By Ahmed Elgammal and Doug Woodham - Published on Artsy

Critics, collectors, and curators now use Instagram to share images of art that inspires and intrigues them. Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer-winning art critic for New York magazine, has 287,000 Instagram followers. Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese technology entrepreneur and collector who paid $110.5 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, has over 100,000 fans. Thelma Golden, the influential director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, has 62,000 Instagram admirers.

But Instagram is more than a real-time platform for sharing and staying connected—it is also a treasure trove of publicly available information that can be mined to identify art that inspires different groups of people. To bring this concept to life, we focused on a recent art world event, Art Basel in Miami Beach, which took place last year from December 6th through 10th.