Will Art Lovers Embrace the Selfie Stick?

Traditional selfies are so over. Meet the selfie stick, a simple contraption that allows for a much wider angle on those prized smartphone self-portraits.

We’re wondering how it will affect the many museum and gallery selfies we see plastered all over the Twitter and Instagram feeds of art lovers posing with their favorite works. Whether it’s Kara Walker’s Marvelous Sugar Baby, or Jeff Koons’s Split/Rocker at Rockefeller Center, or his giant pile of Play-Doh at the current Whitney retrospective, we assume you’ll be able to fit more of the giant flowered dino-horse head or clay in the background but wait…is that really a good thing? Of course you won’t need it if you opt to shoot in front of one of Koons’s shiny balloon sculptures, those selfies happen effortlessly.

While the wider angle may be helpful to some ambitious self-portrait photographers, sadly, it would not have prevented the recent fiasco in Italy, where a student attempting to take a selfie tried jumping into the lap of a sculpture and ended up smashing it instead. It’s unclear whether or not he snapped the prized pic he was aiming for.