See and be seen

Yet museums in the 19th Century, especially in continental Europe, were also already places for self-presentation – for showcasing yourself alongside artworks as something to look at. Parisians dressed up to go to the Louvre, and gossip columnists would report on the fashions of visitors to the salons. Museums, like other public entertainments such as pleasure gardens and fairgrounds, were places to be seen as much as to see, and that remains true today. Many of today’s museum selfies, whether they’re snapped next to Autumn Rhythm or in the bathroom mirror, are as much about status as appearance. I was here, they say, and in MoMA’s case they might even be saying: I paid $25 for admission.

A group of visitors to the Contemporary Art Center in Malaga, Spain, take a selfie in front of photos of Marina Abramović (Corbis)

Increasingly for museums and curators, selfies are simply a reality, to be designed for and considered rather than dismissed. It is easy for supercilious critics to grouse that museum selfies are inane. The harder, and more pressing, task is to accept that people see art as selfie backgrounds, and to engage with the difficult questions that phenomenon engenders for artists and their advocates. This past summer, the gifted American artist Kara Walker presented an astounding sculpture made of sugar, in the form of a nude black woman with exaggerated lips, breasts and buttocks. If for many visitors it was a painful evocation of slavery, other gallery-goers, white and black alike, took the opportunity to make lewd gestures for their cameras, and then post them online.

When I saw Walker’s sculpture, on a brutally hot summer day, I wondered whether the artist had erred in imagining that her art would stay put in the space of the gallery, and not circulate in remixed and reconstituted forms. But Walker was watching – and, in a critical but not judgmental film she screened last December, she followed her own audience to see how they beheld her sculpture, why they photographed themselves with it and whether their poses perpetuated the objectification her art is meant to denounce. If the museum selfie represents a recession of art from an autonomous position to a backdrop or a prop, then artists and curators are going to have to start thinking like Walker – and to consider just what power art can retain in such new circumstances. Otherwise we are going to be stuck with a lot of duckface self-portraits in our Instagram feeds, with half-obscured masterpieces peeking from behind.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-13