“It’s You Plus It’s … Art”: The #Artselfie Debate From Douglas Coupland to Tolstoy

Abstract

“It’s You Plus It’s … Art”: The #Artselfie Debate From Douglas Coupland to Tolstoy Elena Siemens Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Erwin Wurm, Big Disobedience. VAG Offsite, Vancouver, 2019. Photo by the author. [End Page 27] In contrast to a regular selfie, the #artselfie, Douglas Coupland writes, “contains upscale branding semiotics within the frame itself. Crop and apply a hashtag and suddenly you don’t feel like an ant any more” (Jordan et al. 13). Instead, “It’s you plus it’s … art!” (Jordan et al. 13). Coupland, though, still misses the old analog era, and in particular “that wicker basket next to the landline phone filled with bad party shots and unflattering posed shots taken on windy days” (Jordan et al. 11). The selfie, Coupland points out, “allows all of us to pose and put forth a model of who we think we are, as opposed to who we actually are” (Jordan et al. 11). Taking a giant step further, the #artselfie brings Da Vinci and Van Gogh into this equation, rather than simply adding an Instagram hashtag. Does the #artselfie diminish art? Is the conversation between its two protagonists (art and the self) one-sided? In addition to Coupland’s “Notes on Selfies,” the thought-provoking volume on #Artselfie includes a substantial critical component couched as a dialogue between DIS Magazine and Simon Castets. According to DIS: “You could argue that when people are taking #artselfies in the museum, it somehow devalues the work that is behind them, if for no other reason than the fact that it appears as a thumbnail on your iPhone” (Jordan et al. 79). DIS further states: “Art suddenly becomes a status-apparatus, it becomes-with the #artselfie-a beautiful background” (Jordan et al. 79). Castets, who is a French art curator and director of the Swiss Institute in New York, takes issue with this: To me, it’s the opposite, if I don’t take a picture of the artworks I’m interested in, I remain on the surface and I am keeping myself from a deeper understanding of the work. I photograph the label, the artwork, but I am not necessarily going to do an #artselfie. (Jordan et al. 79) This article considers a number of diverse takes on the often tangled interaction between art and the viewer. In addition to the #Artselfie contributors, I discuss Johan Idema’s How to Visit an Art Museum, which proposes a range of productive strategies designed to help the viewer conduct a more meaningful dialogue with art. My case studies include Alex Prager’s short film La Grande Sortie (2015), as well as Prager’s photographs associated with it, both addressing the complexity of this exchange between art and the viewer-especially the consequences of breaking the fourth wall separating performers and audience. Martin Parr’s set of photographs Playing to the Gallery, shot for Vogue (2019), also raises some tough questions regarding the museum and/or theatre environment. The article further refers to Tolstoy’s classic War and Peace, particularly the chapter set at the Opera Theatre in Moscow, where, to the narrator’s indignation, the stage and the auditorium are found at complete odds. In contrast to Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov refrains from judging the characters in his play The Seagull or his story “The Lady with the Dog.” The article is illustrated with a selection of my images portraying viewers interacting with art at two prominent locations in Vancouver. [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Erwin Wurm, Big Disobedience. VAG Offsite, Vancouver, 2019. Photo by the author. Commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet and shot at the renowned Opera Bastille, Alex Prager’s short film La Grande Sortie (2015) stars the celebrated dancer Émily Cozette as a prima ballerina, who returns to the stage “after an unexplained hiatus” (“La Grande Sortie”). In her New York Times article coinciding with the opening of Prager’s 2016 exhibit at the Lehmann Maupin in New York, Isabel Wilkinson writes: At first, the performance resembles what Prager calls a “PBS-style” movie, “when you’re searching for something to watch late at night-until its...