Audience Gatekeeper: Analysis for Online Artistic Experience and Interaction

With social media increasingly used to create or plan arts, the role of the audience changes greatly and citizen curation emerges. Therefore, posts in social media become a new curation target and social media make the citizen curator easier to be seen, touched, and mainstream. As a result, the online artistic experience changed greatly, and people expressed their love for artistic works on social media through likes, comments, and sharing. Social media improves the curation dimension, and it is important to understand what artistic works can drive engagement. In this study, quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted to study the interaction between social media artists and followers and analyze what artworks are screened by these occasional and unconscious online curations with social media users as audience keepers. This study referenced posts from 2118 art field accounts of Instagram, which shows that those most popular artworks are more interactive. The study about social media interaction in the art world is expanded, which can also support the study about citizen curators and social behavior.