ARE you thinking of seeing the big fall art exhibitions, including the Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art or the Balthus show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Please be advised: photography is not permitted. Please also be prepared for skirmishes in the galleries between museum guards charged with enforcing no-photography rules and a public that is likely to ignore them. These days, many museum visitors arrive with smartphones and the assumption that they have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of good photographs.
Museum bans on picture-taking are practically unenforceable and are also obsolete. Art museums in America typically permit visitors to take (nonflash) photographs of works in a museum’s permanent collection but forbid pictures at temporary exhibitions. This prohibition is currently under review at many institutions, some of which have already dropped it.
You don’t have to be a cultural alarmist to feel unsettled by the ubiquity of digital cameras in museums. As early as 1936, the German critic Walter Benjamin warned that cameras were instruments of distraction that impeded concentration and robbed art of its “aura.”
Indeed, there is a type of museum visitor today who stops in front of Rembrandts and Vermeers for only as long as it takes to snap a picture of them. Other visitors prefer taking photographs of art-plus-people, blocking traffic in the galleries as they step forward and back trying to compose either “selfies” or tourist-style snaps in which entire families pose in front of old master paintings. This can be exasperating for other visitors and can make smartphones seem to be the enemy of art and beauty.
Nonetheless, the vogue for digital photography is a constructive development that, for the most part, enhances our experience of art. First, there is the eye factor. A visitor who photographs van Gogh’s “Starry Night” echoes, however wanly or casually, the basic mission of visual art: to celebrate the act of looking. When you gaze through a lens, you are likely to consider the world more deeply. You frame space and take note of composition, the curve of a line, the play of light and shadow. As the photographer Dorothea Lange noted, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
As an aid to art education, smartphone cameras are preferable to older devices. Consider Acoustiguides, which offer a blizzard of facts in the place of soulful communication and create a buzzing sound in the galleries that can cause you to wonder, “Am I hearing voices?”
Unlike Acoustiguides, photographs go home with you and offer long-term benefits. For art-history students, iPhone photographs are an earnest reference aid, a crystalline substitute for hard-to-decipher notes.
For everyone else, digital photographs work in much the same way as art postcards did in their heyday a half-century ago when museum gift shops devoted more display space to them. On a recent trip to the Museum of Modern Art, I admired a plastic handbag in the gift shop, peeked at the price — $595, an Issey Miyake! — and ached for the humble Picasso postcards of my childhood.
Astoundingly, there are still a handful of museums that prohibit photography altogether. The Frick Collection, for one, seems to take a perverse pleasure in its old-world formality; it does not permit children under the age of 10 on the grounds either. The Frick’s camera policy, like those elsewhere, is now under review. “We are keenly aware of how devices like smartphones are used in galleries,” Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, noted recently in a statement. “We’re reviewing the policy, but have not yet made a change.”
Most other museums permit photography at least in the permanent exhibition galleries, but ban picture taking at temporary shows to accommodate and appease lenders. Private collectors who lend museums their paintings like reassurance. They don’t want thousands of strangers to photograph their artwork, post it on Facebook or add a humorous mustache to it.
Museums have lately begun to rethink loan contracts and to encourage lenders to be less possessive with their artwork. “In the past year we have been making strides to loosen our policy,” Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, noted in an e-mail. “We now routinely attempt to negotiate with all of our lenders to allow photography of their works while on display in the galleries. We have included that express permission in our own loan letters and contracts.” The change, he notes, should put an end to confrontations between guards and visitors. “It is far more important for our gallery attendants to focus on the safety of the works of art and our visitors than to have to constantly admonish our visitors, ‘No photographs!’ ”
As subtle as that point may seem, the new loan arrangements represent a sea change. Or rather a see change. We are at the tipping point where art museums are poised to become copying centers whose every single artwork can be reproduced in digital form a million times every day.
I say hooray. When we photograph, e-mail, tweet and Instagram paintings, we capitalize on technological innovation to expand familiarity with an ancient form. So, too, we increase the visual literacy of this country. Much can be gained. Nothing can be lost. A photograph of a painting can no more destroy a masterpiece than it can create one.
Deborah Solomon is the art critic at WNYC and the author of the forthcoming book “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell.”