Instagram Aestheticism: A Foodie Investigation into Postmodernism’s Micro Revolution in Instagram

Though Instagram, invented in 2010, has not had enough time to establish a canonical repertoire of Instagrammers, it should nonetheless be taken seriously as a part of Art History. It is especially relevant in Post-Modernism’s most recent incarceration, Participatory Art and Relational Aesthetic Practices, in which the social interactions prompted by a work become its content. Often called Relational art, the work literally engages the public in some way” (Robertson). These artists have roots in the Conceptual art of the 1960s, and, with the evolution of digital technology and social media platforms, have expanded the level of audience participation in the Participatory and the Relational art forms (Pohl, 574). Artists who are “attracted by the immediacy and connectivity of globally networked media often create online projects that invite social interaction.” In response to the plethora of Participatory art stemming from social media platforms, “relational aesthetics has developed (and been contested) as a critical theory for analyzing and evaluating such undertakings” (Robertson). For posts on Instagram to be taken seriously in the development of Postmodernist Art and in the Realm of Art history, this language can be constructed in order to analyze and evaluate them.

I am primarily concerned with the aesthetic language of food photography in posts on Instagram by amateur Instagrammers, who are bloggers, foodies, and Influencers rather than professional chefs or magazine editors. First, this language will be parsed out, specifically through theories of Transactional Glancing and the Attention Economy, the glance has developed into the dominant mode of seeing (Zulli, 11). These theories allow us to understand that in Participatory art, attention is the commodity rather than the art itself, making Participatory art in general, and art on a social media platform like Instagram, especially, a revolutionary development in Art History. Posts on Instagram, then, are not separate from this development, which may be assumed to only affect the realm of Fine Art. Food photos on Instagram reveal the importance of the relationship between branding, the market, and artistic aesthetics. Food photos follow similar trends, aesthetic reactions, aesthetic choices, and Participatory mediums as much Modern and Postmodern Fine Art, while their value, platform, and viewing practices differ into a purely digital realm in the digital attention economy. While I do not think that posts on instagram should be conflated with Fine Art --capital F capital A -- photography, it is still fine art that should be recognized as an important and contributing factor to discussions in Art History. In evaluating the aesthetic choices of Instagram photos with language used to analyze Modernist painting and fine art photography, I will show the relevance of Instagram photos in the trajectory of Art History. Then, by contextualizing the Instagram posts in the digital attention economy, I will suggest how this relevance still holds water in the Art History realm despite different modes of seeing and attributed values.

Like Fine Art photography, certain aesthetic characteristics used to evaluate and compare photos can be used to describe those on Instagram, those of which include color palette, color saturation, number of segments, brightness, composition, camera type, sharpness, and focus. With Instagram, characteristics like edge density, edge distribution, minimum size of a bounding box, and caption contribute to the photos’ total affect. With food photos, specifically, their ability to grab attention or be aesthetically impactful, or, in other words, their value in the Attention Economy, can be analyzed by the food’s characteristics, as well as the photo’s. Does the plate convey tastiness? Fillingness? Healthiness? Does it arouse or leave an impression? Color Variety in Instagram photos are further complicated by the ability of using filters and the coherence of a single photo in the context of the user’s feed. Successful (read: highly followed and/or endorsed) users strategically curate their feeds to correspond with the range of posts as a whole, thus both foreshadowing how their specific feed will look and creating, filtering, posing, and posting with intention after such a decision has been reached. Each successful instagrammer, then, acts as their own exhibitionist or curator to create a cohesive, aesthetically cohesive, consistent, engaging, and predictable feed.

Modernist Abstract Expressionism provides a useful vocabulary to talk about food trends on Instagram in 2016 and 2017, notably the wild, colorful, opulent treats invented solely to be photographed and posted on Instagram.A key early Abstract Expressionist, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866-1944) relationship to art and views on Expressionism are easily translatable to the Instagram food movement for their commitment to color, crafting, and embracing of technology (Peng and Jemmott III, 317). He produced radically abstract work using gestural and color field techniques that set out to understand the spiritual in art and concepts of cosmic transcendence and regeneration (Pohl, 418). In his book, On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky celebrates the expressive elements of color and shapes freed from associations with any particular objects (Pohl, 371). In his work "Squares with Concentric Circles," 1913, for example, the painting follows its titicular promise with richly saturated colors and without associative objects. Coincidentally, the painting reflects highly consistent Instagrammers’ feeds, with the square border and circles repeating colorfully throughout the piece. Furthermore, the logic of Kandinsky’s art movement translates well to Instagram: his affinity for crafts is reminiscent of the reclamation of crafts, cooking, and baking -- activities gendered as feminine and therefore not seriously artistic -- by women who subsidize or earn their income through prolific instagram accounts; his unification of art and technology is essential for a medium like Instagram to becomes ubiquitous in modern culture; his creative approach to art did not require a practice towards “solely practical pursuits,” which may give legitimacy to the creative labor that goes into the production of serious bloggers’ accounts.

Additionally, both the “freedom” from association that Kandinsky stresses is art-worthy is apparent in the food movement of 2015-17, where feeds were, and largely still are, filled with colorful, sugary affronts to god in the shape of Freakshakes, Mermaid Toast, Psychedelic Smoothie Bowls, Unicorn Lattes, Iridescent Gravy, and Rainbow Bagels. These foods are not practical, meaning that they are not nutritiously sound, often financially inaccessible, or convenient to make. Rather, it is their shock value, impenitent indulgence, and photogenic nature that primes them for this medium. They also demand a practiced amount of manipulation to create this shock value, which “sets the tone for the whole aesthetic movement.” They are “bright, flooded with light and popping with flashes of color, vibrancy, and life,” which give “levity” to the otherwise “(wonderfully) butter-heavy, cloyingly sweet” foods themselves (Tandoh, 2016). As Ruby Tandoh writes in The Guardian in 2016, these profitable, professional food bloggers and Instagrammers “amass huge amounts of interaction from followers, and spawn food trends of their own. First come the savvy Instagrammers, then the foodie public, and then, once we have all moved on to something new, the traditional food press.” One would be remiss to focus solely on the marketability of these food-creations; their role as food indicates a greater implication in food itself. They push the limits of what food can be and blur the line between art and food outside of the realm of haute-cuisine. To analyze this, it is useful to take a cue from Barnett Newman, the canonical colorfield painter who wrote in 1948 on the massive works of Abstract Expressionist artists that, “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting” (Newman qtd in Pohl, 476). Indeed, their “action paintings” pivoted sharply away from the “studied refinement” of European art in favor those that were instead bold, raw, and aggressive ones (Pohl, 476). Likewise, these extravagant foods turn 180 degrees from typical notions of food to edible artworks. Glitter and Crayola colors were no longer relegated to crafts, but to breakfast. In doing so, they reflect the “idea that by breaking norms, nature becomes an aesthetic cosmopolitan experience” (Emontspool and Georgi, 316). Furthermore, these foods-in-drag were a fun reaction to increased representation of and legislation in favor of LGBTQIA+ Americans, specifically following the Federal Legalization of Gay Marriage in the US in 2015, after which bloggers promoted creations representing the rainbow flag, a representation of LGBTQIA+ pride. As Dana Seitler writes of the “lushly colored images of LGBTQ subjects” of queer photographers Tommy Ray Carland and Catherine Opie, it is their formal strategies that “produce queerness in a specific way” (48). Beyond signifying the Rainbow flag itself, these foods establish “sensual enjoyment” and “pleasures grounded in the materiality of the sensate world” in order to create “sensual dimensions of aesthetic experience [that] surpass and evade the conditions of rationality” (Seitler, 49). Food becomes pleasurable for its frivolity, extravagance, extensive preparation, and ability to demand attention.

The aesthetic qualities of a successful Instagram are rooted in the mindset of being attractive. As Adeline Waugh, one of the initial creators of the rainbow food trend, says in her interview with The New York Times in 2017, she was experimenting with natural food dye -- specifically beetroot -- to “add a pop of color” to her photos. “I was never intending to start a trend,” she says, but after she posted it, her followers crowned it with the unicorn label. Then, she explains, all of a sudden all these people were making it and tagging it, and now the unicorn thing has gotten just insane.” Her inclination to experiment with color is one scientifically backed, too. In a 2018 study examining the aesthetic appeal of a diversity of food photographs (and their subsequently generated likes and comments) in an artificial newsfeed mimicking Instagram’s, researchers found that photos using more arousing colors were reported to be more aesthetically attractive and received higher sharing intention, and higher levels of “likes” (Peng and Jemmott, 2018).

These sugary, colorful affronts to god iconic to Instagram posts of 2015-17 are met with a stark resistance later in 2017. Foodie Instagrammers and bloggers, reacting to the use of beet juice, spirulina and matcha powder, and freeze-dried fruits -- often used to dye psychedelic smoothie bowls -- were replaced with potent charcoal powder. Lemonade, hamburger buns, macarons, pizza crusts, soft serve, and smoothie bowls reflected a noire hue and brought a crisp and subdued, rather than somber, aesthetic to Instagram feeds. Similarly, while Minimalist artists in the mid-1950s “rejected the spontaneity and ambiguity of the gestural abstractionists for an art of clarity, simplicity, and control” (Pohl, 509), charcoal-infused foods became rainbow and glitter foods’ antithesis. Though off the color spectrum, charcoal treats had a similar impact to their kaleidoscopal counterparts by changing the nature of what appetizing foods look like. The color black in meals is traditionally affiliated with burnt, and therefore inedible, food, rather than desirable and aesthetically intriguing -- Instagrammable -- items. This intrigue is particularly norm-breaking because of its material characteristics. Therefore, “consuming nature in a novel aesthetic form . . . becomes a cosmopolitan experience [for] discovering a foreign environment for which the consumers lack orientation points” and hence can “feel like explorers (Emontspool and Georgi, 316). If fantastically-themed foods allowed Abstract Expressionists an “escape from the everyday world into a rarified, aesthetic world of line and color,” charcoal-tinged foods provided shock value for their color, emphasizing, like Minimalist works, “the materials and colors of that everyday, industrial world” that had now become edible (Pohl, 512). However, “some minimalist photos featuring a prominent object placed in a simple background (usually black and white) were rated as aesthetically pleasing, but might seem less evoking or impressive, lacking the visual impacts to stand out in newsfeed” (Peng and Jemmott III, 2018). Regarding food photography, charcoal-prominent foods did stand out against their colorful counterparts, with the dark black hue providing enough shock value to gain attention. However, this trend did not overturn the favorability of photos with a diversity of elements, textures, colors, and ingredients (Peng and Jemmott III, 2018).

Experimenting with color and materials from amateur food bloggers and Instagrammers presents an unprecedented amount of agency for those who are not professional chefs, magazine editors, or professional photographers to contribute to and manipulate food trends and the aesthetics of food photography. These photographers, many of whom are women, utilize Instagram as a space to explore creative expression outside of the masculine art- and professional food-industry. Feminist artists in the 1970s took on a similar challenge in response to the patriarchal art world and the hypermasculinity of the Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist movements prior. Harmony Hammond, for example, addressed the relationships between the worlds of art, craft, and the domestic space in Floor Piece VI (1973), which references both the claims of universality by minimalist artists and the delegitimizing categorization of women’s work and art. Like Minimalist artists, who challenged viewers to reconsider the nature of industrial materials as commodities or art, Hammond too initiates a new trend in mixed media using domestic sources, like textiles and wallpaper. These materials were self-consciously celebrated materials, designs, and practices gendered as feminine, thereby reclaiming misogynistic claims of biological “aesthetic destiny,” rather than acknowledging artistic skill, pertaining to women artists (Pohl, 354-7). Conveniently, the colorful smoothie bowls, grain bowls, and salads made for Instagram not only look similar to Floor Piece VI, with their evenly-dispersed bright colors and circular shape, but also challenge traditional categorizations separating craft from cuisine and professional chefs from home cooks. Though the creativity of women Instagram creators is celebrated through large numbers of followers, product endorsements, and the seminal food trends that follow (Tandoh, 2016), the separation of food on Instagram does not challenge the restaurant and art industries that remain patriarchal and are viewed superior to the creations of Instagrammers.

Separating the aesthetic integrity of Instagram food-creators, -chefs, and -artists from “serious” artistic or gastronomic endeavors, we disregard these foods from their aesthetic integrity. While much of this section has discussed the subject photographed, the composition of the photo further reinforces its aesthetic value. According to Peng and Jemmott III, photos that adhere to the rule of thirds and compositional simplicity increase their aesthetic appeal. The short life of Instagram has given itself to multiple aesthetic shifts, all of which are influenced and progressed through cell phone camera improvements, food trends, health reports, and colors introduced in the fashion and design industries. The release of the 8-megapixel camera on the iPhone 4S in October 2011 is parallel with a significant shift in quality and intentionality in food photos on Instagram. Contemporary posts are of higher quality, less obviously filtered, and taken with the intention of being shared, all of which translates into the curation of food for the purpose of being styled and posted. Unlike photos from 2010 to 2013, which are characterised by low image quality, compositional complexity, and claustrophobic borders, Instagram photos in late 2017 onwards balance the desired diversity of colors, elements, and textures while allowing for breathing room through white space, symmetry, and repetition throughout a feed. The formal elements of liked images of food on social media are consistent with the conventional wisdom in photography. Contemporary Instagram photos prioritize the photo and its relation to those in the surrounding feed in order to construct the necessary pleasantness, arousing potential, and virality (Peng and Jemmott III, 328). Foods in the category of breakfast, brunch, or lunch are more commonly featured in these types of accounts because they more easily lend themselves to these formal elements, specifically natural lighting and colorful, rather than brown, ingredients. These elements can be traced to the “Hipster” food photography techniques of 2013-5, when a specific “Hipster Instagram Aesthetic” became culturally recognizable. Numerous publications satirized this notoriously narcissistic and self-aware aesthetic, such Buzzfeed’s article, “How Hipsters Make Their Instagram Photos Look So Damn Good: Neither kale nor man buns are necessary” from 2015. The article lists a step by step tutorial of how to achieve this look, advising to first find a “photogenic restaurant or cafe,” (“If they have wooden tables or white table sheets, you'll know it's the one. When ordering food, don't even bother with the menu. Scroll through photos on Yelp, and pick the one that *looks* the best. Taste is insignificant.”); take a Top-Down food shot (“If you don't already take pictures of your food by standing on a chair, then what are you doing.”); Increase the exposure, slightly increase the contrast, and sharpen the photo (“This is crucial. You want your followers to see all the pulp in your grapefruit and all the char on your potatoes.”). Though snapping a pic of food in restaurants before eating is now commonplace, the authors in 2015 encourage a fearlessness to initiate this process (“Tip: Don't mind the people staring at you. They know nothing.”) and reference “experts” @_samhillman, @cookrepublic, and @livingthehealthychoice (Kim, 2015) Instagrammers of 2018 follow more natural-looking versions of these aesthetic elements, usually with less obvious filtering and higher ingredient consistency. Leanne of @leanneliveshealthy, for example, is highly consistent in her food posts, which are mostly of breakfast items. Her primary features include eggs (white and bright yellow, circular, tastiness and fillingness), berries, sweet potatoes, or tomatoes (“arousing” colors, healthiness, sweetness), spinach and avocado (green, healthiness), white plates (white space, cleanliness), and flooding natural-looking light. The yolk of the eggs is always visible, often dripping down onto something green (orange is the secondary complimentary color to green) or hard-boiled and sliced horizontally, giving a satisfying, perfectly circular, yet natural, shape. The avocados are sliced symmetrically and evenly, giving uniformity and color atop toast or omelettes (again referencing complimentary colors). Though Leanne rarely posts photos of herself, she often features her hands, either holding a piece of toast or caressing a plate. This adds an element of human interaction with the otherwise sterile, meticulously choreographed dishes.

Other Instagramers follow these techniques: consistent types of food, proliferic featuring of breakfast, diversity of bright colors, even distribution of elements, and generous space surrounding the borders. Jose from @naturally.jo and Christina from @christinascupcakes feature their cute, cartoon-like creations, usually sweets, with consistent symmetry, background color, and food layout. Theirs is streamlined and repetitive, like the Minimalists, but pastel-colorful and saccharine, like the fantastical Instagram creators of 2015-7. Instagrammrs like @chocolateforbasil, @fooddeco, and @the_sunkissed_kitchen feature richer colors, busier palettes, and less free space, often which is filled with strewn granola, wooden spoons, cut flowers, vibrant linen kitchen towels framing the dish, or hands, yet they still satisfy both the “eye-catching” and “eye-pleasing” aesthetic requirements of successful Instagram feeds (Peng and Jemmott III, 2018). The rich colors, unnecessary use of cloth, and curated assemblance of ingredients is reminiscent of 17th century still life paintings, such as those by Jarelle Guy’s (@chocolateforbasil) spread (Dec 2018) and Abraham van Beyeren’s Still Life with Lobster (c. 1650). Bending between time periods, the streamlined, colorful, repetitive images also mirror the experimentation of painter Macdonald-Wright’s paintings, specifically those of the Modernist avant-garde movement he co-founded, called Synchronism. This movement was based on the relationship between pure color and emotion, rather than representation, to express form” (Pohl, 356). In his painting Abstraction on a Spectrum (1914-17), color and shape are prioritized. The oranges, blues, greens, and reds shaped in wedges and circles is seen in Instagrammer Alison Wu’s (@alison_wu) Toasts (April 2018). Wu features shapes -- the crescents of halved slices of bread, avocado slices; the perfect circles of radishes and blueberries -- and colors -- magenta beet hummus against emerald sprouts and goldenrod radishes -- to recreate the “toasts of her childhood,” as she contextualizes in her caption. The way she cuts the vegetables and arranges them defamiliarizes the vegetable on the whole, thereby abstracting the organic shapes that evoke natural foods without transcribing them.

Though these guidelines may be similar both to fine art photos and paintings, the element of human interaction differentiates Instagram food photos from traditional photos, specifically due to the modes of viewing practiced in scrolling through Instagram feeds. Instagram photos are positioned amongst captions, hashtags, and tags, providing multiple spaces from which to understand it. Captions, for example, are not new to understanding a story, as Romana Javitz, the superintendent for The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection illustrates:

“The fact that amazes most of the beginners in picture work is the way the image changes as you know more about the content in terms of words. I have a particular fondness for watching people read a paper such as The New York Daily News . . . no matter how crowded a subway or bus is, the reader . . . will flip that paper back and forth from story to picture, from picture to story, until he has found everything in the picture that the story has told him to look for. Well that is very much the way we look into a picture from the point of view of a library archive” (Javitz qtd in Panzer, 116).

The Instagram photo is inseparable from its caption, which we, like the newspaper readers, use to understand the photo. Food Instagrammer Adeline Waugh of @vibrantandpure captions “I’m dubbing this the ‘food blogger bowl’ . . .” beneath her colorful assortment of roasted veggies, sprouts, figs, quinoa, edible flowers, avocado, and hemp seeds (2017). The layout of complimentary colors -- vibrant oranges and yellows, deep blues and pastel greens -- and the layering, almost swirling, of textures, is not unlike the aesthetic choices of Kenneth Noland’s painting Heat (1959). Noland, an American color-field painter, should be the inspiration to every smoothie- and salad-bowl-posting Instagrammer out for his his mix of rich colors, circular patterns, and generous borders. Unlike Noland and more like the NYDN readers Javitz’s recalls, our interaction with photos like Waugh’s on Instagram is facilitated instead by a “glance [that] positions short, fleeting looks that glide from surface to surface as the dominant mode of seeing” (11).

Instagram photos’ captions teach us their context; their tags, links, and hashtags encourage us to walk down the trail laid out by the Instagrammer, rather than meditate on the photo itself; the sheer number of food photos on Instagram devalues most individual photos. Indeed, Waugh’s use of “food blogger bowl” in quotes indicates that hers, while an aesthetically successful photo, is part of a larger aesthetic practice on Instagram outside of her own creation. Her photo is part of an aesthetic fetish that is destabilized by the sheer amount of similar photos. Thus, “the glance has eclipsed the gaze in the attention economy. [. . .] There is a relationship between glancing and voyeurism or fetishism, which is currently left out of the glance’s theorization. The difference between voyeurism/fetishism as present in the gaze versus the glance is that in the gaze, the object is unaware that they are being observed, thus establishing a power imbalance. Being looked at on Instagram is not only expected but also welcomed [. . .]. This process of transactional glancing facilitates capital” (Zulli, 11).

While users might be inclined to gaze at these images to gather information, the format’s embedded links, products, and tags privilege ‘the connectivity of the glance, rather than the sustained and deliberate attention of the gaze,” thereby transforming “even brief moments of gazing . . . into the glance as users are moved from surface to surface” (Zulli, 11). The compositional methods, staging, and color- and ingredient-use in Instagram photos facilitates our reading. The “studium” of these photos — what, as Roland Barthes’ would say, the artist intends for you to encounter (Barthes, 27) — is curated by the viewer themself. Viewers are encouraged to glance, to expect similar works from specific follows (hence why we follow them), and to recognize details as elements within larger trends (the edible flower in the “blogger smoothie bowl”). This threatens what Barthes coined as the punctum -- the element in a work, particularly a photograph, which is “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Barthes, 27). It is a specific detail in a photograph that “pierces” the viewer and brings the photo both to life and to the life of the viewer. The “life” of a photo on Instagram is their world outside of itself -- that trail, the product, the rainbow bagel. Barthes explains that the presence of a punctum initiates a “blind field” that “doubles our partial vision” of the photograph (Barthes, 57). For him, photos with a “good studium” still may not create a blind field and, therefore, “everything which happens with the frame dies absolutely once this frame is passed beyond” (57). For Barthes, his transportation to this blind field is a highly personal process that “takes the spectator outside its frame” and creates a “kind of subtle beyond” (59); for Instagrammers, this process is highly curated and dependent on a “good studium.” In the glance economy, we perhaps check the boxes of a good photograph by how “eye-pleasing” they are and if they are “eye-catching” enough. This process, like Barthes’, happens instantaneously, yet, in Instagram, the punctum is not separate from the studium and the blind field is not separate from the trail’s creation.

Using the academic language of art history, this essay has drawn parallels between the food, meal, and composition choices of the artist-Instagrammer. Furthermore, the attention economy and privileging of the glance over the gaze bring a new vernacular to understand, analyze, and evaluate this contemporary leap in Instagram aesthetics. Though this paper was intended to be a parody, the tenets of modern art parallel so strongly with the micro-revolutions in Instagram’s food aesthetic that Art History is not only a good way of analyzing the images, but should, I argue, be included in the realm of Art History, specifically in the Participatory and Relational art periods we are immersed in currently. Even Roland Barthes admits that “Photography has been, and still is, tormented by the ghost of Painting’ (30)