What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Tara Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalizes on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today.
Tara Ward is an art historian specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture. She is editor of Gender and Popular Culture: A Visual Study, and her work has been published by the Guggenheim Museum, Oxford Art Journal, and Excursions.
"Tara Ward presents social media as an art historical intervention and in the process makes us look anew at our discipline and at ourselves."—Dana E. Katz, Professor of Art History and Humanities, Reed College
"In this groundbreaking study—the first sustained art historical account of Instagram—Tara Ward presents social media as a crucial new visual archive, platform, and medium. Appreciation Post brilliantly theorizes how familiar concepts, from aura to the gaze, look profoundly different in a digital age of endless scrolling, liking, clicking, and sharing."—John R. Blakinger, Endowed Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Arkansas
322 pp.6 x 9Illus: 28 color illus.
9780520398771$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2024