The publishing house Jean-Boîte continues its series, “Follow Me, Collecting Photography Today,” with the publication of its new book, Artselfie.
In 2012, the New York collective NIS launched a Tumblr page containing all of the Instagram photos with the hashtag #artselfie. This sub-category of the “selfie” phenomenon combines the huge success of the social network self-portrait with the popularity of art expositions.
But how does one define this new derivation of the selfie?
“With #artselfie, art suddenly becomes a tool of self-promotion, it is relegated to the aesthetic background,” explains the DIS collective in an interview with Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute of New York. According to Marvin Jordan, who wrote an article for the book, “a famous saying of Marcel Duchamp says that the viewer completes the work. In the case of an artselfie, it’s the work of art that completes the viewer.”
In an artselfie, you do not look at the work, you are a museum guide of a new genre placed between the camera and the painting, the sculpture, and other installations in order to benefit your large audience of followers. No longer is there a need to wander the long corridors of institutional museums, holding aloft a closed umbrella so that your group can follow you. Your group from now on can be gigantic, and it is by likes and shares that you measure, through other people, the validation of your aesthetic choices.
The DIS collective also wonders if there are not recurring trends in the choice of works of art for an artselfie. They even claim that Jeff Koons in his retrospective exhibition in New York designed the layout of the exhibition to facilitate the taking of selfies by the exhibit’s visitors. Luckily, the “balloon dog” and other inflatable lobsters from the American artist have just arrived in Paris at the Pompidou Center. What beautiful artselfies to come.
BOOK
Artselfie
Notes on Selfies de Douglas Coupland
Conversation with DIS and Simon Castets
From FOLLOW ME, Collecting Images Today collection
Jean Boîte Éditions, Paris, 2014
French / English
128 pages
Hardcover, 167 mm x 240 mm
260 color photographs
Design : Groupe CCC – Valentin Bigel & Alice Gavin
ISBN : 978-2-365-680-073
19€
http://www.jean-boite.fr
