In April of 2017, the Museum of Ice Cream took Los Angeles by storm. Teenagers and millennials alike flocked to the pop-up to take photos in the iconic jumbo-sized sprinkle pool and pose in a cloud of painted bananas suspended in the air. Every visit was punctuated by the purchase of an equally effervescent ice cream cone, and every room in the pop-up was overwhelmingly pink.
Following the massive success of the Museum of Ice Cream, a yellow counterpart spawned across the way later that November, named The Happy Place. Soon, it was ordained the “most Instagrammable museum in America” by major publications, and Angelenos came in thousands to take their shot inside of the monochromatic yellow bathtub surrounded by floor-to-ceiling rubber duckies.
The cultural moment of overtly Instagrammable pop-ups like these has largely passed. But in their prime, these venues capitalized on a growing interest among individual social media users to curate their lives for the feed. Before the existence of such pop-ups, this visual curation could only happen through photos taken on beautiful trips, nice evenings out, or amongst stunning landscapes. The Museum of Ice Cream and its ideological successors fast-tracked this process, creating a venue where the sole purpose was the production of these aesthetic photographs.
But nearly ten years later, places like the Museum of Ice Cream have become decidedly cheugy as audiences demand something beyond pure aesthetics, and thus Instagram virality looks different than before. In 2023, the SF Museum of Modern Art exhibited Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love, the wildly popular exhibition that garnered over 170,000 visitors in its six-month run. The exhibit’s Infinity Mirror Rooms propelled its virality, as they translated well to mirror selfies that could then be posted on Instagram.
Earlier this year, the Hospital of Emotions opened in the abandoned St. Vincent Medical Center in L.A. Curator Yaara Sachs held an open call for artists to fill the 80 rooms of the abandoned hospital, giving each one a stipend of up to $10,000 to make their exhibition. Sachs made sure to select both established and upcoming artists, and donated a portion of the proceeds to the St. Vincent Behavioral Institute that will take over the hospital in 2028.
The exhibition was divided into the Compassion Department, the Fear Department, the Resilience Department, the Joy Department, and the Sadness Department, mimicking a hospital’s actual departmental divisions. Sach’s Hospital played on the commonly held belief that medicine has lost its sense of empathy by literally reinserting emotion into the medical space and making the hospital a site for artistic expression. But although there were definitely many meaningful rooms in the Hospital of Emotions, their resonance was undercut by the fact that their departmental categorization tells viewers what they are supposed to feel before they even see it, another symptom of the Instagram era.
The Instagram-ification of museums is a fraught issue, especially in our current cultural landscape where engagement with the arts is declining. On one hand, Instagram virality undoubtedly brings new visitors into museums, potentially causing them to engage with art in a meaningful way. On the other hand, exhibits synonymous with Instagram virality rarely incite meaningful engagement, since the purpose of attendance is simply to take a photograph.
“Instagrammability” is an immediate, uncomplicated aesthetic beauty, an adjective for something that can be registered as art within the split second that an Instagram user scrolls past it on their feed. But in pandering to social media’s logic of immediate pleasure and completely transparent meaning, art can lose much of its transformative power, which more often than not occurs through the laborious act of emotional and intellectual engagement with a piece.
The post How Instagram Changed Museums and the Way We Experience Art appeared first on LAmag.
