Curators and Instagram: Affect, Relationality and Keeping in Touch

Curators use Instagram like many individuals to post selfies and images of friends, special events, travel and other notable sights. Yet this platform has taken on special relevance in the art world by how it extends curatorial relationality and modalities of affective engagement. In this article, I survey accounts of curators whose Instagram accounts blur work/life dichotomies, adopt conceptual or feminist projects, and function as avenues for ethico-aesthetic intensifications of awareness. I argue that Instagram’s affect of proximal immediacy keeps users ‘in touch’ through a range of haptic modalities that in effect bring the art world into one’s hand; kinaesthetically mobilize users through ‘following’; and reveal the manners by which curators attune themselves to context.