She kindly turned the question into a thought-provoking post on her own blog, here.Īlli seconded the notion that technology is not the defining factor. (If Rembrandt lived today, wouldn’t he be making both?) A portrait lasts, not because it is better than a selfie but because it is meant to.įor a second perspective, I turned to writer and theorist Alli Burness, founder of the Museum Selfies tumblr. Paul Getty Museum, 2013.60īy this reasoning, ephemerality-not just medium or skill-is what makes a Rembrandt self-portrait fundamentally different from, say, a Rembrandt selfie. Not a selfie: Rembrandt Laughing (detail), about 1628, Rembrandt Harmensz. An artist could choose to represent him or herself through selfies however, self-portraits don’t immediately signify selfies. This does not mean that selfies cannot be self-portraits, or that selfies by nature require the opposite of calculated intent. Calling a self-portrait by Rembrandt a selfie is not only anachronistic, it also negates the carefully calculated set of decisions that created the rendering. The self-portrait, whether it is a carefully composed study or created in haste, often contains more decisions than could be easily erased. If after taking a picture of oneself the results are unsatisfactory, it is easily forgotten and replaced by a new picture. What has greater weight is the selfie’s inherently replaceable and even disposable quality. Qualities like medium specificity, deeply rooted histories, and traditions (or lack thereof) that define these efforts only superficially differentiate the two. The self-portrait and the selfie are two separate, though at times overlapping, efforts at establishing and embellishing a definition of one’s self. Instantly curious, I asked him to elaborate on the difference (emphasis mine): “You do see self-portraits,” curator Arpad Kovacs said of the show, “but they are self-portraits rather than selfies.” At least, that’s what I assumed until two weeks ago when I stumbled on an article in The Guardian about the Getty exhibition In Focus: Play. Hanging out with The Getty’s new acquisition #museumselfie #manet #TheGetty #museum /4g9gSrnHraĪ selfie is a self-portrait taken with a smartphone.
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