Museum Selfies: How They Create And Define Identity

In the last article, we talked about the importance of attracting young people to museums. With young people comes social media, and with social media, selfies. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have created an environment where the image (or video) is paramount. When young people come into any photogenic space, they capture it for their friends and followers. There has been a plethora of material written about selfies, and so much of it is sexist and ageist and very “get off my lawn you whippersnappers.” Separating the valid arguments from the chaff is a chore, but one thing is clear: selfies are not going away. Art institutions will have to figure out what their policy regarding museum selfies is, and decide how to engage with a public that expresses itself primarily through images.

Modern Narcissus?

Whenever someone starts talking about selfies in a pejorative manner, they often bring up the story of Narcissus. The beautiful mythological boy fell in love with his own reflection and died when that love could not be reciprocated. He, like so many mythological cautionary tales, lends his name to a modern affliction: narcissism. Social critics associate the selfie with this story, saying that young people are wasting away staring at their own reflection. There is much pearl clutching: “before the advent of the selfie, one would ask a fellow visitor to take a picture and perhaps strike up a conversation. Thus, the totality of the experience was enhanced. Now, we need not ever talk with a stranger because we are self-sufficient. The less we interact with others, the less empathetic we are to others [efn_noteTrischa Goodnow, “The Selfie Moment: The Rhetorical Implications of Digital Self Portraiture for Culture,” in In the Beginning Was the Image: The Omnipresence of Pictures, ed. András Benedek and Ágnes Veszelszki, Time, Truth, Tradition (Peter Lang AG, 2016), 123–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4cns.14.[/efn_note].” Is this really all there is to selfies? Should museums ban them altogether? Anyone who read my last article about how museums can engage with young people probably can guess my take on this, but let’s look at this issue from all the angles.

History of Self Portraits

Self-portraiture is not new. In fact, one of the first photographs ever taken was a self-portrait¹. But even before that, self-portraits emerged in painting in the 16th century, and they became a well-known and often-painted genre. Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt are some of the earliest examples of self-portraitists; “Durer’s self-portrait of 1500 arrives in a historical moment when categories of self, man, artist and creator are being reworked in the broader tension between the Renaissance and the Reformation².” He used a Christ blessing pose in the portrait to portray himself like Jesus. Is that narcissism? Or is it excusable given the context provided in the above quote? Or do we say, “Well, Durer was a master, so a certain level of narcissism is acceptable.”? 

The disapproving critics would say that artist self-portraits, displayed in museums, can’t be compared with selfies being taken in museums. Let’s investigate that judgment further with an examination of what a selfie actually is.

What is a Selfie?

What counts as a selfie? There are several definitions, but the most common one tends to be something along the lines of this one: “photographs of oneself (or of oneself and other people), taken with a camera or a camera phone held at arm’s length or pointed at a mirror, that [are] usually shared through social media³.”

This definition misses a point, however. Here’s another definition: “selfies are characterized by the desire to frame the self in a picture taken to be shared with an online audience⁴.” These two definitions may seem very similar, but the second one is more about identity and narrative. This definition is more germane to what we are talking about here. There’s additional meaning in a selfie as well: it “reveals the current culture’s perceptions of narrative, time, and values⁵.”

We live in a unique time when everyone is capable of documenting and sharing every single moment in their life. In 2014, 93 million selfies were taken every day. That number has probably gone up in the last six years, but it’s impossible to say what it is today.

Why Take a Selfie?

There’s no one answer to this question, but research has divided selfie takers into groups based on different motivations: Communicators, Autobiographers, and Self-Publicists. The Communicator wants to engage friends and followers in conversation. The Autobiographer wants to record and document key events. The Self-Publicist wants to share their entire life⁶. Selfies themselves are also easily divided into categories: there are adventure selfies, popularity selfies, and attractiveness selfies. Adventure selfies are divided further still, into daring adventure selfies and location adventure selfies. 

Museum selfies are location adventure selfies. People value the idea of exploration: “based on the Frontier Myth common in Western culture, exploration, of conquering uncharted lands (experiences), is a value that is cherished⁷.”

With an understanding of why people take selfies, let’s look at how selfies are tied to identity to understand why museum selfies are meaningful.

Identity

When someone takes a location adventure selfie, like at a museum, they are claiming the space as a space they belong. They are the type of person who goes to museums. And they want everyone to know that. More broadly, “the genre contains the potential to capture and reveal complex dimensions of identity including sexuality, gender, taste, class and power[efn_ note]Kris Fallon, “THE PENCIL OF IDENTITY:,” 2020, 17.[/efn_note].” Selfies broadcast the taker’s identity to others, while also claiming a group and expressing a desire to be claimed back by that group.

Museums are themselves places that signal and help create identity: “visiting a museum can simultaneously serve both the construction and signaling of identity⁸.” People go to museums to be elevated, inspired, and educated, all of which feeds into building one’s identity. 

It therefore makes sense that museums would be a hub for selfies. However, there is another facet to identity signaling in museums. Selfies don’t just declare the taker to be someone who frequents museums, but also someone who is art: “being located inside the art seems to encourage additional performances and trigger the need to see and show oneself performing, which is satisfied through selfie- taking and sharing. One of the selfies we found in this sub-genre had a poignant descriptor: ‘We are part of the art’⁹.” Selfie and art are inextricably linked.

Identity is more than just telling people who you are. It is also telling a story about who you are. Selfies tell that story, and they also fit into a larger narrative. They serve as an equalizer: “in popularizing a novel form of self-authorship open to anyone with a smartphone, Instagram challenges the traditional definition of whose story is worth sharing, and who gets to tell that story¹⁰.”

Selfies in Museums

Now we can see that selfies are a way to establish one’s identity, which is also a purpose served by museums themselves. So, let’s take a look at how museums are reacting to selfies.

The museum reaction to selfies and, more importantly, selfie sticks, has been mixed. Several New York City museums, including the Met and the Museum of Modern Art, banned selfie sticks. Other museums banned photography altogether. The primary motive for this negative reaction has been damage control. There is a perceived higher risk to art with selfies and selfie sticks. There have definitely been high profile incidents in the last few years in which selfie takers have accidentally destroyed art, but it appears no one knows how many selfie related accidents there really are. It’s possible it doesn’t matter how many there have been; any risk is too much risk. But not all museums agree that selfies pose a threat.

Malcolm Rogers, former Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, famously posted a selfie showing himself in the galleries on Twitter in 2015 to kick off Museum Selfie Day, during which the museum encouraged people to take selfies in the museum and they would retweet their favorites. Other museums have launched similar initiatives. Museums have started catering to selfies by creating selfie spaces. Other museums have been created around selfies. There is definitely a variety of opinion from institutions about this subject.

Marketing

One major reason a museum might want to allow or even encourage selfies is that Instagram posts are free advertising. If a museum has a particularly eye catching exhibit that will look good in pictures, people will come just to take photos. Museums will still need to engage with those people if they want to see them again, but it’s a way to get them through the door.

Connection to Art

Most of the (many, many) articles about selfies, selfie culture, and museum culture focus on whether or not selfies should be tolerated. Virtually no one talks about whether selfies should be encouraged, and what value a museum selfie might bring to the selfie taker or their audience. Museum selfies transform art. They allow the selfie taker to be inserted into art, and they are (possibly) art themselves.

When someone take a selfie, they are “granting a new perspective and a personal connection to a potentially lifeless object¹¹.” People who might not feel a connection to something normally are creating one when they take a selfie. Creating connections between people and art is the core principle of those behind this website and, consequently, I feel it would be a mistake to underestimate how important this is. Selfie takers also share this connection that they’ve discovered with others when they share the photo on social media. Their followers see art in a new light given the photographer’s perspective. It’s very powerful.

Selfies also provide people a way to insert themselves into art. Selfies often show people mimicking the positions of sculptures or subjects in paintings. This creates a connection, but it also integrates the art with the person’s day-to-day life. History and art history can feel so remote from us now in the 21st century. The flat-faced portraits from the Renaissance can feel not quite human and difficult to relate to. By mimicking a pose or by pretending to touch the art, the selfie taker is bringing that remote and unrecognizable figure into today’s world. They’re discovering and experiencing a shared humanity. Google created a selfie service where you upload a selfie and the AI tells you which famous piece of art you most resemble. This creates that same sense of shared humanity, as well as exposing people to art they may not have been aware of before.

Let’s go back to that question we asked earlier when discussing self-portraiture: are selfies art? Are selfies really the same as self-portraiture? And what should we make of the museums that are designed to create the best selfies? 

There are many Instagram-famous museum spots, but there are also museums that have been created to make good pictures. The Museum of Selfies is the most obvious example, but there is also the Museum of Ice Cream with their sprinkle pools, and the Color Factory with their color-themed rooms. Wired’s Arielle Padres asks, “what separates the monochromatic paintings of the avant-garde movement, like Ad Reinhardt’s series of square, black canvases, from a room devoted to the color blue in [the] Color Factory?¹².” She ultimately comes to the conclusion that selfies lack context, and it’s context that makes art. This harkens back to the old “art institution as gate keeper” mentality that we’ve discussed before. It’s the idea that you must have a specific vocabulary and years of art history study before you can fully understand art. This idea is terribly exclusionary and, more importantly, just not true. 

However, the Museum of Ice Cream, the Color Factory, and most selfies are not actually calling themselves art, so in that way, they are not. People have been debating what counts as art for many, many years, and I’m not going to insert myself into that argument. Many selfies are artistic, and many selfie takers are presenting their selfies as art. Any work that is created with artistic intent is art in my book.

There is another facet to selfies, especially considering their relationship to art, that is too fun not to talk about. We’ve talked briefly about the history of self-portraiture, but we haven’t delved into the history of patrons inserting themselves into the art they’re commissioning. The Medici family (depicted as the biblical Magi) is looking on adoringly at the baby Jesus in Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, and the patrons of the Merode Altarpiece are peering in the door watching the Annunciation. Rebecca Carlson compares this tradition to something akin to the Kardashians posing as the Holy Family¹³“How Selfies Are Changing the Way We Interact with Art,” MuseumNext, February 26, 2020, https://www.museumnext.com/article/how-selfies-are-changing-the-way-we-interact-with-art/..”

Is this really that different from people inserting themselves into art via selfies? It is, in that the Medici family paid for that painting and the millions of people who take selfies next to the Mona Lisa did not. But the impulse to include yourself in a masterpiece, to say “I’m the art too,” has a very long history.

The debate about selfies, selfie culture, and selfies in museums will rage on. But I hope that I’ve sufficiently shown that museum selfies are a natural extension of what has come before, that they allow people to connect with art, and that they help create and define identity. Finally, I want to share a video that I found years ago that shows a positive side of selfies.

We’d love to see your museum selfies! Tag us @artistic_connector on Instagram!

1. ibid.
2. Kris Fallon, “THE PENCIL OF IDENTITY:,” 2020, 17.
3. Robert Kozinets, Ulrike Gretzel, and Anja Dinhopl, “Self in Art/Self As Art: Museum Selfies As Identity Work,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00731.
4. ibid.
5. Trischa Goodnow, “The Selfie Moment:: The Rhetorical Implications of Digital Self Portraiture for Culture,” in In the Beginning Was the Image: The Omnipresence of Pictures, ed. András Benedek and Ágnes Veszelszki, Time, Truth, Tradition (Peter Lang AG, 2016), 123–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4cns.14.
6. “Are Selfie-Takers Narcissists?,” The Science Teacher 84, no. 3 (2017): 25–26.
7. Trischa Goodnow, “The Selfie Moment:: The Rhetorical Implications of Digital Self Portraiture for Culture,” in In the Beginning Was the Image: The Omnipresence of Pictures, ed. András Benedek and Ágnes Veszelszki, Time, Truth, Tradition (Peter Lang AG, 2016), 123–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4cns.14.
8. Robert Kozinets, Ulrike Gretzel, and Anja Dinhopl, “Self in Art/Self As Art: Museum Selfies As Identity Work,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00731.
9. Robert Kozinets, Ulrike Gretzel, and Anja Dinhopl, “Self in Art/Self As Art: Museum Selfies As Identity Work,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00731.
10. Kris Fallon, “THE PENCIL OF IDENTITY:,” 2020, 17.
11. Robert Kozinets, Ulrike Gretzel, and Anja Dinhopl, “Self in Art/Self As Art: Museum Selfies As Identity Work,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00731.
12. “The Rise of the Made-for-Instagram Museum,” Wired, accessed September 9, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/selfie-factories-instagram-museum/.