For art’s sake

For art’s sake

Museums should embrace selfie culture, because it’s better to attract crowds than dust.

Where you are banned from using smartphones, they tend to feel even more desirable. In the art world they get a singularly bad rap. The flash causes fading. The selfie stick is considered not at all chic. Posing with art equals being inattentive to it, your narcissism reducing paintings and sculpture to backdrop. But any queue outside a museum that bans smartphone use is likely to see folks tweeting, Instagramming, scrolling reviews of the exhibition, compulsively. Being on line seduces you to go online.

Now many museums are changing tack. Instead of turning up their nose at the selfie, a new approach is that this self-portrait stimulates the visitor’s encounter with art, and memorialising the encounter then markets the museum to a wider audience. To illustrate, a key reason for Indians’ endless fascination with Madame Tussauds is rubbing waxy shoulders with Katrina Kaif and Sachin, then sharing the photo-proof with all your family and friends via social media. High art is not that different. On the lawns of the National Gallery of Modern Art in the capital only the most self-contained soul is not tempted to take a selfie after bumping into Subodh Gupta’s Dada, the stainless steel banyan tree that makes children smile and adults too.

India’s museums tend to be dreary experiences. Troops of restless schoolchildren are often the most frequent visitors, endlessly being told to lower their voices and not touch the art. A change of approach is clearly called for. Even the Louvre that attracted an eye-popping 8.1 million visitors last year compared to India’s 10.18 million foreign tourists, has hooked up with Beyonce and Jay-Z for promotion, where they take a selfie with Mona Lisa. Our museums need to get cool too.