“Self-representation online can appear to be more straightforward and unilateral. It can seem that you can control what other people will think about and do with your self-presentation by curating it carefully, which entails a kind of alienation from oneself, thinking of oneself as a detached, manipulatable object. The self is externalized and becomes a brand rather than the inviolate vehicle through which one experiences being alive. The self is construed as an abstract, flexible space, akin to the feeds we manage on media platforms, a place we fill with representative objects and also a place where others can come and be seen — a white-cube gallery.

Since everyone has social media space to fill, everyone has come to operate like a museum, “curating” experiences and memories as images of their lives as a deliberate, unfolding story of artistic progress. One’s life, ones self, is no longer conceived a mere work of art (as Foucault was describing in his later work) but as a collection — the trajectory of the self articulated through the images one makes and assembles to represent it.

People acting as though they were art museums has upended the conventional role of actual art museums: They function less as repositories of precious works grounding efforts to periodize and regionalize the history of cultural production and more as places where visitors can stage their interactions with that history and appropriate it in various ways that museums could ideally profit from. Museums have had to reorient themselves to become more photogenic, to announce themselves as iconic and immediately recognizable tourist attractions, in order to maximize the potential value in images that visitors would take and circulate of their visits.

Museums have become staging grounds for visitors’ self-representations; the collected artworks function as props. The “works” that visitors make become more significant than the ones they see there. And the kind of pieces that museums must foreground need to lend themselves to being backdrops; they need to be legible without upstaging the visitor’s sense of self with an autonomous meaning of their own. Every art work should “mean” nothing but what the viewer chooses to reappropriate it for, to represent something about themselves. (Look! I went to the Louvre!)

[…] Museums are thereby complicit in inculcating a particular kind of subjectivity in visitors — the consumerist subjectivity that valorizes itself by trading in brand value, enriching itself by hyping other things.”

— Rob Horning, “Lead and Felt”, 6 May 2020