Is Cindy Sherman's Instagram account a deconstructive post-internet artwork on online identity formation?
Summary
Cindy Sherman’s Instagram account has gone public from the spring of 2017 while around the same time she started posting heavily edited selfies on there. These selfies were never officially stated part of her oeuvre but seem out of the ordinary in the context of a social medium. Through classical art historical analysis of Sherman’s earlier works and theoretical research on their topics and methods it is possible to interpret her Instagram selfies as part of her oeuvre, as these topics seem applicable and relevant to them. The topics discussed within the analysis concern representational mechanisms in popular media; identity formation considering one’s behavior setting; one’s sense of reality; and Sherman’s deconstructive working method. Concluding, this analysis forms a multi-layered deconstruction: on one hand it forms the established artist’s behavior setting as it responds to certain expectations by interpreting new output by means of past output. Because of this, the analysis forms a demonstration of some of the topics analyzed in it, and it therefore also is a deconstruction of a deconstruction.