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When it comes to Instagram, I was a last adopter.
I had heard of it but was too digitally primitive to understand what it was.
I had been all about Facebook (where I have 99,628 followers) and Twitter (560,000).
Thats when I knew: I got this Instagram and I learned how to make it talk.
My whole life, I have disliked the model of art criticism as a pyramid.
It has been a top-down practice of a few people speaking, often in language no one can understand.
Instagram inverts that model.
I dont delude myself into thinking that Instagram is a venue for traditional art criticism.
Rather, it is a hybrid of opinion, criticism, diary, humor, and a little trolling.
Do I seek to call attention to myself?
I have my own idiot publishing empire that makes no money and is dependent on nothing but me posting.
I am not surewhodoes my posting.
My Instagram self is like my second self, far more gregarious and out there than my real self.
My life is beautiful but very limited.
I see 25 to 30 art shows a week.
Then I go home and worry about writing about them.
Then I have to write.
I do not cross water for art fairs.
Yet my Instagram self can be with others without leaving the house.
I enter the group mind.
I get ideas, have opinions, stand corrected, get offended, get jealous, laugh.
Then I get an idea.
I do this one or two more times.
By then, my writing demons have been lulled.
I make another cup of coffee and sit down to venture to work.
I have been spanked for using Instagram so much.
It is sure to be in the first lines of my obituary, Instagram critic.
But Instagram changed my life.
The platform is changing.
They are very different from the silent pictures with written captions.
I imagine Instagram will soon become antiquated and be as hard to access as MySpace.
Instagram in the last hours of its golden age is a very specific form of communication and interior transport.
I take a stab at post every day.
It is sometimes exhausting.
But as an older art critic, its all I know how to do.
I cannot write if writing is without you.
