Some Museums Banning Selfie Sticks Because “Duck Face” Is Not Art

Featured on consumerist.com

We know, we know: Your social media followers insist — nay! demand! — that you chronicle every single thing you do in your life. But displaying your best duck face in a selfie will be a bit trickier at some museums soon, as various cultural institutions nationwide are putting a ban on selfie sticks.

If you’re not aware of what a selfie stick is, picture a long stick that holds your smartphone at one end, allowing the user to grasp the other end and thus, get a better angle for taking a self-portrait than you can get just by using your arm.

According to Skift.com, the sticks are now not welcome at Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Guggenheim, all in New York City, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in D.C. and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art may soon join them.

It’s not just that no one wants to see your mug in front of a work of art, but anytime you’ve got a long stick soaring through the air in public, it creates a bit of a nuisance.

“You can, just by looking at this, imagine the havoc a selfie stick might wreak in this kind of space,” a rep from the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum tells CBS New York, gesturing to a complicated looking installation piece. “They could pose a danger to visitors or our objects on view.”

Not to mention the damage you could be doing by perpetrating the phenomenon known as “duck face,” wherein the subject has pursed his or her lips in an attempt to make oneself more attractive, but that usually actually results in said person looking like a duck.