In a recent Guardian interview, Moco co-founder Kim Logchies-Prins described Instagram as a vital element for the success of art galleries today. Moco’s sites in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and soon London predominantly feature work by artists who are iconic and recognisable such as Warhol, Basquiat and Banksy. The gallery displays art which they believe is most likely to be shared online, stating these artists as ones who ‘have proven popular with social media posters.’ Their exhibitions also often rely on gimmicks and immersiveness, like their 2017 installation of a 3D model of the bedroom from Lichtenstein’s Bedroom at Arles (1992). Certain exhibitions and installations which apparently exist to harbour social media content have caused controversy, with PBS asking whether Instagram is ‘killing our museum culture or reinventing it?’
In the same interview the Moco co-founder blatantly admits to economic motivation: ‘we’ve rented a very expensive building that we have to fill with attractive things and get people to buy tickets.’ When I visited Moco Amsterdam’s Banksy exhibition in 2019 it was so packed you could barely move, and involved a lot of waiting around until you could actually fit into one of the rooms of the exhibition. It was clear to me then that Moco prioritises profit and perceived popularity over visitor experience. Moco clearly uses Instagram as a tool to generate more ticket sales, but it is not always the actions of the gallery itself which causes a social media frenzy.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, currently on show at Tate Modern, suffer from an undeniable Instagrammable quality. There is a one-star review on TripAdvisor of the exhibition which complains that too many people were allowed in one of the rooms at once, meaning ‘you really couldn’t achieve taking the kind of pretty photos demonstrated on the website.’ Seeing as the Tate website does not of course advertise Infinity Mirror Rooms as a venue for taking photographs, and rather as an art exhibition of work by Yayoi Kusama, it seems that so many selfies have been taken in these rooms that there has been some kind of collective amnesia regarding their function.
While it may be overdone, these Kusama selfies are definitely fine and not ‘killing’ much. The exhibition only allows for people to be in each room for 30 to 45 seconds, making it quite a normal reaction to take a photograph to preserve the event for longer. As well as the fact that a series of mirrors actively involves the viewer in the artwork, as their likeness is momentarily part of the work itself. Therefore the exhibition arguably doesn’t call for quiet contemplation but for active participation.
Tate are interested in a more active gallery experience in general. The Yoko Ono retrospective also currently on show includes My Mommy is Beautiful, which invites visitors to write notes about their mothers and attach them to the wall. White pieces of paper with scrawled proclamations of affection form part of the exhibition alongside Ono’s work. This cooperation between artist and spectator falls into what Claire Bishop defined as participatory art. The act of photographing an artwork to share on social media should also technically fall into this category, where the viewer is no longer merely just that, and effectively aids the distribution and visibility of certain art pieces.
Not all artists are interested in this model however. Amsterdam’s Stedelijk recently housed Nan Goldin’s retrospective This Will Not End Well, where the artist requested black stickers to be placed over phone cameras when entering. Goldin stated that if viewers cared about her work, they wouldn’t take photographs and share them. Goldin’s photographic slideshows are carefully curated, and in this case visitors taking pictures would isolate specific moments from their intended context.
Despite certain galleries’ money-grabbing motivations, Instagram is not dangerous to an ever-changing art world where exhibitions are becoming less and less paintings in frames on walls and more interactive and participatory. But it’s nice to know that in some cases the experience of an exhibition is still confined between the gallery walls.
“Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room-The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away” by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.