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Alternative "National Gallery" account reinstated, but artist decides to end posts

The artist behind the popular Instagram account @nationalgalleryofcanada is no longer updating it after being shut down. Photo from Getty Images.
The artist behind the popular Instagram account @nationalgalleryofcanada is no longer updating it after being shut down. Photo from Getty Images.

His popular Instagram account was reinstated after a complaint from the National Gallery of Canada shut it down last week, but Toronto artist Jay Isaac said he’s decided his homage to Canadian art has reached a natural end.

The unexpected shutdown of the account made him realize that it had served its purpose, Isaac wrote in his farewell Instagram post. “It seemed like the natural conclusion,” Isaac told Yahoo Canada News of his decision to stop updating his @nationalgalleryofcanada account despite its reappearance after being deleted by Instagram last week. “I like stopping things at a high point.”

Over a three-year period Issac assembled about 700 images of Canadian artwork on his Instagram account. They were a mix of downloaded images, photographs he had taken himself, and photos of catalogues, all posted with the aim of simply exposing a selection of Canadian artwork to an online audience.

“it introduced a lot of art to a lot of people that they didn’t know about within Canada, but also outside Canada,” Isaac said. About 75 per cent of his audience for the account, which has 6,761 followers, is from outside the country, he said.

The artwork Isaac featured on the account included a wide spectrum of what “Canadian art” might include: celebrated Canadian artists, reasonably well-known contemporary artists like himself, relatively unknown creators.

“Really, it’s just one individual presenting what I think is interesting or important,” Isaac said. His use of the name “National Gallery of Canada” was in part meant as a joke or critique about the role of a government-owned art institution “but they weren’t my adversary,” he said “I wasn’t going against the National Gallery.”

But last week Isaac found his account deleted in full, with an explanation from Instagram’s legal division saying that he had violated the site’s terms of use. Instagram’s terms of use require users to comply with copyright laws. The statement he received from the site also said that his images could not be recovered because of the category of violation.

The Gallery’s spokesperson Josée-Britanie Mallet said that although they had flagged the account to Instagram, no direct request was made for the account to be deleted or re-instated after the shutdown.

“We had made an inquiry to Instagram regarding intellectual property because of the use of the Gallery’s official name for a personal account,” Mallet added.

Given that his personal Instagram project has only about 1,000 fewer followers than the National Gallery’s official account, Isaac thinks a collaborative approach with him or artists like him would do much more to promote Canadian artwork.

“It was obviously a really really terrible PR move because censorship always, always backfires,” Isaac said. Working with artists and social curators like him would be a way to reach new audiences, he said, especially since he already knows some of the people involved with the gallery itself.

Isaac hasn’t had much direct communication with Instagram or the National Gallery of Canada so he can only speculate as to why his account was reinstated, but he said he suspects Instagram determined in the end that the resurrected post didn’t constitute a copyright violation.

“In their email to [Toronto Star reporter] Murray they said the one of the main reasons they took action was that they could be responsible for copyright infringement, which makes absolutely zero sense because I have no affiliation with the gallery,” Isaac said.

Though Isaac, who previously co-ran the arts magazine Hunter & Cook, said that he’s okay with his Instagram project coming to an end he is glad that the posts are restored and can be found and enjoyed by both existing followers of the account and those who discover it in the future.

“The only thing I actually was kind of bummed out about was the fact that the archive wasn’t there,” Isaac said. “It’s a really nice resource. It’s the only time that those pieces will be in the same place and I think it’s really nice to be able to look at.”