Media hacks have Twitter, excitable teenagers have Snapchat and middle managers have LinkedIn, but in the art world, the social network of choice remains Instagram, where all the world’s beauty is gridded into squares.

That photo-sharing app is the de facto broadcast medium for new exhibitions, and it’s an agora, too, for artists and curators in a field dispersed worldwide. For the most part artists use Instagram like the rest of us: as a document of everyday fascinations, a bit scrubbed up for public consumption.

But the photographer Cindy Sherman — who knows more than most about the deceptions of selfies — has quietly been exploring Instagram’s potential for something more than self-promotion. She created a private account on the service last October while in Tokyo; last week, without warning, she unlocked her account and changed her handle to @_cindysherman . (She originally went by @misterfriedas_mom, in honor of her pet macaw.) At a stroke, she revealed not only quotidian ’grams of sunsets and lunches, but also more than three dozen distorted selfies, deformed by unnatural smudges, copious flares and kaleidoscopic reflections.