Art for instagram's sake?

A while back I read an article on The Atlantic titled ‘Art for Instagram’s Sake’ by Katherine Schweb, which questioned whether immersive exhibitions were changing the nature of the gallery experience. Undoubtedly visitors are spending more time looking at the art through their phone, ‘meticulously choosing filters to best highlight the vibrant colours and textures of the art before them’, or using the exhibition backdrop for the ‘ultimate selfie’. As she rightly comments, the phenomenon brings art to the masses in a way that hasn’t been achieved before, making people more curious and perhaps more likely to visit galleries themselves. Like her, I disagree that it’s nobody’s place – art critic, art institution, or cultural elite – to say what ways art should or shouldn’t be experienced by an individual, and this is precisely why I found the recent Yoyoi Kusama’s exhibition at London’s Victoria Miro gallery to be a disappointment.

Japanese artist Kusama has been a key player in the art world for almost seventy years – with her practice evolving to include influences from Surrealism, Minimalism, Pop art, the Zero and Nul movements. She has produced paintings, collage, drawings, sculpture, performance, installation and environmental art, not to mention a range of fashion and product design. To say she is a highly accomplished individual is an understatement! Her work itself is mesmerising, and perhaps none more so than her experiential mirror rooms, seen at her recent London show which drew to a close in July. They captivated visitors through the repetition of form, expansive sense of space and clever use of light. Despite essentially being held inside a small box, spectators experienced a unique sense of infinity and wonder…for a couple of minutes. Then the gallery assistant tugged open the door and ushered us back out, stop watch in hand, ready to herd the next batch of visitors in.

There’s something infinitely less enjoyable about being ‘on the clock’, with someone else determining when you’ve seen enough. It casts my mind back to being in PE lessons at school. Back then the stop button couldn’t be pressed soon enough, but surely going to an exhibition in your leisure time is supposed to be, dare I say it, leisurely? Sure, we were in there long enough to take some quick snaps…but what if we wanted to enjoy it for a bit longer? It felt like the gallery and overall curation was missing the point of the work entirely.

Thankfully free reign was given to explore Kusama's outdoor installations and impressive large-scale paintings showing intricate details and hallucination-inspired motifs, but the whole experience reeked of a school trip, with visitors arranged into groups and taken through the show.

Don’t get me wrong, I endured the queues enough to know that demand was (understandably) high, and that the gallery were keen to let as many people as possible see the show. But surely it would have been better to ticket the exhibition and allow people to enjoy it properly rather than limit the experience to a hurried glance, particularly the immersive works which are designed to be enjoyed in time. 

It seems to me that if visitors choose to snap the exhibition it is their prerogative, but if galleries start to prioritise numbers and the 'been there seen that' mentality over genuine experiences, enjoyed at leisure, then art is reduced more and more to digital spectacle rather than something experienced in space and time.  Curation - particularly where there is high demand - is key to genuine experiences.

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