My best friend Landin is a very talented visual artist and she runs an Instagram page where she posts photos of her artwork. I knew when I was assigned this project that I wanted to kill her, that I wanted to use her Instagram, and that I wanted to exploit her life’s work. I have invented a reality in which Landin has passed, and I have made a website where I sell the art from her Instagram account.
There are two main phenomena I am trying to explore through my project. The first is the phenomenon of art being worth more when the artist is dead. The second is the problematic way people interact with the art of dead artists. My website tries to combine these two explorations by combining two varieties of website: it’s an online store, but also a sort of blog. I will explain the ways I handle my interests first by discussing the store, and then by discussing the blog.
That art goes up in value when the artist dies is something I and I think most other people know to be true, but I don’t think anyone can really explain why. M. D. Edwards knows it’s true in “How Much Is That Painting Worth? An Essay on the Value of Art.” The factors that determine a painting’s worth are numbered, and number four, dropped with really no explanation, is “the time of the artist’s death” (Edwards 10). We all know it’s true. But why? Sure, a dead artist ensures that the art is unique. If Landin isn’t around to produce anything else, every piece she made while she was alive is the only thing of its kind that will ever exist. But does uniqueness alone make art objectively valuable? What if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing to me? Do collectors collect just because the objects are rare? What do they get out of that? If we value art for how it makes us feel, and whether or not we like it viscerally, the way I think most people do, why can we all agree that a piece should be worth more just because the artist is dead?
The idea of selling Landin’s work almost directly from her Instagram account (an atmosphere I try to capture by embedding her posts in my own so that you can see the number of likes they received, when they were posted, etc.) was important to me. I want to emphasize that Landin’s art already has a life online, in the public eye, outside of my website. Potential buyers could have been interacting with the art I’m now selling from the time it was posted on her account, but they look at it through different eyes now because of the way it is packaged. The gallery Landin curated in her lifetime was strictly view-only. There was never any mention of selling her art. The viewing experience of my website, then, is inherently different because of the “Add to Cart” button you see beneath every piece. I invite the viewer to pass judgment on the art in a way Landin never did by providing space to wonder about the art’s value. I comment on how ridiculous the idea of automatic death-value seems to me by valuing individual pieces of Landin’s art somewhat arbitrarily.
As the self-appointed executor of Landin’s Instagram estate, I get to decide how much each piece should sell for. That’s definitely taking advantage – of her creation and of the platform she gave it online. Honestly, it’s taking advantage in a way that might get me arrested in real life, and is maybe not plausible, but it’s in service of an exploration of my second phenomenon.
I think people have much more of a tendency to impose themselves on the art of dead artists than of living ones. Often, I think we take a sort of ownership of dead artists’ work. We feel like what they’ve left behind offers some look into their heads, lives, or experiences. We try to understand the departed through the art they made when they were alive. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with interpretation. Art makes you feel the way it makes you feel, and that’s the point of it. I think the issue is when we decide to align the way we feel with the artist’s intent, or the artist’s subconscious. When we try to construct a narrative about the artist’s emotional life based on their work. It’s intrusive and presumptive, and a dead artist doesn’t get to talk back, or tell us where we’re right or wrong.
I’ve thought a lot about this kind of interpretation of dead people’s art in terms of a photo caption from Bell’s BBC article about death photography. The picture in question shows a blurry man and woman with their dead daughter, who is in sharp focus, and is captioned “Long exposures when taking photographs meant that the dead were often seen more sharply than the slightly-blurred living, because of their lack of movement” (Bell). I think that metaphorically, this is society’s attitude towards the dead. We romanticize dead people’s, especially dead artists’, problems and emotional turmoil, and have a morbid fascination with trying to understand them. We act as though death gives us license to intrude on someone’s life, like their absence brings a sort of clarity. Dead people are easier to understand in their “lack of movement,” because they can’t continue to act. If life is the painting of a mural that continues to get more complicated, then death makes the mural finite, and we can impose an interpretation on the picture we have that won’t be forced to change with new additions to the mural. The problem is that the mural wasn’t necessarily finished. The artist just stopped adding things. There’s no way for us to really know what the final project was intended to look like.
Kris Fallon argues in a chapter of Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism that Instagram defies the database model of photo-sharing that has existed for decades by inherently creating a narrative. Since photos are shared when they are taken, we go on a journey with the sharer. This is what is eerie about the social media accounts of the dead, I think. Like my mural analogy, an archived Instagram page is an abandoned narrative. By coopting Landin’s Instagram and imposing my own narrative on her art, I am inserting myself intimately into her life’s work in storytelling, an uncomfortable colonization.
On my website, I’m trying to overdo the overstepping. Instead of being set up like a typical gallery or online store, it runs like a blog, and I write a short post about every piece I’m selling. Those posts range from trying to find an uplifting theme in a piece that makes it seem heartwarming and likeable to using the art to justify accusations of deep emotional turmoil in Landin’s last few months alive. In one place on the About page, I claim that art with special sentimental value is not for sale or exhibited on the website. I want a visitor to the website to read that message and be confused by the pieces I have included. If I have so much to say about the ones I’m willing to sell, what could possibly be in the pieces I keep out of the public eye? The point is that I’m interpreting whatever I want to from the art, no matter how shallow, far-fetched, or imagined, and speaking my interpretation like it’s profound truth.
The blog format makes the website more about me than about Landin. I tried to embody the selfish grief Phillips’ grief trolls target. As a blog, the exercise of trying to interpret Landin’s art becomes an attempted definition of my own relationship with her. That isn’t what a website marketed as a space for her honor and remembrance should do. This fault is near what some of Phillips’ trolls argue about people who post on Facebook memorial sites – they aren’t doing it to remember the dead, they’re doing it to draw attention to themselves. My website even has my name in the URL. That began as accidental – I needed it to be an offshoot of my Davidson Domain and I couldn’t figure out a way around the domain name – but I liked the way the problem centered me. I think we as a society are trying to figure out how to make public grief in the age of the internet appropriate. The biggest struggle is navigating how to honor someone with our private accounts, where we are the center of the world, without making the death about us. To comment on this issue, I wanted my website to really be about me.
In short, I want this project to be disturbing, and I want to come across as really wrong and unlikeable for having set up this website at all. I was careful to obtain Landin’s permission before embarking on the project, but it still felt wrong to kill her and manhandle her art like this. I am encouraged by the fact that public, exclamatory, profitable grief like this is uncomfortable for me. I hope the website will be uncomfortable for you.
Works Cited
Bell, Bethan. “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.” BBC News, BBC, 5 June 2016, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581.
Edwards, M. D. “How Much Is That Painting Worth? An Essay on the Value of Art.” Art Education, vol. 44, no. 1, 1991, pp. 9–13. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3193261.
Fallon, Kris. “THE PENCIL OF IDENTITY: INSTAGRAM AS INADVERTENT (FEMALE) AUTOBIOGRAPHY.” Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism, edited by Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, pp. 9–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1tqx9f7.7.
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at tragedy: Facebook trolls, memorial pages and resistance to grief online.” First Monday[Online], 16.12 (2011).Web. 27 Mar. 2019