How Instagram Is Changing the Museum Experience

Is $30 to get into a room of Insta-worthy backdrops actually worth it?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or perhaps caught in the limbo of an extended train delay somewhere on the Q, entirely devoid of data service or WiFi, you probably know about the recent rise of Instagram museums. Does the Museum of Ice Cream ring a bell? What about Refinery29’s 29Rooms? Brooklyn’s Dream Machine?

At some point, maybe you have even found yourself within the walls of one of these Warholian, pop-futuristic dreamlands, wandering through pastel oceans of sunflowers, cotton candy nightmares, and mirrored halls. Or, maybe you saw that a ticket to visit 29Rooms costs $30 and decided to opt out, because it’s 30-fricking-dollars and you could buy like an entire two pieces of avocado toast with that kind of money. Regardless, you have probably seen some of the upwards of 69.4 thousand images tagged #29rooms on Instagram and, somewhere between marveling at the shiny, colorful pictures and weighing your options (buy groceries this week or museum tickets?), you have likely thought to yourself, what the hell is the world coming to?

According to a report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences on art museum attendance in the U.S., as of 2012, 21 percent of the adult population within the U.S. reported visiting an art museum or gallery in the previous year. This was the lowest level reported in the past three decades and the rate of visitation to art museums in the country has been steadily declining since the early 2000s.

Reasons for this are complex and varied, but one these includes the lack of representation of artists of diverse race, gender, and other identifying factors. On top of this, we are bombarded with constant stimuli on the multitude of screens we are surrounded by on a daily basis, giving us easier ways to spend our free time.

Simply put, why would we go to a museum when we have access to almost the entire breadth of human knowledge and culture right at our fingertips? Why would we go sit in front of a painting for an hour when we can sit in front of thousands, all at once, for hours, without leaving our beds? Please. We have neither the patience nor the attention span for that kind of nonsense.

Of course, this translates to a major problem for museums and galleries. This is where the rise of museums with interactive elements come into play. Gone are the days when museum-goers are satisfied with just looking at the art. These days, we want to be the art.

At Dream Machine, viewers walk through a 10-room installation involving a ball pit, clouds, a technicolor garden, and even a neon laundromat. At Refinery29’s annual 29Rooms, each room is themed, offering an experience that will, according to their website, “unearth your deepest creative instincts” and allow you to “enter into a new realm of abundant thinking.” All this owes a great deal to the work of one of Instagram’s favorite artists, Yayoi Kusama, an 89 year-old Japanese artist whose famous installation Infinity Mirror Rooms debuted in 1965 and has become an international phenomenon.

Kusama’s work and subsequently inspired installations allow visitors a chance to be immersed in a world in which they themselves figure as the prominent subject of the piece. These works lend themselves naturally to easy picture-taking and sharing on social media; they are made, in most cases, specifically for that purpose. Because of this, they attract contemporary visitors by the hundreds in a way that traditional art museums, with their static, thoughtful viewing culture, could never do. Therefore, they are also massive marketing machines. People go to the museum, take pictures, share those pictures, thus attracting more visitors. It’s a stellar business model and these kinds of museums are encouraging people to engage in art who would never have gone to art museums otherwise.

So, great—more people are getting into art. In such a chaotic time, art is still one of our most viable means of figuring out just what is going on. But what does this mean for the important artwork of the past that don’t benefit from this type of experience? If institutions like museums are meant to preserve works of art and present a narrative of history through cultural artifacts, I cannot help but think that in gaining this new appreciation for contemporary art, we are also losing something. I mean, how can crowding around the famously small and ambivalent smile of the Mona Lisa compete with a pastel wonderland like the Museum of Ice Cream? The jury is still out on the long-term effects of these types of museums, so all I really have are more questions without any real answers.

When every art experience is mediated through a screen, it is difficult not to wonder whether our engagement with the art itself is becoming limited. Are you really engaging with the art or the reproduction of it? However, the museum experience is increasingly become one of dynamic collaboration, fundamentally changing the relationship between artist and audience. Within these spaces, we are encouraged to be both the subjective participants and the critics of the piece of art into which we have entered.

So, if you do, in fact, decide to shell out the $30+ required for a ticket to one of these places, maybe you want to consider this new art-viewing dynamic as you try to think of a worthy caption for your Instagram post. How does being in the space make you feel? What does the act of taking photos while momentarily immersed in this version of reality add or detract from the experience? What does it mean for you, your role in the culture, society in general and the entire world? Or, just jump in a ball pit submerged in blue light, have some fun and caption your photo with your favorite song lyric. Whatever. This is your world; it is what you make it.