How Cindy Sherman Shaked the Art World with Instagram

Back in 2017 a private Instagram account run by famous photographer Cindy Sherman featuring a new series of selfies was made public. It created a sensation in the art world overnight.

The account was created as private on the service last October while in Tokyo. Cindy Sherman’s handle then was @misterfriedas_mom, in honor of her pet macaw. Now the artist changed it to @_cindysherman.

Cindy Sherman’s Instagram posts are a series of very distorted selfies, still lifes with flowers, and disturbing hospital self-portraits. There is a video shot from the perspective of someone lying in a hospital bed. The first thing that crosses your mind is the question, of whether Sherman was actually hospitalized, or the whole scenery is fake. The work seems to be made specifically for Instagram – the photos are using Instagram filters too – and not as a physical work for a future show in a gallery. Sherman herself declined to comment on anything connected to this – well, art project? – which makes the whole thing even more exciting and fascinating.

Cindy Sherman has a long history of dramatically staged self-portraiture, and in a sense pioneered the idea of the “selfie” decades before social media began. But these pieces are the answer to an era of self- and beauty-obsession. And it also shows the world of comments on social media. Out of Instagram context ofter they are pretty creepy.