The art of being an Insta-fan

From pairing Alexa with Lucian Freud to drawing Cara, online obsessives are using social media to get very creative, says Phoebe Luckhurst
Get creative: clockwise, from far left, Badly Drawn Models, Lena Ker’s catwalk sketch drawings and Art-lexa Chung
Instagram

Once upon a time, being a fan meant pitching up at airports to screech at The Beatles; later it meant Smash Hits and band tees. Now — if the reactions of Directioners are the benchmark — it means compulsive online pursuit, inexplicable sobbing and pledging never to be happy again if your band separates. All of this is done very publicly on social media. We are in the age of the online super-fan — if your idol does something and you don’t tweet about it, did it really happen?

Some, however, manage to execute fandom with a little more panache. While hollering fans are ten-a-penny, and usually found on Twitter (with an unimaginative handle that riffs on your pin-up’s name), creative enthusiasts are on Instagram making (fan) art.

Art-lexa Chung (@artlexachung) is one of the cleverest Instafan accounts — 26,200 people follow the account that posts composites of fashionable Alexa next to famous works of art starring a dark-haired woman in a similar outfit and pose. The anonymous artist’s knowledge of art history and Alexa history is estimable: captions outline the artist, date and name of the portrait, followed by the year and location of the Alexa pap shot. Recent posts include “Girl in a Dark Jacket by Lucian Freud (1947)/Alexa, Glastonbury 2014”, or a sallow, morose Freud portrait juxtaposed with a picture of Miss Chung looking stern at Glasto; and “The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1881)/Alexa Chung at NYFW Dinner Party”, or a languid Renoir party scene juxtaposed with Alexa looking mischievous and gamine at a fashion week bash.

Art history is a popular theme — @meangirlsarthistory (47,000 followers) overlays lines from films over famous images. The pairings are ineffably perfect: for example, Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler (a scarlet -dressed woman dances with a man on a beach, while a maid and a butler dance beside them with umbrellas) is matched with Regina George’s threat — “she thinks she’s gonna have a party and not invite me”. A picture of a voluptuous Bellini muse looking pensive (Naked Young Woman in Front of a Mirror) is overlaid with “I really want to lose three pounds”.

Then there are those fans who really create their own art. Badly Drawn Models (@badlydrawnmodels, 54,500 followers) juxtaposes pictures of models (both household names and fledgling upstarts) next to goofy monochrome line drawings — the artist Sean Ryan’s impressions. They’re edgy caricatures, exaggerating features like eyebrows, lips and “characterful” noses, but never edging into cruelty. Indeed, Edie Campbell was so thrilled with hers she shared it on her own Instagram account. A recent one of Cara Delevingne scored almost 5,000 likes; Ryan sells prints of some of them on his website, Badly Drawn Portraits.

Cara Delevingne's fashion career - in pictures

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In a more glamourous iteration of the same theme, Lena Ker (@lenaker, 35,900 followers) recreates catwalk snaps, campaign images and street-style shots by hand. It’s an analogue counterpoint to ubiquitous digital imagery.

Lastly, a picture says a thousand words and comedy needn’t be complicated: @kanyedoingthings is just pictures of Kanye West doing things. It is inexplicably and undeniably amusing — partly due to the deadpan captions (“Kanye sitting on a bench”; “Kanye shutting a door”; “Kanye tossing the mic instead of dropping the mic”).

It has 662,000 followers. Some fans have obsession down to a fine art.

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