Digitally Curating Los Angeles

Perhaps the most popular contemporary Los Angeles landmark is Chris Burden's "Urban Light." Erected at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008, the public art installation features 202 repurposed streetlamps, and is swarmed by photo-taking tourists (and locals) at all hours of the day.

LACMA claimed to be the fourth-most Instagrammed museum in the world in 2016, a statistic confirmed by CNN. This is due largely in part to free public exhibits such as "Urban Light." In fact, according to LACMA's Senior Communications Editor, Chi-Young Kim, 60 percent of LACMA'S 1.4 million visitors in 2016 visited the museum for free.

"We kind of feel that we are one of the pioneers of social media for museums and art collectives," said Miranda Carroll, senior director of communications at LACMA. "Other places do have very strong social media presences as well, like the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But I feel that maybe on the West Coast, we were one of the first pioneers in that media."

As a self-proclaimed "pioneer of social media," LACMA has embraced this shift in the way people view and experience art both online and at the museum itself. LACMA was the first museum to join Snapchat in 2014, and won a Webby Award for Snapchat Culture & Lifestyle in 2016. Even their latest exhibit, "Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage," has its own Snapchat room, where visitors can take selfies on various mounted iPads and use face filters to try on the various Chagall stage costumes from the exhibition.

"I'm focusing a lot on how do we create channels that people want to visit as channels on their own, not even if they're able to come here or not," said Eva Recinos, LACMA's Social Media Manager. "Because they want to see what's going on at LACMA, they want to hear our voice."

Part of this push toward cultivating LACMA's voice involves inviting other artists to enter the conversation through LACMA's already-popular social media platforms. Earlier this summer, LACMA announced its first-ever Instagram Artist in Residence featuring archivist Guadalupe Rosales. Rosales was given control of LACMA's Instagram account for six weeks, during which she shared her own archival photographs chronicling the Southern Californian youth subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s, curated photographs of her favorite LACMA exhibits, and engaged in artistic and cultural discussions with LACMA's nearly 600,000 followers.

Rosales is the founder of her own successful Instagram accounts, with more than 140,000 followers combined on @veteranas_and_rucas, "Dedicated to women raised in Socal from '90s and earlier," and @map_pointz, "Documenting SoCal 90s party crew/rave scene."

"What happens with Instagram is that I write a few sentences, maybe three max," Rosales said. "Then, the image does most of the work."

Rosales uses her existing archives to open up a dialogue about Latinx subcultures in East Los Angeles, thus elevating and reframing subcultural histories that, in her opinion, would otherwise go unseen. By having her voice on LACMA's platform, Rosales believes that social media has given accessibility to folks who would not typically be given the chance to participate in conversations about art.

"I want these conversations and the way people view art to intersect," she said. "Everything is valid. One person is not smarter than another; 'This person knows more about art,' or whatever. We're all experiencing something at the same time."

While the response to LACMA's Instagram Artist in Residence initiative has been largely positive, others are not so keen on LACMA's open-armed embrace of social media. David Pagel, long-time art critic for the Los Angeles Times and self-proclaimed "old-fashioned critic," called LACMA's Instagram Artist in Residence "deeply wrong-headed."

"I think Instagram's a great thing and museums are great things, but Instagram and museums together isn't such a great thing," Pagel said. "I think it's the institution trying to be all things and everything to everyone when it is counterproductive. It's actually just kind of gross and sad. It's like a corporation trying to be hip. It's like, be an institution."

While critical of LACMA's social media use, Pagel is less condemnatory of The Broad and its seeming tendency to pander toward the Instagram audience.

"The Broad thing is kind of cool, because The Broad let hipsters do their thing with it," he said. "And now this is like LACMA trying to pay the hipsters to do the thing."

Rosales, however, knows that sharing her archival work and engaging with audiences on Instagram is critical for expanding the type of discourse that exists within the art world, thus subverting institutional expectations.

"What institutions teach us, I think people start to think that's the only way that we learn about art or that's the only language that we have to talk about art," she said. "But I don't believe that's true. That's the work that I'm trying to do. I want people to feel comfortable going to museums and looking at the art and actually relating to it in any way that they can."

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is located across the street from The Broad. While The Broad has a winding standby line — which is kept track of daily by its own Twitter account, separate from that of the museum — MOCA does not appear to have the same amount of foot traffic as its neighbor. According to MOCA's Social Media Coordinator Nevin Kallepalli, however, museum attendance has actually increased since the museum opened its Instagram account in late 2011.