The greatest source of fascination in our daily lives isn’t art or politics or faith, but the lives of the people around us, and those of people we’ve never met.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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A garden is a miniature version of the world.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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Today, we look at Instagram feeds with the same level of scrutiny as the Renaissance merchants who converted their Madonnas into ducats. Only the criteria of judgment have changed. Does the user obey the unwritten laws of adult Instagram, posting less than once a day, avoiding too many shots of their face, going easy on the hashtags?
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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Like other social media platforms, Instagram may owe much of its success to its role as a supremely efficient brain parasite, feeding on our need for instant connection and validation.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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The golden era for the depiction of food in art came with the popularization of the still life in seventeenth-century Holland. The first society to experience the problem of having too much money and too much stuff, the Dutch had multiple genres of food-related still lifes, each dealing in a different level of luxury. They began with the humble ontbijtjes, or breakfast paintings, to the slightly more elaborate banketjestukken or “little banquets,” and on to the kings of them all, the pronkstilleven, from the Dutch word for “ostentatious.”
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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Life in the Instagram bubble requires a constant calibration of how it will be viewed from outside.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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Art changes all the time, and when it changes, so does its history.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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Instagram creates a disarming sense of intimacy with people you’ve never met.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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In its exclusion of links, minimization of text, and encouragement of gauzy filters, Instagram turns every smartphone into its own little Silver Pavilion, through which the user can both cultivate a world and blot out what they don’t wish to see.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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In its exclusion of links, minimization of text, and encouragement of gauzy filters, Instagram turns every smartphone into its own little Silver Pavilion, through which the user can both cultivate a world and blot out what they don’t wish to see.
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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