Ask me most days what I think about Instagram, and I will tell you: a scourge. The social photo platform, and the cameraphone more generally, have produced a radical shift in the experience of art — turning virality into the principal marker of success, and laying waste to heritage sites worldwide. (Follow the viperous account @insta_wrecked, and you can gasp at images of thousands of tourists at the Trevi Fountain or Angkor Wat, all taking the same selfie.) Still, understanding art today means understanding Instagram, and in the last month it has been offering me a view of the world I cannot reach anymore: an imperfect but important means of global engagement that lets me drop into Indian museums or Nigerian photo shoots even as I keep my distance.

I don’t follow a lot of museums’ Instagram accounts — the tone is usually too promotional — though a few rise above the standard: Sir John Soane’s Museum in London offers on-target bursts of 18th-century architecture, while the small Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich posts off-key close-ups and fragments of textiles and cargo ships. I regularly check in on artists like Camille Henrot and Amy Sillman in New York, Rosa Barba in Germany and Ana Vaz in Brazil. Much of the rest of my feed consists of Baroque and Rococo interiors and tapestries, mixed in with a few pop stars, half the French national soccer team and a strangely large number of koalas, mostly from a marsupial hospital in New South Wales I started following during the recent Australia wildfires.

Here are my five current must-follow accounts; my fellow critics have their own favorites, which you’ll discover in the weeks to come.