Jostling happy snappers are ruining art galleries for everyone

The first time I went to a gallery overseas, it was the Louvre. It was also 2009, and I didn’t yet have a smartphone that took photos, so instead I stood in front of each piece of art and just took it in.

I worried, at the time, that I would forget the details – that the vivid colours or subtle brush lines would evade me eventually, and that my pathetic human eyes couldn’t possibly capture enough of the art to really store it in my memory. Around me, people sat on small stools in front of gigantic canvases, easels set up, recreating the pieces with their own paintbrushes. That seemed to me a more worthy way to ensure the image lasted, by committing every brushstroke to muscle memory.

Tourists jostle to photograph Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, in August 2024.Credit: AP

A few years later, I revisited the Louvre, this time with my iPhone in hand. All around me, people snapped photo after photo. It still seemed a novelty to be carrying cameras in our pockets but fast-forward 15 years, and I yearn for a return to that first trip in 2009. Comparatively, the ensuing visits to museums and galleries have been punctuated by phone cameras everywhere, the present being traded for some expected future enjoyment.

Phones, and the constant urge to capture everything, are ruining art galleries for everyone. The etiquette of standing in a way that allows everyone to view a piece has been eroded as people lean as close as possible to canvases to capture the exact shot they want, presumably to put on social media to trumpet their cultured lifestyle. You now have to dodge extended arms, avoid walking into someone’s shot, and suffer through others blocking your viewing experience to get their phone cameras into position.

I’m in Paris again right now, and on a drizzly day, I took myself to the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain on a whim. The line, even on a cool January day, was long and places in the next viewing group for the exhibition were full. Somehow, I snagged the very last spot.

Inside, massive and striking woven sculptures hung from the ceiling, a retrospective exhibition of work by Colombian artist Olga de Amaral. I overheard two women in the line speaking about how they had flown to Paris from Norway specifically for this exhibition.

Lines of tape on the ground marked the exclusion zone for bodies near the artwork – but people still contorted this way and that, phones in hand, to take images that could only flatten the intricate textures of each woven piece.

I’m not immune to wanting to capture the moment – I thought about taking a photo and uploading it to Instagram. The works were so staggering in scale and beauty, it felt like I should be capturing them somehow. But, a voice inside asked, why?

I thought to myself of all the exhibitions I have seen over the years, those I took photos of and those I didn’t, and catalogued how often I review those images versus how well I remember the art. I have vivid memories of sculptures in the Centre for Native Futures Chicago, their deep reds contrasting with copper inlay. I remember the first moment I saw a Gustave Courbet in person, in the Louvre, then again in galleries and museums across Europe, the thick mesh of browns and greens imprinted in my mind. Standing in front of a massive Turner masterpiece at the National Library of Australia and feeling like the sunset was inside me.

I don’t remember wanting to review photos of any of these artworks on my phone, even once, in the years since those viewings.

It can feel uncharitable to call out the way other people experience or view art. But taking photos in galleries is not only disruptive to the people around you – it detracts from the whole point of galleries in the first place.

When we can Google any artwork and view it online from the comfort of our own homes, the role of a gallery is to provide that special, unique experience of being physically present in front of a piece of art. The proximity and the three-dimensionality is the entire point – it is a feeling that can happen only in real life, and can’t be replicated by a screen. Because if it could, why would we go to galleries at all?

Fellow art lovers, please put the phones away. Trust your mind, and take the art in with your senses.

Zoya Patel is an author and freelance writer from Canberra.

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