A painting is not a background and a museum is not a set. Yet that is precisely how Olivia Rodrigo’s music video for her latest single “drop dead” used them. Released last week, the project marks the first time this decade that the Palace of Versailles has opened its royal apartments to a film crew. On the surface, it’s one creative form encouraging another — a way to inspire young audiences to visit Versailles and reflect on the palace as a place of beauty. But handing over Marie Antoinette’s bedroom in the name of awareness spotlights a more cynical problem of institutions caring more about clout than impact.
The Smithsonian Institution’s WONDER exhibition in the Renwick Gallery was dubbed “Instagram famous” by The Washington Post before it had been open for a month, and gimmicky experiences like the Museum of Ice Cream in SoHo — which is actually not a museum as it collects or preserves nothing — are charging up to $49 a ticket for the privilege of taking selfies in a room full of fake sprinkles. After watching its lines wrap around the block, real museums have taken note.
The American Alliance of Museums has openly advised institutions to compete with these venues by embracing photo-friendly policies. A major exhibition at the Fyre Art Museum in Seattle went so far as to curate its entire show based on which paintings got the most Instagram likes. We have clearly lost the plot.
Understandably, social media can be seen as free advertising, and every visitor with a phone is a potential publicist. More photos mean more visibility, which means more foot traffic and the ability for these museums to keep the lights on. In 2017, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors at the Hirshhorn drew a record-breaking 475,000 visitors and was posted on Instagram over 34,000 times. You cannot stop it, the argument goes, so you might as well lean into it.
But there is something troubling being glossed over here. Psychologist Linda Henkel of Fairfield University found that people who photographed objects in museums remembered significantly less about them than those who simply looked at the art — a phenomenon she called the photo-taking-impairment effect. We are quite literally outsourcing our experience of art to our camera rolls and then never thinking about it again. The photo becomes a receipt for having been there instead of a memory of what it truly felt like.
The entire point of museums and the reason we visit them is to have a tangible encounter with the actual artwork. Standing in front of Guernica — which the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid recently made photographable after 30 years of restriction — and feeling the 25-foot scale of it land on your chest is uniquely human. That experience is not enhanced by reaching for your phone, but interrupted by it.
There are also concerns about conservation, particularly for older, more fragile pieces. The jury is still out on whether smartphone flashes cause long-term fading, but physical proximity to art is its own risk. At Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the communications officer has flagged that photography-distracted visitors regularly bump into the plaster casts on display ledges. The art suffers quietly and we never get to see that in people’s perfect feeds.
None of this means that museums should return to the era of guards descending on anyone who raises a phone. There are real benefits to open photography policies, such as people getting to share their experiences, improvements in accessibility and communities that have historically felt excluded from elite cultural spaces being able to engage on their own terms.
But the line worth drawing is between allowing photography and designing for it. A museum that lets you take a photo of a Rembrandt is doing something categorically different from a museum that installs a neon sign purely because it will perform well online or that redesigns its lighting around the algorithm rather than the artwork. One serves the visitor, while the other serves the feed.
Museums are not content circuses or pop-up experiences. They are, at their best, places where time slows down and you are asked to pay attention to a piece made by someone who had something to say. Next time you are at a museum and feel yourself rushing to post on Instagram, consider slowing down by sketching or journaling about the art pieces that catch your eye instead.
Contact Srishti Mangla at [email protected].