The selfie museum: why big art galleries should take it seriously

Featured on theguardian.com

Selfiemania in art galleries has reached new heights of surreal comedy at a museum in Manila. Art in Island is a museum specifically designed for taking selfies, with “paintings” you can touch, or even step inside, and unlimited, unhindered photo opportunities. It is full of 3D reproductions of famous paintings that are designed to offer the wackiest possible selfie poses.

Meanwhile, traditional museums are adopting diverse approaches to the mania for narcissistic photography. I have recently visited museums with wildly contrasting policies on picture taking. At the Prado in Madrid, all photography is banned. Anything goes? No, nothing goes. Guards leap on anyone wielding a camera.

At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris photography is a free-for-all. Even selfie sticks are allowed. I watched a woman elaborately pose in front of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe so she could photograph herself with her daft selfie stick. This ostentatious technology turns holiday snaps into a kind of performance art. That is what the Manila museum indulges.

My instincts are to ban selfie sticks, selfies, cameras and phones from museums. But my instincts are almost certanly wrong.

Surely the bizarre selfie museum in Manila is a warning to museums, such as New York’s MoMA, that seek to ban, at the very least, selfie sticks – let alone photography itself. If you frustrate selfie enthusiasts, they may just create their own simulated galleries with phoney art that’s “fun” – or stop going to art galleries entirely.

It is better for photo fans to be inside real art museums, looking – however briefly – at actual art than to create elitist barriers between museums and the children of the digital age.

The lure of the selfie stick, which has caused such a flurry of anxiety at museums, is exaggerated. It really is a specialist device for the hardcore selfie lover. At the Musée d’Orsay there are no prohibitions, but only that one visitor, in front of the Manet, out of all the thousands was actually using a selfie stick.

And there’s another reason to go easy on selfies in museums, however irritating such low-attention-span, superficial behaviour in front of masterpieces may be.

This is that we have many other ways to spoil the museum experience. The Prado bans photography, but looking at its greatest painting, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, is hindered because one tour party after another blocks the view. I had to put my fingers in my ears to shut out commentaries by guides. Some now use microphones with their groups all wearing earpieces, which is just as surreal as selfie-mania. What’s the point of the Prado banning photography if it lets art be spoiled in other ways?

And yet, my survey of the international museum in the digital age was heartening. All over the world, galleries are full. Museums in Paris, Madrid and London are so busy. Has there ever been a time when more people were looking at more great art?

It is easy to rage about the various distractions that complicate the pleasures of museums, but selfie sticks and all the rest are part of a great democratisation of culture.

Art is for everyone – even people with selfie sticks. It’s better for us all to enjoy it in our silly ways than for some to be driven out of the real galleries into fake museums such as the one in Manila.