Jean-Michel Basquiat Critics, collectors, and curators now use Instagram to share images of art that inspires and intrigues them. Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-winning art critic for New York magazine, has 287,000 Instagram followers. Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese technology entrepreneur and collector who paid $110.5 million for apainting, has over 100,000 fans. Thelma Golden, the influential director of the Studio Museum in Harlem , has 62,000 Instagram admirers.

But Instagram is more than a real-time platform for sharing and staying connected—it is also a treasure trove of publicly available information that can be mined to identify art that inspires different groups of people. To bring this concept to life, we focused on a recent art world event, Art Basel in Miami Beach, which took place last year from December 6th through 10th.

We first assembled a database of images posted by Instagram users based upon their geolocation tags showing they were in Miami during the fair, and their use of the hashtag #artbaselmiamibeach. Because selfies are such an important form of Instagram expression, but not something relevant to our analysis, an algorithm was trained to eliminate them from the database. Special care was taken to include images of people standing next to artworks, a practical reality at art fairs. We also eliminated travel-related images of hotel lobbies, food, and beaches.

This resulted in a database of approximately 35,000 images of artworks at Art Basel in Miami Beach. We then used an artificial intelligence visual search tool designed and optimized for art to identify pictures of the same artwork within this database. This special tool was developed by Artrendex , a New York-based technology startup of which Ahmed Elgammal is founder and CEO. Examples of how the algorithm classified different Instagram pictures as being the same artwork are shown in Exhibit 1. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time analytic techniques like this have been applied to art world-related Instagram data.



