Marine Tanguy thinks our eyes deserve more than narcissistic soft porn — so she’s building a stable of talents to rival Kim Kardashian

One day Marine Tanguy decided to do a test. She posted a picture of her bottom in a bikini to her 24,000 Instagram followers. The post received 75% more views than usual — and most of the viewers were other women.

“I’m a grown woman,” says the 29-year-old French founder of arts talent agency MT Art. “But imagine if I was a 16-year-old girl. What would this tell me? It would tell me that my body is more valued than anything I could say, more valuable than, say, posting my exam results. Quite possibly it would mean I would put up more photos of my body to increase my profile.”

Tanguy points out we live in a world where Kim Kardashian has 70 times more Instagram followers than the Louvre. Why does that matter? “Because she is producing overwhelmingly narcissistic, self-objectifying, highly sexualised imagery. She’s promoting unrealistic beauty standards, rather than enriching visual art, which is what the Louvre offers. ”But surely it’s not Kardashian’s fault? “No, but she has 100 million followers.” (Actually, 136m.) That’s one eighth of Instagram users. It can’t be good for us that so much of our visual landscape is dominated by a single individual. “But you’re right. It’s not her fault. We have a responsibility for who our role models are. We are the ones creating the demand for this narcissistic visual content. We are the ones to blame.”

Tanguy’s big idea is that we need to go on a visual diet. “A lot of us are spending five hours a day on social media sites such as Instagram, looking at the visual equivalent of junk food. No one would advocate eating junk food for every meal, but effectively that’s what we’re doing and it has consequences.” She tells me that depression among teenagers has risen massively since 2010 and that teenage suicide rates are higher than ever. “Not all of this is to do with a photo-sharing app, obviously, but it isn’t helping.” Tanguy demurs when I suggest the problem is that we’re tyrannised by the visual, glued to our phones rather than books. The Marxist critic Frederic Jameson wrote in Signatures of the Visible: “The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination … Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body … Our society has begun to offer us the world — now mostly a collection of products of our own making — as just such a body, that you can possess visually, and collect the images of.” For Tanguy, the visual is a cause of our problems, but it can be a solution too. “We need inspiring visual content that can enrich us.” What does she have in mind? She recalls seeing Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa as a schoolgirl. “It was the first time a painting made an impact on me. I could empathise with their plight. It took me out of myself and into the position of those people lost on the sea and contemplating cannibalism.”

But do the world’s great art galleries necessarily inspire and enrich? Think of what the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls pointed out in 1985, namely that less than 5% of the artists in the modern arts sections of New York’s Met were women, but 85% of the nudes were female. “My hope for art is that it will supply visual content that will change people’s philosophies, shake them up rather than keep them in their little bubbles as social media does. Art books always provided me with a way to escape my own routine; they quickly became my door to new intellectual worlds full of exciting new ideas that were striking visually. And the point of what I do is to promote artists who do just that.”

After studying philosophy and art history, Tanguy, aged 23, set up her own gallery in Los Angeles. “I didn’t like the art scene there much, but I did have an idea to create a kind of talent agency for artists in the same way they exist in Hollywood for actors.” In 2015 she set up such an agency. “We’re looking for artists who have innovative techniques, inspiring content and strong visions. The artists who sign with the agency have their studio costs covered, we sell their works, put in place cultural and commercial partnerships and get them press exposure. We accelerate their artistic reputation and visibility.”

One of her clients is Sarah Maple whose work, Inaction, has the slogan: Inaction is a Weapon of Mass Destruction painted on to a mirror. Another is Alexandra Lethbridge, a photographer whose photomontage (Mis)direction is a lovely visual puzzle exploring her themes of truthfulness in images. “I’m trying to create an agency that helps people enter what has been a very elitist industry and to subvert that elitism, and its sexism and racism,” Tanguy says. Another artist, Adelaide Damoah, describes herself as a living paintbrush. In a recent piece, Damoah subverted Yves Klein’s 1960 Anthropometries performance, in which the Frenchman selected young white women to cover their torsos and thighs with his patented blue paint and directed them to press and roll their bodies on to paper-covered canvas. “Klein’s models were stripped of agency,” said the British performance artist. “I directed myself, applying the paint to my whole body in private, removing the potential for eroticisation and objectification.”

What shines from Tanguy and the artists she represents is the idea that art can catalyse change. Her heroes are Victorian social reformers Octavia Hill (artist and the founder of the National Trust) and John Ruskin. Ruskin believed that the industrial working class needed not just bread but beauty. For Tanguy, social-media addicts need more than narcissistic soft porn and product placement: they need inspiring images. “I think people are becoming more aware of how useful art can be in improving wellbeing. It’s associated with an improvement in mental health.” She cites the Canadian government prescribing visits to art museums when someone is low mentally. The UK is planning something similar, according to health secretary Matt Hancock. He made a speech last year arguing for what is called social prescribing — whereby people suffering from depression, strokes, dementia or even social isolation will be encouraged to become socially involved. “Access to the arts and social activities improves people’s mental and physical health. … For too long we’ve been fostering a culture of popping pills, when we should be doing more prevention.”

Tanguy, along with Vishal Kumar, a data scientist at University College, recently conducted a study highlighting how public art can deliver wellbeing. They surveyed 469 respondents during two MT Art agency commissions. The study reported that 84% of all respondents said that more public art in their city would improve their wellbeing, 60% were willing to pay at least £5 for more public art in their local area, with 84% willing to pay at least £2. The aim of the study was to encourage public bodies to commission more public art: “There’s quite a lot of hesitation,” And she thinks her agency can have a role in overcoming it. One of her artists, Jasmine Pradissitto, has just been commissioned by the Mayor of London Fund to make a sculpture which uses a geopolymer to absorb pollution, such as nitrogen dioxide, from the air as part of a so-called Wellbeing Walk from London’s Euston station designed to encourage commuters to use less polluted streets.

Perhaps Tanguy’s hope that art can change social attitudes is not so far-fetched. She cites Joseph Hillier’s seven-meter-high, 9.5-tonne statue Messenger, representing a woman in an action pose, installed in Plymouth in March. The artist said Messenger was aimed at changing public perceptions about what sculptures should look like and how women are depicted. Nicola Kavanagh, the actor whose physical pose inspired the work, said: “There aren’t that many statues of women and those that are around are passive, demure or looking beautiful. She looks like she’s engaging and acting in a rebellious manner. I have two nieces. I think it’s very important that little girls and little boys see women doing things — and you can’t miss Messenger.” The sculpture does something else: it provides an antidote to how Kim Kardashian offers herself up for the public gaze. It suggests that women might do more than take off their clothes to advance. “This is my hope,” says Tanguy, patting her belly, inside which her first child is growing, “that my son grows up in a world where women aren’t passive objects consumed for the male gaze and that the new generation isn’t as addicted to that kind of imagery as ours is.”