Museum behavior has always been synonymous with restriction: Don’t raise your voice, don’t wear backpacks, and certainly don’t touch the art. One rule, though—don’t take photographs—has been entirely done away with by some museums, and is under reconsideration by dozens of others.
There are obvious benefits to allowing non-commercial photography. Given free rein, every visitor with an Instagram account becomes a potential publicist for the museum. But there are downsides, too. Conservation is the biggest: The jury’s still out as to whether cell phone flashes cause fading, and if a visitor is focused on taking a self portrait, there’s a higher likelihood of banging into the art. “We have plaster casts on ledges,” says Tom Ryley, communications officer of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. “If you’re taking a photograph, you might back into them by mistake.”
Not coincidentally, there’s a growing stack of literature about the pernicious effect of mixing museums and social media. Too many people, the critique goes, are photographing art with their smartphones and then walking away. The art itself is merely glanced at, if at all.
Selfie Culture Meets Actual Culture
Various commentators have noted that this is a byproduct of selfie culture; art effectively has become a scrim for self-portraits. “Museums,” writes the critic Rob Horning in Even Magazine, “are no longer spaces in which to experience art, but rather spaces in which to perform the self having art experiences.”
Anyone with a social media account can see that this is true: Even if people aren’t posing with art in museums, they’re certainly posting it. (Earlier this year, the Russian ministry of Culture’s official twitter account sent out a tweet promoting “MuseumSelfieDay.”)
And anyone who’s actually been to a museum in the last few years knows that many visitors (of all age groups and nationalities) seem compelled to interact with art by using their screens as an intermediary.
“Personally, what I’ve noticed is that people spend more time taking pictures than looking at pieces of art,” says Benoit Parayre, the director of communications at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “They take a picture, and don’t even stop in front of the paintings and discover it.”
The question, then, is how museums are responding to this trend, if at all. Virtually all institutions ban flash photography, and all banned selfie sticks almost as soon as they were invented. But individual administrations have since taken very different approaches to the selfie phenomenon. The choice, museum representatives say, isn’t simply a question of boosting attendance or restricting it. Photography policy has become a defining standpoint on what museums can, should, and will represent to their visitors.
“From a museum perspective, it is wonderful that people are memorializing their experiences,” says Kenneth Weine, the chief communications officer at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “As a marketer, it’s very important to us that this channel is available, because we at the Met want to be accessible to the widest audience possible.”
No Photography, Period
A surprising number of museums have an outright ban on photography. The Prado in Madrid, which has 79 works by Velazquez, 42 El Grecos, and 43 Titians, doesn’t allow photos or filming during museum hours, according to a press representative at the museum.