Gallery wars! Are you a selfie fan or a silent snob?

Times

25-06-2025

You might have imagined that the biggest security threat to the world's great artworks these days came from environmental activists intent on chucking soup, paint or powder at priceless treasures. Last week a Picasso in Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts became the latest target, splashed with pink paint.
But two recent incidents in Italy suggest that the stupidity of ordinary visitors can be just as destructive as the wilful vandalism of protesters. At the renowned Uffizi Gallery in Florence an early 18th-century painting of Ferdinando de' Medici by Anton Gabbiani had to be removed for repairs, and an entire exhibition temporarily closed, after a visitor apparently fell backwards into it, tearing the canvas while trying to create a meme with a phone.
The Uffizi's director, Simone Verde, says that the museum will now 'set very precise limits' on visitors intent on taking selfies that are 'not compatible with respect for cultural heritage'. I'm not sure what the Italian is for 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted', but you have to wonder why such an esteemed institution didn't have 'precise limits' in place already.
Especially as, earlier this summer, two tourists at another Italian gallery — Verona's Palazzo Maffei — managed to shatter a crystal-covered chair by the artist Nicola Bolla by pretending to sit on it (then, inevitably, falling on it) while taking selfies of each other.
But such crass behaviour is not confined to Italy. Whether it's the British Museum, the Louvre, the Prado or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the world's great art repositories are packed with visitors who seem far more intent on taking selfies — with a glimpse of the Mona Lisa, an Egyptian mummy or a Van Gogh sunflower in the background — than on looking at the masterpiece itself.
And the selfie mania is just one example of a whole range of behaviours that exasperate those who still cling to the belief that the most important thing in an art gallery is the art — which should be studied in as near to a reverential silence as is possible in these crowded public spaces.
The trouble is that the people who cling to this old-fashioned belief don't seem to include many of those who run the UK's main galleries. In The Times last weekend Maria Balshaw, the director of the Tate museums, welcomed an influx of under-35 visitors 'who didn't used to come to museums' and who now apparently come because 'they like the artist-led experience but they also want nice wine, and they want to be seen in a crowd with other people'.
• How to deter the art vandals — punish them properly
In other words, they are there precisely because they are being offered a socially pleasurable experience, with some interesting stuff on the walls that they may or may not glance at in passing.
In the 1980s the Victoria and Albert Museum was ridiculed for marketing itself with the infamous slogan 'an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached'. We can see now that it was simply ahead of the curve.
Today it's not just the Tate trying to woo young punters by promoting itself as a place where you can have a nice chat with your mates and take a few pics for your social media account in congenial surroundings. It's nearly every museum and gallery in Britain.
Cases in point? This week we learn who has won the Art Fund's Museum of the Year award. When I talked a few weeks ago to the directors of the five contenders I was struck by how much each of them emphasised one aim above all others: to widen their museum's appeal by making their institutions as welcoming to newcomers as possible.
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Laudable, you may say. But should that strategy include permitting, or even encouraging, new visitors — unaware of any museum etiquette — to behave as they would in a theme park? Or to feel that they haven't properly validated their experience of a great artwork unless they spend their whole time in its company setting up the perfect meme to amuse their followers on Insta?
There are wider currents at work here, of course. We live in a mad age where we happily devalue every significant moment in life — from birth to marriage to your kid's first bike ride — by turning it into an amateur photoshoot. We also live at a time when, culturally, every experience must be reduced to its lowest common denominator lest it be labelled with the dread word 'elitist'. Which seems to mean tolerating behaviour that, even 20 years ago, would have been regarded as unacceptably antisocial.
That's why, at certain West End shows on Friday and Saturday nights, drunken theatregoers now regularly heckle the performers — imagining that they have a licence to behave boorishly because they have paid for a ticket. Or why distinguished symphony orchestras have got into trouble with their longstanding supporters and indeed their musicians by tolerating audience members who film concerts illicitly on their phones.
At a time when every arts institution is still trying to get its ticket sales back to pre-Covid levels, you can understand why arts leaders are reluctant to set rules that might deter new punters. But would a little etiquette really put them off?
When people step inside the National Gallery they surely don't want to experience the same hubbub as outside in Trafalgar Square. They want to escape from that. Learning to look at art — really look at it, not just glance in passing — is a skill best nurtured in an atmosphere of tranquillity. There's also the matter of behaving in a way that shows respect — respect both for other visitors and for the magnitude of the artistic genius arrayed all around you.
'Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,' Picasso said. Well, it can do if we give it the time and concentration to work its magic on us. But for that to happen you have to accept that, when you step into a room with great art in it, the most important thing in that room isn't you. Sounds obvious, until you watch someone fall onto a 300-year-old painting while trying to take a selfie.
by Blanca SchofieldSchoolboys damage the Elgin Marbles, British Museum, London, 1961The British government's case in the back and forth with the Greeks about the future of the 2,500-year-old sculptures can't have been helped by the two rowdy students who had a fight and fell into the artwork, knocking off part of a centaur's hind leg. Worse, the damage was irrevocable as archivists couldn't replace the missing chips. Always keep an eye on the kids: this year a child made headlines by scratching a £42 million Rothko in Rotterdam.
A man falls into three Qing dynasty vases, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2006Always double-knot your shoes. Nick Flynn, 42, tripped over his untied laces when walking down a staircase and ended up falling into three 400-year-old Chinese vases, worth £100,000. He blamed the absence of a handrail but even so, he was banned from the museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was kinder to the woman who lost her balance at an art class in 2010 and ripped the £80 million Picasso work The Actor — refusing to give her name to the press and reassuring her it would be fixed in a couple of months.
Pauline Bonaparte loses her toes, Antonio Canova Museum, Possagno, 2020Antique chairs in museums often bear a sign saying 'please do not sit here', but you'd think that might go without saying for sculptures. Not so for one Austrian tourist who decided to lie on Antonio Canova's sculpture of Napoleon's sister, looking to replicate her pose for a photo. He broke off her toes in the process, but promised to pay for damages. He wasn't the only one to damage a digit: in 2013 an American tourist held the hand of a 14th-century statue in Florence and broke off its little finger.
The display banana is eaten … twice, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023Maurizio Cattelan is the artist behind the golden toilet that was sensationally stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019. In the same year he taped a banana to a wall and gave it the title Comedian. It was also stolen — or, rather, eaten. The first time the perpetrator was a fellow artist, David Datuna, at Art Basel, Miami, and Cattelan may have been in on the joke. In 2023, however, the incident occurred in South Korea at the hands of an art student. His excuse? He was hungry.