The writer is the Director of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and a curator-historian.
Nowadays, few people enter museums empty-handed. More often than not, we arrive with our phones already in hand or at least within immediate reach. There is an instinct at play. Before the artwork has had the chance to do anything as old-fashioned as affect us, it has already been framed, adjusted, and quietly converted into something else: proof. Proof that we were there, proof that we saw it, and perhaps most importantly, proof that we are the kind of people who go to museums in the first place.
I say this, of course, as someone entirely guilty of the same behaviour. I, too, have stood in front of artworks, very important ones, like one of my all-time favourite pieces, the La Danse by Matisse, and found myself taking photographs I genuinely believed I would revisit later as though my camera roll were some sort of very academic personal archive of art history. It is not. It is for my social media, multiple takes for options, and, occasionally, my own shoes because I like how they look against the flooring. Well, I suppose it is being used now.
Still, something has shifted in the way we encounter art. And I don’t think it is just a distraction, or even impatience. It feels a bit more structural than that.
Museums used to ask for a certain kind of slowness. You stood in front of a work and allowed it to unfold… or not. There was always the possibility that you wouldn’t understand it immediately, and that was part of the experience. Art did not exist to explain itself on demand. Now, visits tend to feel a little more, dare I say, efficient. We move quickly. We document as we go. We collect images the way one might collect small souvenirs. The artwork becomes less of an encounter and more of a backdrop, something against which we momentarily position ourselves.
I’m not entirely convinced this is new, however. Image reproduction changes the way we relate to art; once an image can be endlessly represented and reproduced, something about its presence begins to shift. But I don’t think museum selfies count. What seems different now is not just that artworks are re-represented through our screens, but that we reproduce ourselves alongside them. It is no longer enough to look; one must also be seen looking. And so the museum becomes a slightly strange hybrid of part exhibition, part stage, part lifestyle generator.
The problem is not the photograph itself. It’s what quietly disappears in the process.
Because when looking is replaced by recording, duration tends to fall away. That slightly uncomfortable stretch of time where nothing is happening yet, where you are still figuring out what you are looking at, or whether it is doing anything to you at all. A painting is not a billboard. It doesn’t need to work immediately.
But increasingly, artworks seem to be judged by how quickly they can be understood or at least captured whether they photograph well. Whether they remain legible on a small screen. Whether they can hold attention for just long enough to be posted and scrolled past. The quieter works don’t stand much of a chance. You start to wonder, if some Enlightened master artist were working today, would he be asked to make things a bit more immersive?
Contemporary life trains us to move constantly, to shift attention before it has time to settle. Museums used to offer some resistance to that rhythm, but now, they sometimes feel like they are participating in it, which brings me to a question I find myself asking more often than I would like. Have we started to mistake documentation for experience?
As I said, taking a photograph isn’t the issue. Memory has always needed its supports. But there is a difference, a quite subtle one, between taking an image after you have seen something, and taking one instead of seeing it. It’s easy to miss that distinction. I miss it all the time. But it matters. Because to stand in front of an artwork and give it your attention, without immediately converting it into something else, now feels like a slightly radical act. Not dramatic but unfamiliar? So the next time you find yourself in an art space, phone in hand, about to take a photograph, maybe pause for a second. Lower it, even briefly. Stand there a little longer than feels necessary. Let the work remain slightly unresolved, I say.
Because it may be that the most meaningful encounters are the ones that don’t leave any evidence behind, only the faint, uncomfortable sense that something, however small, has shifted.
