Artists back then Instagram

Abstract

The thesis investigates how contemporary distinguished artists relate to Instagram; the research has been conducted on very popular contemporary artists such as: Dimien Hirst, Cattelan and Wei Wei.

The selected artist’s profile on Instagram has been chosen on the base of follower’s number, interest by the press, degree of innovation by the artist and poetry. Instagram has been chose because it is widespread, with 1 billion users in 2018, and if compared to other social media, it focuses on visual content, making it extremely valuable for artists dealing with visual art. The focus of the research pivoted around the issue of if and how did major contemporary artists deal with Instagram, trying to identify differences between them and between the artist’ works and his profile.

In order to analyze both the effectiveness and the consistency with artist’ poetry, both the artist itself and the Instagram profile are analysed under the framework of marketing tools, so that the outcomes will be comparable and it will be possible to discuss about the consistency of the artist-social media relation from a managerial perspective. The profile and the person are both seen as brands, and attached with all the typical features which are usually investigated in marketing and branding analysis.

At the first stage the analysis focuses on the artist outside of social media, looking at his artworks and personal life, adding the framework of the 4 P analysis (price, product, place and promotion), adding a fifth P which stands for “Poetry”. This last category is meant to be the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style. With the second stage a typical social media analysis is conducted on each profile, based on type content, profile design, which kind of features are used (e.g Instagram stories, posts, ecc.), brand engagement, social media metrics and KPI. The strategy applied to the profile management will emerge from the investigation, giving us two entities to compare: the artist itself and its Instagram profile.

The two entities are therefore compared on the base of the outcomes, trying to identify how the use of this social media is located within the artist's general picture, how the social media is used and what is the level of consistency between the poetry and language used in real life compared to that used on Instagram.