![The new book "#artselfie," created by the New York-based collective DIS, features self-portraits of people with works of art that have been culled from DIS's popular art selfie Tumblr site.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141030003449im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/10/27/t-magazine/27hartman-artselfie1/27hartman-artselfie1-tmagArticle.jpg)
The selfie has come a long way in a few short years; the proliferation of filters, frames and other applications available to Instagrammers has expanded the possibilities of the genre. But are the results art? For the New York-based “cultural interventions” collective DIS, at least one subgenre of the phenomenon is: the aptly named art selfie. The group’s new book, “#artselfie” (19 euros), now out from the Parisian boutique publisher Jean Boîte Editions, aims to document a popular trend that DIS identifies as nothing short of art history in the taking.
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Unlike the basic selfie — which might be shot in bed, out on the town or just about anyplace else — the art selfie is defined by the proximity of the photographed subject to an exhibited work of art. Among the images brought together in “#artselfie,” several show plucky youths posing inside Random International’s 2013 MoMA installation, “Rain Room.” In another, a user flashes his chiseled six-pack before a Jill Magid installation. And, in a dizzyingly meta example, the MoMA curator and art world impresario Klaus Biesenbach snaps the performance artist Marina Abramovic observing herself in a mirror contemplating Jordan Wolfson’s animatronic stripper installation at David Zwirner from earlier this year.
While the origins of the “#artselfie” hashtag can be traced back to a 2012 Frieze installation DIS created in collaboration with the artist Ryan Trecartin, the group claims no ownership of the term. However, in December of that year, DIS launched artselfie.com during Art Basel in Miami. The site, an aggregate Tumblr account archiving posts with the hashtag, was intended as an alternative channel through which DIS would cover the fair. However, in short order, the hashtags were popping up in Instagram posts well beyond the confines of South Beach. Today, the number of posts tagged with #artselfie totals upward of 13,000. Somewhere, Susan Sontag is undoubtedly having a fit.
As Marvin Jordan observes in his introduction to the book, art critics tend to conflate selfies with historical self-portraits. However, the art selfie, he argues, is an altogether different phenomenon, one best explained by the words of Marcel Duchamp: “The observer completes the work of art.”