Fluffy clouds you can touch. Gentle rain falling from soap bubbles. Ball baths, glitter curtains, cotton candy. The rooms of the “Dream Machine” in New York are like a photo shoot in Alice in Wonderland. The new exhibition is one of the latest Instagram-ready experiences made for the social media age.
It’s all part of a competition for fresh “likes” that has created a new kind of museum experience. The formula is simple: It’s not so much about the content as creating snappy, colourful and attractive images for Instagram feeds.
Paige Solomon, the creator of the “Dream Machine,” believes it will also attract visitors away from social media. “It’s a small escape from the outside world,” she says. “Great photos,” are desirable, she says, but it’s also about having a “playful and funny” experience without a smartphone or camera.
However, that leaves the question of what you are supposed to do amid all these bits of plastic, reminiscent of a launderette, a rain forest or a cloudy sky, if not take a few cool photos? If you are going to pay the full entrance price of US$38 (RM150) then you’ll at least want to have something to show for it on your Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat feed.
The Museum of Ice Cream was actually first invented as a result of Instagram. In 2016 it launched in New York and has since opened branches in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami. Co-founders Maryellis Bunn and Manish Vora discovered that there were twice as many posts on social networks about ice cream as about pop diva Beyoncé – and so they had a fun idea: a pop-up museum all about ice cream.
There’s not a lot of art or education to be found there but a huge amount of fodder for Instagram. Every room is utterly photogenic, trimmed with sugar balloons and walls of ice cream cones, there’s a pool full of colourful sprinkles and pink water balls, a chocolate drinking fountain, an outsized sundae, a seesaw in the shape of an ice cream scoop and an ice cream sandwich swing. “If an experience isn’t made for Instagram, then for many people, it’s not really an experience at all,” says Vora.
It wasn’t long before other imitators arrived on the scene. There’s New York's somewhat lacklustre Egg House and San Francisco’s Color Factory. In New York you can already buy tickets for the Museum of Pizza, which opens in October and will have a “Cheese Cave” and a “Pizza Beach”. It’s probably only a matter of time before museums dedicated to hamburgers, chewing gum and cola follow.
Visitors to these museums want to show their friends online “what kind of cool stuff they get up to,” says Courtney Spritzer, the founder of Social Fly, a PR agency that advises companies about their social media strategies. Millenials “come for the visual experience.” And the Insta-museums are now making good money from this.
Yet, even genuine art museums and galleries can attract big crowds once a show is regarded as offering “photogenic moments,” as Spritzer calls them. For example, the mirrored “Infinity Rooms” by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, the pulsating glitter world created by the Swiss multimedia artist Pipilotti Rist, or the “Rain Room” exhibition at the MoMA in 2013. Where once a photo might have just recorded a museum visit now the image is the actual purpose of the visit. “Does the experience inside amount to the little square photo you post online?” Wired magazine asked.
The art world has long realised how to lure the Instagram generation. The “Wonder” exhibition at the Smithsonian in 2016 displayed the work of nine artists who had nothing in common apart from bizarre structures, fantastic colours and, as a result, a very high “like” factor. Visitors wanted to see the art of course, but the main draw seemed to be to photograph it and themselves with it, the Washington Post commented. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell which they care about more.” Many of them were soon looking at their smartphones more than the art itself.
After 100 years of amateur photography people are increasingly pointing their lenses at themselves – the new genre of Insta-museums is simply the spatial response to this: “In the pre-digital photography era, the message was: This is what I’m seeing. I have seen,” JiaJia Fei, former digital director at the Guggenheim said in a TED talk in 2015. “Today, the message was: I was there. I came, I saw, and I selfied.” — dpa
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