Artists will ask, “What’s your Instagram?”

It’s horrible.

Anything: Twitter, Facebook, just Google me, even asking for a business card is fine (even though I’ve never had one), but not my Instagram. Please?

Melissa is millennial. She keeps DMT in her vape pen—“Well, when it kicks in I might drop whatever’s in my hand, I don’t want to burn myself so it’s safer in there.” Point is: she does everything right. An app wakes us up, telling us it’s now peak-posting time on Insta.

“What are you going to put?” I ask.

“I don’t know…” she scrolls through a massive library of phone pictures, with the nipples already edited out.Jessica is more casual, her Insta is just a Young Artist About Town. Jessica is at Ugo Rondinone’s show, Jessica is holding wine, Jessica’s painting-in-process smothered in Likes by partisan friends, a Cardi gif. It’s all very organic.

Jules is the worst. A preliminary sketch: fine. A happy collector picking up something Jules just painted: okay. But then a streetlight, picturesquely shrouded in fog. Another painting. Then a gumball machine under a dappling of autumn light. Somehow obviously in another country. Then berries, in close-up, dripping with National Geographic levels of succulence. These aren’t his work, these photos. Just carefully curated moments, one per day, between the art, designed to make you ask questions: Where is Jules? Who is Jules? How did his art get on a fanny pack? 7,491 Likes.

The New York artists I know just post art they’re seeing. Which amounts to just a picture you could get anywhere on the internet except it’s on their Instagram.

Everyone’s a curator. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I liked it better when everyone was a critic.

It’s at least implied they’re at the show, so it kind of splits the difference between Hey Instagram I’m An Artist Show Me and Instagram As Evidence I Have A Life.
Oh, and actually Jules isn’t the worst. Models are the worst. You think 7,491 is a lot, it’s nice if your painting gets 7,491 Likes. Natasha posts a picture of a tube of moisturizer—9,000. If she’s in it? At least 50k every time. And that’s posting on Bulgarian time. Her cat has more followers than me. She goes about her Instagram joylessly, like it’s work, because it is. “Do you want eggs?” “Yes but I Instagram now, so hush for 10 minute.”

Dropping the spatula, I look at my disastrous feed—things I put up at 3 in the morning because I remembered Instagram existed. I’m a disgrace. Fans who’ve written me letters and bought my books for years are surprised to learn I’m on it. If I’m up early and wildly ambitious I’ll put up one of the literal hundreds of my pictures that’s already on the internet just to keep it looking vaguely on-brand but a lot of times it’s just a cupcake or something I have to take down 10 minutes later because someone in it is married or owes someone money.

Making a painting over the course of a month, like any artist, mailing it to New York, waiting for New York to photograph it, then getting the attachment, then getting the attachment on your phone, then Instagramming it like this was just spontaneously how your day went just makes me hate everyone involved.

If you really Liked me, kittykitty416, you’d just go to my goddamn website.

People who aren’t artists keep asking if I’ve been to the Yayoi Kusama mirror room. No idea. Either I saw it years ago or it’s been photographed so many times I feel like I have or the experience of standing in the middle of a bunch of Christmas lights and mirrors is so easy to imagine that I did. It’s not as good as the yellow squashes but so Instagrammy. Even selfieabler than that shiny Koons rabbit. This is the thing to be now.

What do I feel like while being Instagrammable? Making a video, with one hand on the smallest paintbrush they sell and the other holding down the virtual button, judging the curve of the arm I’m making by the scale of what’s seen through the lens instead of by eye? What I feel like is dead.

Dead and in the artists’ afterlife of pious documentaries—Zak made work, Zak kept living—and now Zak is damned to have to keep proving it—without text, without links, in a square, without anything fast and unplanned, without anything you do while both concentrating and unobserved, without nipples. Fuck Instagram, what’s the next thing?