries in encyclopedias but in the age when Wikipedia is now eclipsing the encyclopedia do museums still matter the reality is we live in a Google world view so when you search for an image online you're searching on Google you're trying to find the you know quickest way to to find what you're looking for what happens when the museum that owns that object isn't there and it's vanished within the history of art from a digital perspective so case in point this is a painting by Kandinsky in the Guggenheim collection the Guggenheim owns more than 1 15 works by this artist more than any other artist um in the world but when you do a quick Google search you type in Kandinsky you see a range of images with varying colors and crops many of which are incorrect you see no images within the top results that are from our website and this isn't just our Museum take a look at star night which is in the Museum of Modern Art collection also by Van go um you'll see that none of the top images are actually from moma.org again the iconic Mona Lisa which you'll see in person in the Lou completely vanishes from a digital perspective because none of the images you see on Google are actually from the L website so why is it that in the age of mechanical and internet and the internet um why is it that museums have essentially fallen off the face of the Earth it's because of the notion of fear the fear of reproduction the fear of copyright the fear of artist Estates and what's going to happen if we allow our information to go online and become disseminated and if there's one message from my talk today it's fear not in the age of the internet we have only something to gain by creating access opening up access to photography opening up access to our intellectual content and making these images available for the public I'm often asked will the digital experience and the digital representation of the museum online through social media ever replace the on-site physical experience just because we're posting images to our Instagram we have millions of followers will that ever replace the actual experience of people coming to the museum and going back into the James Terrell exhibition you'll see that this exhibition with an incredible digital footprint also brought in over 420,000 visitors who wanted to come to the museum to see it for themselves because they saw it on Instagram so the question remains we're living in an age of unprecedented access to Art because of the internet but what is the role of the museum within this narrative do we risk the social media sites and the immense amount of data that's being uploaded online images shared sometimes incorrectly without the proper attributions without captions without any of the didactic materials that's associated with it do we risk social media essentially driving the course of art history is is that okay so the task today remains that we have to reclaim our job as the authority and as the expert within this Google worldview through making our images available online through opening up access through uploading our textbooks and catalogs and making this information free for everybody on the internet we're opening up the opportunity for anyone in the world with an internet connection to learn about art which is essentially the mission of the museum to help you look at pictures and interpret what they mean and how they create meaning within your life so by opening up access we open up the disc for art and we can lead that discourse and we open up visual Literacy for all thank [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 230,723

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Art, Apps, Culture, Internet, Museums, Social Media

Id: 8DLNFDQt8Pc

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2016