Close-up

Photography in museums has become so invasive that, in no-photos-allowed museums like New York’s Frick Collection, I watch museum guards spending almost the entirety of their shifts not supervising the art, but dissuading people from taking pictures. (And pity the guards in those few German museums that make visitors pay extra for the right to take photographs: I was not the only person to get yelled at during my last visit to the Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam.) But two coincident developments at the end of the last decade combined to make the museum into selfie central. One, of course, was the rise of social media and in particular Instagram, which not only allow for quick distribution but also for immediate, uncomplicated praise in the form of ego-sustaining ‘likes’. The other development – subtler but more important – was the introduction of a second, front-facing lens on cameraphones, allowing users to see their own image as they pose. Stand in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre or Starry Night at MoMA, and you’ll now see a good number of visitors looking away from the painting, more interested in themselves on screen.

It’s become popular for visitors to take photos of themselves in all different parts of a museum, including in the lobby, in the bathrooms and even outside (Corbis)

This poses a real challenge to curators and artists, I’d argue, who increasingly have to reckon with exhibition design that takes into account new, probably not better ways of moving among artworks. On a recent visit to the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, I stood in a gallery filled with kinetic sculpture from the 1960s with, by my count, 12 other museumgoers – and every single one was looking at his or her phone. The cameraphone, and the portal it offers away from the museum and into what we used to call cyberspace, is not a phenomenon that can be taken lightly. It challenges the most basic conceptions of how viewers experience art, and what demands the museum places upon them.

After all, one of the reasons so many people bridle at the museum selfie is because we still conceive of the museum – rightly or wrongly – as a place of learning and self-improvement. That has not always been the case; the early Wunderkammer, or 'cabinets of curiosities', were more displays of beauty (and wealth) than educational efforts. It was the 19th Century that gave us the museum as a site of moral improvement, notably in Britain: as the scholar Amy Woodson-Boulton has shown, “reformers” constructed museums in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester not just to showcase the wonders of art and science, but to acculturate working-class populations to middle-class forms of behaviour. And museums today still have a disciplinary character: don’t touch. Don’t talk too loudly. No skateboarding down the Guggenheim’s ramp.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-13