The selfie exists everywhere that people own smartphones. DIS Magazine’s #artselfie, published by Jean Boîte Éditions, attempts to freeze one aspect of this cultural moment — the art selfie — by parlaying its meaning into a gleaming, print-only book that contains a selection of hashtagged images, an essay by writer and artist Douglas Coupland, and a conversation between DIS and Swiss Institute Director Simon Castets. This is where the first question comes up: What is the point of containing a constantly reproducible online aesthetic in a printed book in the first place? How does that create the illusion of ownership over something that remains in the public domain? It seems like anyone who hashtags their own image with #artselfie should be a part of the conversation, but instead only certain people, selected by DIS, become indicative of what the art selfie is or could be. DIS furthermore doesn’t explain why they chose certain images while ignoring others, which makes for a fairly narrow-minded perspective on a broad, ever-evolving phenomenon.
Read the full review on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/169201/someone-made-a-book-of-artselfies/
