I love how the art museums have collections of loosely-drawn sketches. Makes me wish they would collect sketchbooks from artists today.
I know, I know. You have to be “historically significant” to become part of their collection. The sketch featured above was drawn in 1650 by Jan van Goyen. The Art Institute obtained it over 300 years later in 1961.
Maybe 100 years from now, Instagram will become an art museum
Instagram has the most incredibly diverse and rich collection of images to display. Just look at all the people today posting their in-progress works on the service.
I’m pretty sure Instagram has something in their terms that allows them to hold onto all the images forever—even when the original owner deletes the image from Instagram. Thus, Instagram has billions of images from millions of artists. (Yes, billions. 100 million images are uploaded every day to Instagram).
Seriously. Instagram is sitting on a treasure trove. Let’s compare to the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. They have 107,000 total images spanning mostly from the past few centuries. That means every day, Instagram uploads 1,000 times the entire collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Who is collecting the sketchbooks of today?
Instagram is.