Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Katy Perry took a selfie in an Infinity Mirror room. Should you do it too?
A Washington Post headline writer
No, I should not. And neither should you. There are approximately three things wrong with this proposition:
a. Taking life cues from Katy Perry, a woman who had relations—on purpose—with both John Mayer and Russell Brand. Meaning she should probably be vaccinated rather than imitated.
b. Taking life cues from Washington Post headline writers.
c. Taking selfies at all.
For our purposes today, we will only deal with selfies. And if you’re too lazy to click on the hyperlink in the question above, I salute you, as hyperlinks are yet one more demand on our already-fragmented attention spans. But to summarize what you’re missing: The Washington Post implied that Katy Perry presumably visited a massively popular exhibit at Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum titled “Infinity Mirrors,” where she took a selfie. (I say “presumably” because the author never again mentions Katy Perry after the headline; maybe with her diminished attention span, she clicked on one of her own hyperlinks before she finished writing and never came back.)
The exhibit served as a career retrospective of octogenarian artist Yayoi Kusama, with her sense-bending rooms of mirrors. But more importantly, the Post christened these mirrored rooms “wildly popular selfie-spots.” A Huffington Post art critic assured that snapping photos of yourself, in what amounts to Narcissus’s infinity pool with its endless reflections of your own likeness amidst seas of glowing pumpkins and floating candles, is a “very physical way to enact what I think is the spirit of the room: dissolving boundaries, proliferating yourself and sharing yourself.” (#blech, as we in the sharing community say.) To keep things moving, attendees were only allowed to spend 45 seconds in each room, forcing a Sophie’s Choice between taking in the exhibit or taking pictures of oneself nearly experiencing it.
Just to prove that you can never outpace the decline of civilization, it was only last August that my esteemed colleague, Andy Ferguson, wrote a piece in these very pages about the scourge of museum-goers/selfie-photographers who were more interested in capturing themselves in front of works of art than they were in the art itself. Just seven months later, my other esteemed colleague (everyone should have at least two), Alice Lloyd, visited this very Infinity Mirror exhibit, where seeing yourself reflected was the entire point of the enterprise. Or at least she tried to. So long was the line of the eager, boundary-dissolving, self-proliferating masses to gaze upon their favorite person (themselves!), which they could then convert into selfie-Instagram shares, that Alice only made it as far as the courtyard. Which at least had a luxury port-o-john and a pop-up Dolcezza café for line-standers who needed to stay properly caffeinated to make duck face or fish gape for their eventual moment of truth.
A few years ago, I attended South By Southwest Interactive in Austin, where I endured panel discussions with titles like “Smile: People Like Your Pictures More Than Words.” There, the chief revenue officer of a company named Luminate (I don’t know what they do, but then, I don’t know what most people do anymore), informed us that due to everyone’s camera phones, 10 percent of all the photos ever taken had been taken in the last 12 months. And this was all the way back in the ancient days of 2013. (Smart-phone use has nearly doubled worldwide since then.) While he didn’t break it down further, it’s a safe bet that over half of those photos were of aspiring Kardashians taking pictures of their own pouty mugs, gym-mirror asses, or beach feet.
Don’t believe me? Here’s some more fun factoids concerning the Selfie Scourge: According to my bible, Teen Vogue, the average millennial dedicates one hour of every week to selfies. (Taking them, editing them, retaking them.) In 2015, the social scientists at Luster Premium White, a teeth-whitening brand, calculated that at their current selfie rate, your average millennial will take up to 25,700 selfies in a lifetime. Considering that the average lifespan is only around 27,375 days, that amounts to taking nearly one selfie per day, no small feat when subtracting all the years that people are too young or too old to operate a camera phone. According to Adweek, citing data from Rawhide, a non-profit organization that assists at-risk youth, 74 percent of all images shared on Snapchat are selfies, 1,000 selfies are posted to Instagram every 10 seconds, and more people died taking selfies in 2015 than they did from shark attacks.
I personally never take selfies, since I still lug around a dumb-phone (highly inconvenient, but worth it just to irritate the kind of people who can’t understand why I’d choose a phone that’s used for speaking to single individuals instead of taking pictures of myself so that I can share/inflict them on the rest of the world.) Yet I don’t mean to disparage the Scavullos of the Selfie Age. For it takes considerable talents to be an accomplished selfie photographer: fearless exhibitionism, tireless devotion to one’s subject, long arms.
And yet, even when I go fishing with my teenage sons, it always crushes me a little when they seem unable to leave their iContraptions in the car. It’s as if they’re saying, “What good is standing in the riffles and runs of some divinely engineered natural wonder—also known as a river—unless you can take a picture of yourself doing so?” Occasionally, I’m glad they’ve captured our moment. For these are special times and places. They won’t stay this age, and neither will I.
So many selfie moments, however, seem not to be true moments, but rather artificial constructs: Putting a moment in quotation marks, while insisting, just a little too loudly, that we’re having one. Too many moments in which living your life becomes secondary to showcasing it.
The writer Douglas Coupland has written of selfies:
Their fleetingness is low on the list of things that annoy me about selfies. But in a way, I’m with Coupland—to the point that I propose every selfie taken should be forcibly printed and inserted by its shooter in a photo album. I would like to see those selfie photos (all 25,700 or so of them) fill album after album, as the albums mount higher and higher, swallowing the Selfie Scavullo’s coffee table, engulfing her flat-screen, crushing her household pets.
Then let’s have the Selfie Scavullo invite her friends and family over, to sit on the most stable stack of selfie photo albums they can find, with the furniture now a lost memory. Here, they will be forced to view page after page of every album, as their yawns are stifled and their brains go dead, looking at the photo-album equivalent of an infinity mirror room. What would the Selfie Scavullo learn from this physical object lesson?
Probably nothing. She’d likely be off in the corner, making sweet love to her iPhone camera, trying to catch the light on her fish gape just so. But if she could stop trying to look like a carp just long enough to see her friends and family passed out from boredom, she would indeed learn an important lesson: that we are not nearly as interesting to other people as we are to ourselves.
Photograph accordingly.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
