Comment by JazCE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JazCE | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those topics that will keep coming up. I first properly noticed this a few years ago whilst strolling around Tate Modern and watching a girl go from exhibit to exhibit just taking a picture without seeming to take in what she was picturing (I might be wrong, how we judge/look at art is different).

Art is maybe different to historical places. Having just come back from Japan, I noticed this whilst walking around shrines and temples, where it felt like conveyor belt tourism. Walk along a path till you hit the "perfect" point for your selfie/shot of said temple, then keep going till you hit the exit. I even came across this sign: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jaredce/26366290652/in/album-7... a sign of the times?

I struggled in Japan, my knowledge of the language was completely lacking, and it made me wonder, how do we cater to those who don't speak English in the UK, is it a struggle for those too? Is the selfie destroying culture, or have we not done enough to allow people to understand the thing they're looking at?

I don't think it will keep coming up for long. Cameras are getting cheaper and better fast enough that those interested in recording parts of their vacation will soon find it easier to just record continuously to ensure that whatever they are seeing can be shared. It's a limited-time version of the argument for life-logging. When your headset or glasses take a photo of everything in front you all the time, all that's necessary is that you have seen something. The objections related to manual management of cameras and how people aren't really experiencing the moment will be moot.

Of course, we'll replace them with objections to being recorded in public, as we saw with Google Glass, but eventually those will fade, too, as it becomes impossible to know if other people are currently preserving any give moment.

To be fair museums themselves make this worse. I still haven't come across a museum (granted I don't go a lot) that had exhaustive good-quality photographs of all their exhibits available online.

So to give this girl the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this is the only time she'll be in London, she only has a few days, and she's genuinely interested in the art, but taking photos of it to inspect it later allows her to enjoy more of it than hanging around carefully looking at individual pieces at the expense of not seeing any of the others at all, ever.

> To be fair museums themselves make this worse. I still haven't come across a museum (granted I don't go a lot) that had exhaustive good-quality photographs of all their exhibits available online.

Bingo. I do go to a lot of art galleries and museums and this is a huge problem. I get back and want to find that item that was very interesting and study it more, and the best I can find is some grainy picture on wikipedia that someone else took.

Well, they have to incentivise you to visit. I can understand why they don't put their pieces online, they want you to come, maybe pay for entrance or donate, buy something from the gift shop. Putting it online is rightly, or wrongly, detracting from that.

Maybe, but that does not make sense to me. If anything, pictures online make me want to go see something in person. Also, the popular pieces can usually be found online which does not fit the model of must come to see. My guess is the less popular pieces are so numerous that it is too expensive to properly photograph and host images of everything.

Art is maybe different to historical places

That's personal I guess, for me both can evoke the same feelings of wonder of what humankind can do. And for both, I have never felt the same, nor have been as blown away by the real thing as by a picture. Maybe I just lack imagination, who knows? For example: I have seen tons of pictures and documentaries of the colosseum in Rome. Sure they give me a feeling of being impressed etc, but none of them do the same to as when actually standing next to the colosseum and looking at it.

That's personal I guess, for me both can evoke the same feelings of wonder of what humankind can do.

Sorry you're right, it is personal. But, maybe, it's easier to explain why Monks, Kings or Militia built/destroyed something than it is to say why Rothko/Woody Allen/Rembrandt painted/filmed/wrote something a certain way. I'm probably wrong, my knowledge of art isn't particularly great.

So what I was trying to say that, yes you can get a feeling from art, but understanding it is harder, or explaining it is harder, so taking a photo/selfie of the Mona Lisa is maybe more acceptable than the conveyor belt selfie of temples/canyons/great buildings.

I've had to do this several times before, simply because I'm often with people (i.e. parents or friends) who don't have the patience for me to stop at every placard and read the context, they just want to take in everything for a few seconds and move on.

I often have to take pictures of this stuff and not read it until later just so I don't lose sight of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com