Seeing smART

Capturing Hopper with a phone

The Whitney was crowded the day I went to see the Edward Hopper exhibit. As I made my way all round, the biggest impediment to finding an unblocked view of his solemn and lonely scenes was not the crowd itself, but rather the procession of cell phones stuck up in front of the paintings. So I went around a second time (yes, aware of the irony) and shot photos the people shooting photos of the art, often barely pausing to look through their eyes rather than at a screen. And now they all own a Hopper, or a souvenir of a Hopper, or a dull facsimile of a Hopper entombed somewhere in their cell phones.