Democratic art

The Insta*art exhibition highlights Tel Aviv’s wholesale adoption of Internet culture.

By SAM SOKOL
Insta-art (photo credit: Sam Sokol)
Insta-art
(photo credit: Sam Sokol)
In a cavernous storage facility on the Jaffa waterfront, a musty space epitomizing retro industrial chic, Tel Avivians are taking in a new sort of art show.
Traditionally the arts are the last thing you would expect to see crowd-sourced, and photography exhibits, like any other art show, would usually showcase the work of a select few professionals. However, in the postindustrial space that houses the new Insta*art exhibition that closed last week, one can find one of the finest examples of the democratization of art in the Western world.
While photography – quality photography – still requires training and skills in composing and choosing shots, the emergence of the cellphone camera – what Wired magazine terms iPhonography – has radically changed the way we view the visual arts.
Instagram, a company that Facebook recently purchased for $1 billion, developed an eponymous camera app, and its pictures appear, unframed, on the walls of this former warehouse.
A cross between a set of camera filters and a full- fledged social network, Instagram allows its users to snap pictures that can then be edited with a variety of retro filters and uploaded straight from their phones for their friends’ perusal.
“Pre-Instagram, you could text a photo or email it from your smartphone and eventually post it on Flickr, but that all took effort,” writes Jonathan Keats in Wired. “Instagram has made sharing compulsively easy.”
This app, he explains, is fundamentally changing the way people approach photography.
With more than 27 million users snapping and sharing, he isn’t exaggerating.
Now, in Tel Aviv, a city known for its avant-garde lifestyles and its newfound role as the “Silicon Wadi” of the Middle East, crowd-sourced images representing different aspects of life in the city grace the walls, usually with a Twitter handle or hashtag beneath them in place of the plaquethat one would find at a traditional art show.
Featuring more than 300 professional and amateur photographers, the exhibit showcases such categories as #me, #UrbanTLV, #Foodporn and #Moments. The category names, of course, use the # symbol to denote easily searchable topics on micro-blogging site Twitter, another Web 2.0 staple that the Tel Aviv crowd has enthusiastically adopted.
WHEN I arrive, the exhibition is almost empty, save for an elderly Orthodox man perusing a wall of self-portraits and a young family slowly ambulating around the large room. With a sitting area of couches and divans in the center and nothing else to fill the middle of the grand space, Insta*art seems forlorn and unpopular. Asking one of the curators, I am told that I have come at the wrong time, the exhibition being more popular during the evenings, and that the first several days brought large crowds.
This is the second Insta*art exhibition to be held in Tel Aviv, and online video of the first, which took place last year at the Rothschild 12 bar, shows a large crowd of urban hipsters, art fanciers and technologists mingling and admiring the art.
The show highlights the diverse and sometimes conflicting forces that make up the great tapestry of Tel Aviv.
Among those whose images are on display are a man wearing a prayer shawl and tefillin praying in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, a Sudanese refugee holding up a sign at a protest against Israel’s decision to deport illegal migrants and a woman breastfeeding her child in the bath. In a juxtaposition of two different Tel Aviv lifestyle ideals, a picture of a nude man sitting in a bath with his legs crossed sits next to a photograph of two ultra- Orthodox women in modest dress pushing carriages along the water at a local beach.
The spirituality and the nudity, the pictures of Palestinian flags and the images of IDF soldiers, the images of simple fishing boats and of massive corporate-owned skyscrapers, all bring to the foreground the varied people and ideologies that have come together to make Tel Aviv the city that it is.
The crowd-sourced nature of the exhibit, as well as its specific content, emphasize the importance of the little guy in a metropolis that can sometimes make one feel small and insignificant.
Instagram and TimeOut Tel Aviv’s art show both highlight how technology, which can have some seriously dehumanizing effects, can also give us a newfound appreciation of the individual and his or her role in society – and that is priceless.