Art gets a new audience thanks to selfies
LOS ANGELES - Every morning, there is a line outside The Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles. But the people there don't come to see the art. They're there to be seen with the art.
"I almost fell off my chair when I read we were the fifth most Instagrammed museum on the planet," said Joanne Heyler, the museum's founding director.
The initial release of Yayoi Kusama's "Infinity Mirrors" exhibit sold out in minutes, and crashed the museum's website.
You won't learn much at the nearby Museum of Ice Cream. But 2,000 patrons a day pay $30 to pose like Beyonce.
"As soon as she like, showed me the pictures on Instagram, I was like, 'Oh we got to go'. We booked the tickets as soon as they became available," said one fan.
Selfie-obsessed fans of Taylor Swift posed at a pop-up in bird cages and a "Look What You Made Me Do" throne.
Event spaces are also being created solely to drive the selfie economy. Critics would never call rubber duckies art, but at Happy Place, tickets are sold out until January.
But Instagram can be a new high-tech canvas for artists like 88-year-old Kusama.
"It's fantastic that her work translates so well on social media, and yet there really is no replacement for seeing the works in person," said Heyler.
With more than 500,000 posts on Instagram, the way people experience the exhibit may be different, but the way they capture it is the same.
