Why would anybody need to take a picture in a gallery? The only things you might reasonably want to take pictures of are pictures. Yet being quite famous pictures (hence their being in a gallery) there are presumably plenty of pictures of these pictures already. Better pictures, these, than any you might take yourself.
Alternatively, why not take a picture in a gallery? Not just a picture of a picture, either, but a picture of a picture and you. This, to go on Facebook, Instagram, and to be proffered in conversation, should the topic of your visit to this gallery arise. For, without that picture, how would your friends know you were there? And if they don’t know, what was the point in going?
Now the National Gallery in London has banned selfie sticks. These are long, telescopic poles to which people attach their cameras and phones in order to gain enough distance to take a reasonable photograph of themselves. One might object to selfie sticks on the grounds that they represent a societal failure; the final surrender to everybody’s bleak disinclination to ask a stranger for a favour. The National Gallery’s ban, however, follows bans in museums from New York to Paris, normally on the basis that people might wave them around and break things or stick them through a painting.
The Times has no fondness for selfie sticks. On selfies themselves, however, the Thunderer is unsure which way to thunder. Rarely has an editorial conference been so divided. Some feel that cameras have no place in museums at all; others that young people will never be lured in if they need to leave their favourite appendages at the door. Thus we intend to crowd-source. Please write in. This is your chance to make newspaper policy. Should selfie devotees be indulged? Or should they stick it, without even a stick?