Celia Walden despairs at the rise of the museum selfie

Peace sign or no peace sign?’ the redhead calls over to her boyfriend, as she assumes a gratingly familiar ‘selfe’ stance before Vernet’s Portrait of a Lady on the third foor of the LA County Museum of Art’s Ahmanson Building. I look from the redhead – now clicking her way through a series of imbecilic poses – to the serene-faced woman mounted on the wall behind her, and for a moment there is nothing I want more than for that woman to break through the canvas, unpurse her lips and snarl, ‘Let’s go with no peace sign, shall we. Oh, and how about you get out of my face?’

In the unlikely event that this did happen, Mrs Patrick Campbell would doubtless be reprimanded by the museum authorities for being stufy and antiquated. And while stufy and antiquated is something I actively seek in a museum, I suspect the redhead and her boyfriend are after something a little more cutting edge, a little more ‘now’: themselves, perhaps? Which is presumably why both LACMA and the Getty (not to mention Paris’s Pompidou Centre) are embracing the museum selfe in the hope of drawing in greater numbers of young visitors – with LACMA even inviting members of the public to send in their ‘favourite museum selfes’.

To be fair, in a city like LA, this is pure good business sense. What could be more pointless, more depressing, than spending a minute looking at something that not only doesn’t refect your own image but doesn’t involve you at all? That’s not going to do le grand moi much good; that’s not going to promote a healthy, contented ego. And by ‘healthy’ I mean that it needs to be everywhere: that no sunset, Grand Canyon, bird of paradise or baby’s bottom is worth the screen it’s captured on unless your gurning little face is inserted somewhere in that frame. Who would even know of the Mona Lisa’s existence if Beyoncé and Jay Z hadn’t adorned her shadowy personage with their own selfes back in October at the Louvre? That sour-faced old broad should be grateful.

Of course people could save themselves the 15-buck entry fee and stay at home in front of a mirror, I think to myself as I wander through the Modern Art wing towards the exit, past a man trying to perfect an Instagram post of himself smoking Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe and a couple selfiesmooching before Matisse’s La Gerbe. But that wouldn’t sate the internet-forum braggart’s mentality – not so much ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ as ‘pics of me or history didn’t happen’.

People could save themselves the 15-buck entry fee and stay at home in front of a mirror