What to Know
- Glendale
- $25
- Opening in January 2018; Wednesdays-Sundays
If you've ever been shushed while strolling a museum with a friend, you know what it is to feel embarrassed. But taking a stealth photograph, only to have an employee museum speak sternly to you about the rules?
The desire to slink away is high.
But neither slinking away, nor embarrassment, nor stealth photographs are at the heart of the pop-up institution click, click, clicking into Southern California in January.
It's The Museum of Selfies, and if you just guessed that taking selfies inside a structure devoted to the art of snapping a picture of one's self will be encouraged, #youknowyourselfie.
The museum's sole focus is the no-longer-so-modern phenomenon of people taking their own snapshots in mirrors, posing for snapshots with famous landmarks in the background, beaming in front of concert stages, and mugging for the camera while lounging in bed.
So multi-tentacled is this phenomenon that The Museum of Selfies will include a host of areas that examine the prismatic nature of the ever-evolving school of selfiedom.
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Look for the area all about bathroom selfies, the display depicting food selfies, and selfies captured atop high places, such as skyscrapers.
And, yes, the historic aspects of selfie-ism will be considered, with cave paintings and centuries-old self portraits coming into the mix, as will narcissism (accidents involving selfies gone wrong will also come under consideration).
Museum goers can expect to eye selfies aplenty, yes, as well as interactive, selfie-ready elements and deeper ponderings into the whats, wherefores, and hows of #whyweselfie.
Selfie sticks are "encouraged," if you're wondering, given the fact that so many museums have banned the contraptions, which allow one to capture a selfie from a beyond-an-arm's-length distance.
It's a pretty darn meta experience, selfieing inside a selfie museum, much like the pop-up gingerbread bar in DTLA, the one where you can drink a gingerbread cocktail.
For taking a selfie inside a museum that's all about selfies? It seems like a must-do for those people devoted to the individualistic art form, as well as those visitors who'd like to make an arch or ironic visual statement on our abiding love of taking our own pics.
The highbrow hashtaggery will commence in January 2018, on Brand Boulevard in Glendale, Wednesdays through Sundays. For the actual opening date, follow the site, which promises news as January draws closer.
As for the founders? Tommy Honton, who has helmed a number of escape rooms, has partnered with writer and performer Tair Mamedov to bring The Museum of Selfies to the world.
But what should you do before the museum finally turns the camera on itself — and opens?
Best make time to practice your most winning poses, your alluring head tilts, and your beamiest smiles, for your #selfiegame is about to go through the looking glass, or, rather, the bathroom mirror, into a world solely devoted to people posing for a photographer they know all too well: Themselves.
A ticket is $25.