In a famous lab trial, a chimp named Sultan put two interlocking sticks together and pulled down an elusive prize, a bunch of bananas hanging just out of arm’s reach.
Nearly a century later, eager tourists have conducted their own version of the experiment. Equipped with the camera extender known as a selfie stick, occasionally referred to as “the wand of narcissism,” they can now reach for flattering CinemaScope selfies wherever they go.
Art museums have watched this development nervously, fearing damage to their collections or to visitors, as users swing their sticks with abandon. Now they are taking action. One by one, museums across the United States have been imposing bans on using selfie sticks for photographs inside galleries (adding them to existing rules on umbrellas, backpacks, tripods and monopods), yet another example of how controlling overcrowding has become part of the museum mission.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington prohibited the sticks this month, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston plans to impose a ban. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has been studying the matter for some time, has just decided that it, too, will forbid selfie sticks. (New signs will be posted soon.)
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“From now on, you will be asked quietly to put it away,” said Sree Sreenivasan, the chief digital officer at the Met. “It’s one thing to take a picture at arm’s length, but when it is three times arm’s length, you are invading someone else’s personal space.”
The personal space of other visitors is just one problem. The artwork is another. “We do not want to have to put all the art under glass,” said Deborah Ziska, the chief of public information at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which has been quietly enforcing a ban on selfie sticks but is in the process of adding it formally to its printed guidelines for visitors.
Last but not least is the threat to the camera operator, intent on capturing the perfect shot and oblivious to the surroundings. “If people are not paying attention in the Temple of Dendur, they can end up in the water with the crocodile sculpture,” Mr. Sreenivasan said. “We have so many balconies you could fall from, and stairs you can trip on.”
At the Met on Thursday, Jasmine Adaos, a selfie-stick user from La Serena, Chile, expressed dismay. “It’s just another product,” she said. “When you have a regular camera, it’s the same thing. I don’t see the problem if you’re careful.” But Hai Lin, a student from Shandong, China, conceded that the museum might have a point. “You can hit people when they’re passing by,” she said.
Generally, the taking of selfies is not merely tolerated, it is encouraged. Art museums long ago concluded that selfies help visitors bond to art and create free advertising for the museum. When Katy Perry dropped by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Magritte exhibition last summer and detoured to take a selfie in front of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” the museum reaped a publicity windfall after the image was posted on Pinterest.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, at its Jeff Koons retrospective last year, passed out cards proclaiming, in capital letters, “Koons Is Great for Selfies!“ and urged visitors to post their work on Instagram.
So, selfies good; sticks bad. But bad in theory, not fact, since many museum officials in the United States acknowledge that they have experienced few actual instances of selfie-stick use, or, in some cases, none. For the Hirshhorn, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which have yet to record a single sighting, the ban was a pre-emptive strike. Meanwhile, at the Tate Modern and the National Gallery in London, and the Louvre in Paris — two cities where Asian tourists, in particular, have made the selfie stick a highly visible part of the urban landscape — selfie sticks are still permitted.
The selfie stick originated with a Canadian inventor named Wayne Fromm, who took out a patent in 2005. With the arrival of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the stick spread like wildfire throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. In South Korea, selfie sticks became so heavily used that the government stepped in, ruling that selfie sticks with Bluetooth technology were communications devices and had to be certified. Anyone wielding an illegal stick there can be fined and jailed for up to three years. The selfie’s westward creep followed, as European and American entrepreneurs picked up on the trend.
No one knows how many selfie sticks are out there, though Andy Brennan, an analyst for the market research firm IBISWorld, has estimated that hundreds of thousands have been sold in the United States since last summer.
Noah Rasheta, whose photographic accessories company, iStabilizer, has produced 150,000 selfie sticks since 2011, said, “It’s not the product that’s at fault, it’s the behavior of the people using it.” If the museums think of the selfie as a free form of advertising, he argued, they should encourage visitors to take a better picture.
Museums have always struggled with an intrinsic conflict: how to expose their collections to the maximum number of visitors while protecting their priceless treasures. Their efforts are generally encoded in a set of guidelines, some universal — do not touch the art, do not smoke, do not bring food, do not talk on a cellphone — and some quite particular.
At the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, visitors are reminded that they cannot take guns. The Art Institute of Chicago does not allow flowers, wrapped packages or balloons. (If you have a balloon, you must check it.) Even rule No. 1 — do not touch the art — has variants. Visitors are asked to stay one foot away at the Kimbell, two feet at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The guidelines at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., include the following request: “Please wait until you are outside to erupt into cartwheels of joy.”
The noes are offset by surprising yeses. The photographer Abe Frajndlich once paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art with two digital Leica cameras and a Japanese Butoh dancer, Minami Azu, caked in white makeup and wearing a bright red kimono. As she improvised a performance in response to the artwork around her, Mr. Frajndlich snapped away. Only when a high leg kick flipped Ms. Azu’s kimono open did a guard approach.
“He told me, ‘Sir, we have no problem with you photographing your friend here, but we do have a problem with her exposing herself to our visitors,’ “ Mr. Frajndlich recalled.
The artistic impulse tends to be open and inclusive. All museums contain at least some of this DNA — hence the months of deliberation it took before the Met issued a rather reluctant no.
In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Mr. Sreenivasan, the museum’s digital officer, bought a selfie stick at Walgreens . He took it with him on recent trips to the United Arab Emirates and Europe, where he saw, with alarm, thickets of selfie sticks at tourist attractions and museums.
“If it turned out that the selfie stick served some great purpose, we would defend it,” he said. “But it does not.”
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