The Age of Selfie, now in museums
The distance between the fine art of painting and the mundane selfie collapsed — quite literally — when a visitor at Florence's Uffizi Gallery tripped while posing for a photo with an 18th-century portrait of a Tuscan prince. According to the museum, the 300-year-old painting of Ferdinando de' Medici sustained a tear when the visitor tumbled into it. It has now been removed for repairs, while the accidental vandal, who was reportedly trying to mimic the prince's pose when the incident occured, has been apprehended.
Galleries and museums across Europe have responded by bemoaning the scourge of the selfie-taking tourist — understandably so, given another recent incident where a couple accidentally broke a sculpture inspired by Van Gogh's 'Chair' at the Palazzo Maffei in Verona (one of them accidentally fell backwards into the fragile artwork while pretending to sit in it). Yet, as the artist Nicola Bolla (who created the chair) points out, the institutional response of anger is not the only one. From the Dadaists in the early 20th century — who encouraged visitors to destroy artworks at their notorious 1920 exhibition in Cologne — to artists like Maria Kulikovska and John Baldessari — who obliterated their creations as part of performances — the loss or destruction of works has been used to enrich art.
Each instance of damage might tell a story or ask a vital question, like when a gallery staffer cleaned up a Damien Hirst installation that was meant to look like the mess left behind after a wild party: Was this vandalism or, as the artist himself concluded, an inadvertent comment on art? Years from now, it is possible that the accidents of Florence and Verona will, as Bolla has already noted, be seen as 'a kind of performance', perhaps telling a story about the Age of the Selfie.
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