Star curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: "Many artists consciously do without social media"

SPIEGEL: Mr. Obrist, please try to remember 2010. Instagram was founded. Where were you?

Hans-Ulrich Obrist : At first I wasn't interested in social media. But in 2011 I had breakfast with American artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin. He took my phone, installed Instagram and informed his followers that I now also had an account. Maybe a thousand people immediately followed me. Ryan had thrown me into the cold water. I had to swim away.

SPIEGEL : You did a pretty good job swimming - today you have 282,000 followers.

Obrist : I love the idea of ​​seeing the Internet as a dematerialized exhibition that can evolve over the years. A visit to Umberto Eco gave me the idea of ​​my hashtag #handwritten. We talked about archives and he showed me his library of manuscripts. Since then, I've been asking artists I meet for a handwriting sample for Instagram. This resulted in a group exhibition with thousands of participants.

SPIEGEL : Instagram's little heart logic also creates pressure. How has this changed the art world since 2010?

Obrist : I don't think Instagram puts a lot of pressure on artists. I feel the development is rather positive because it has made the art world more accessible. It hasn't fundamentally changed my work as a curator. I continue to discover artists, especially on tours or in exhibitions and especially when visiting studios.

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SPIEGEL : Not on Instagram?

Obrist : Yes, of course I'm there every day, but it's just one platform among many. Artists can be seen there without going through the gallery or museum systems. When I was planning my last exhibition with this year's Biennale winner Arthur Jafa, Jafa invited unknown artists to participate. He wanted to give artists a platform that was previously only available on Instagram and YouTube. One of them was the Norwegian Frida Orupabo. She had never exhibited anywhere.

SPIEGEL : It was like a fairytale for Orupabo, and she was then invited to the Biennale. But what if artists refuse to use social media?

Obrist : A lot of the artists I work with consciously avoid social media. For the Albanian video artist Anri Sala, who does not want an own account, I am the replacement. He sends me a new watch every two weeks, which I then post. As always, when new technologies emerge, they bring positives and negatives with them. Artist Hito Steyerl, for example, says there is not only "AI", artificial intelligence , but also "AS" - artificial stupidity .

SPIEGEL : What does Hito Steyerl mean by this?

Obrist : It relates to Twitter bots, a very low level of artificial intelligence, and their impact on public opinion. A role of art can therefore be to make the invisible visible. Few people know the algorithms behind Facebook, Instagram and artificial intelligence. Art can also be a social alarm system, like a radar that warns us.

SPIEGEL : You could warn us against spending too much time on the cell phone. The large German exhibition "Jetzt! Junge Malerei" was also available as a virtual tour. Doesn't that pull visitors away?

Obrist : A virtual tour is no substitute for the experience of art. Even though we make a great deal visible on the Internet, the Serpentine Gallery London now has significantly more visitors than before, around 1.2 million a year, ten years ago it was around 30 percent fewer.

SPIEGEL : The number of visitors to many German museums is stagnating. Culture pessimists would say that this is due to the Internet.

Colonel : I would like to go into something about this. We recently had Tim Berners-Lee for a lecture in the gallery. He invented the World Wide Web 30 years ago. His top priority at the time was that the Internet should be there for everyone, but one of his biggest concerns today is that there will be a two-tier network - a powerful network for the rich, and slow or none for the poor , I also firmly believe that technology must be neutral and not knowledge of rule.

SPIEGEL : What does that have to do with the art world?

Obrist : Art must also be available to everyone. That is why the Serpentine also does not pay entrance fees. Art has to take care of lifting social injustice. The world has become much more polyphonic in the past ten years - and so has art. The interest in her is by no means declining. However, a museum has to adapt to these developments and be more open.

SPIEGEL : Do artists also have to adapt?

Obrist : The task is difficult: artists and curators have to go with the change, but counteract the destructive aspects of it. Homogenization, for example - languages ​​or cultural phenomena such as letters and manuscripts are dying out, whole species are disappearing. With my handwriting project, for example, I want to keep writing alive while everyone is typing. Another negative trend is new, aggressive nationalism and a lack of solidarity. You also have to counteract this.

SPIEGEL : So art should save the world? How exactly?

Colonel : I worry about this every morning when I read my fifteen-minute Edouard Glissant after waking up. For me he is by far the most important author of our time because he foresaw the phenomena that globalization brings about. Art is not the only duty. No matter what part of society we work in, everyone should think about how they can work against the fatal forces of homogenization and nationalism. It will be the big task of contemporary art in the coming decade.