How Social Media Puts Art at Risk
When the Uffizi Gallery in Florence was opened to the public in 1769, the invention of photography was more than a half-century away. It wasn’t until the summer of 2014 that personal photography was allowed within the ornate museum. The Uffizi wasn’t late to the game. Rather, this was exactly the era during which many museums were struggling with whether to allow visitors to snap pictures in their galleries. Issues like copyright and damage to art from flash photography hovered at the top of most institutions’ lists of reasons why to prohibit the use of cameras.
The era of the iPhone and other cellular devices was in full-swing. It seems now like an overnight development: gallery guards suddenly had to contend with virtually every visitor coming into their spaces carrying a phone with a high-quality camera. This was concomitant with the social media revolution, and the combination has proven irresistible to museum goers.
Museums saw the futility in trying to stop the incessant photography. They also saw opportunity—museums are, by nature, aesthetic wonders and make for perfect photography studios. It’s hard to snap a bad photo standing by a beautiful Renaissance painting. So the endless images that popped up on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and elsewhere amounted to free advertising.
But all of this comes with a risk, of course. None of the aformentioned—the 18th century visionaries who opened the doors to the Uffizi nor the museum directors of the 21st century—could conceive of what the museum experience would become with the introduction of cameras in nearly every hand. After all, who could have imagined that people would prefer to take in their experience with great art through a viewfinder and instead later admire it on 6” x 3” hi-res screen (probably after applying a filter with an odd name like “Juno” or “Mayfair”)?
Visitors making short videos for their Tik Tok accounts stand out like a coffee stain on a white dress shirt. These aspiring Scorceses walk with their cameras raised in front of their faces trying to create something special for maximum clicks. It’s depressing to watch them bump into other visitors in their path.
Unsurprisingly, this behavior can lead to damaged art. In the past week, a tourist at the Uffizi tried to create a meme by posing like Tuscan prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in front of his portrait, painted by Anton Domenico Gabbiani in 1712. The tourist fell backwards into the 300 year old work, tearing it in the process.
Just days earlier, another tourist in Italy, this time at the Palazzo Maffei, foolishly tried to sit in what was called Van Gogh’s Chair, a crystal-covered piece made by the artist Nicola Bolla. Of course, the artwork buckled under the visitor’s weight and was ruined. The visitors finally put their camera away to run out of the gallery, but not before the museum’s CCTV system captured the inglourious event. The Palazzo Maffei accurately described the incident as “every museum’s nightmare.”
These sound like isolated events, but they are not. Museums rarely publicly announce damage to their collections by visitors. It serves no good purpose to do so, hurts their reputation, and embarrasses the visitor. So the general public is not aware of the risk to fine art brought about by people more interested in a snapshot that will garner them likes on Facebook than they are in the brushstrokes of a Velazquez or the cleft chin in Botticelli’s model.
The visitor experience near famous works is impacted, of course. Take a look at the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa. They resemble attendees at a stadium concert, standing shoulder to shoulder, jockeying for their personal space, their cameras held high, almost above their heads, to capture what they should be seeing with their own eyes.
All this makes it very difficult for museum security to protect collections. There exists today a wide array of excellent technology to protect art against theft and vandals. But it’s extremely difficult to protect against mindless behavior. Even that old friend of the protective services department, the stanchion, is virtually powerless against the amateur videographer. In some instances, it serves only as a tripping hazard.
Walk through any busy museum and you won’t take ten paces without seeing a young person standing for photos taken by a friend. You’ll easily recognize the familiar poses that you see everyone striking on your social media feeds. Look more closely and you’ll notice that after they model, they walk away from the art next to which they preened without ever really taking it in. For so many—too many, in my opinion, and I see it every day—the museum has become a film set rather than a place to learn or be inspired. And sometimes, it can destroy the experience for everyone else.