Selfie abuse

The Auckland Art Gallery has responded to our post on Light Show that it had wanted to allow photography in the exhibition as it loved “our public taking selfies and tweeting as much as everyone else.” The restriction on photography comes from the Hayward Gallery that developed the show. Some time soon this sort of restriction is going to be unacceptable if shows like this are going to attract younger audiences. Exhibitions like this are not cheap to mount and given the cost of the show and the installation build the AAG will be hoping to match the huge enthusiasm the Light Show created when it was shown at the Hayward. We're talking about an impressive 190,243 visitors in a city with a population of 8.3 million with people waiting up to 8 hours in queues. Transfer the exhibition to Auckland's 1.3 million population and the equivalent is around 31,000 visitors. Ironically we suspect no one would be very happy with that as a number and it would certainly make it very tough to make any sort of a profit. They'll be hoping for things to pick up with a school holiday surge and might even pull the free day thing towards the end of the run to boost numbers, but you'd have to say the Haywood has done them no favours banning cameras.