Is the photo and video sharing service Instagram the new source of contemporary art and publishing? A kind of vast digital supermarket of the image, where the least of your personal photos could be recovered without your knowledge, transformed, edited, exposed and marketed by an artist or an untrustworthy publisher?

This is the question that many people are asking today, since the American painter, photographer and stylist Richard Prince (he was credited with Marc Jacobs of Vuitton's Untitled Monogram bags) sold for nearly $ 100,000 piece pictures of thirty-seven people captured on the social network, cropped, legged and printed in large format, and then exhibited in works of art. Without at any time either the interested parties or the authors of the images or selfies are prevented from giving permission - except for a few close relatives of the artist, such as Pamela Anderson - or even touched with money for their commercial exploitation.

A situation that could never happen in France, according to the lawyer and intellectual property specialist Emmanuel Pierrat: "There is a great legal difference between the United States and France on the principle of reappropriation of a work. There, what is called "fair use" authorizes an artist to work from an existing image and to transform it without considering that the copyright is violated. In France, he would be immediately exposed to a double conviction, for violations of the right to the image and to the right of patrimonial. The reframing or transformation of the image does not deprive more of his rights the person who took the picture than the model. "

Impossible in France? Despite the legal risks, many gallery owners salute the work of the artist and do not forbid themselves to expose his next images, like the Parisian art dealer Eric Dupont: "Let us not forget that it is he, artist! He who created the work of art, not the person who posted the picture on Instagram. If the opportunity arises, I would be delighted to expose his work - after having spoken to my lawyers. On the editorial side, the images of the three hundred million Instagram users are seen in a different light. Especially since the phenomenal success of Kim Kardashian West's "Selfish" * book, based on self-portraits of which - it is true - the salty ones were not yet posted on the social network.

The French star Nabilla, who has just surpassed the million subscribers on his account, has already received several proposals from publishers for the photo-novel of his life on Instagram ... "At this level of sharing, images are not more considered as works but as infos, explains a publisher. The only added value is the approach that puts them on stage. "

(*) Ed. Universe (in English).