Imagine trying to take a photo next to Starry Night, swinging the stick clumsily and tearing the sky a new comet. Have a little respect, says Jonathan Jones

 Accessory unnecessary … the selfie stick, now banned from several New York museums. Photograph: PR

Jonathan Jones

Friday 6 February 201517.58 GMT

At last, someone has stood up to the swilling tide of pseudo-democracy that threatens to turn museums into playgrounds and shopping malls. The selfie stick is now banned in many New York museums.

The doctrine that a museum should be full of people at all times, however uninterested they may be – bus in as many schoolchildren a day as you can cram into the galleries, never mind the resulting noise level – means that most big museums and art galleries will do anything, literally anything, to make themselves more approachable. They even collaborated with the Night at the Museum film series.

Above all, to maximise the pleasure of the crowd, photography – that great mass cult of the digital age – must be enabled in museums. Nothing must stand between me and my selfie next to a Picasso! Even the sombre National Gallery in Britain recently joined most museums around the world in permitting photography by visitors.

Modern tourists, it seems, cannot enjoy looking at art without photographing it, and themselves in front of it. The camera has become a prosthesis for looking. We don’t need to concentrate on works of art and remember them: a smartphone can do that for us. 

It is therefore truly heroic of some of New York’s leading museums (including the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum – with the Metropolitan Museum of Art perhaps to follow) to announce they have banned the devil’s instrument.

The museums making this audacious stand against our time say the sticks are dangerous to their works of art (imagine trying to take your picture next to Van Gogh’s Starry Night, swinging the stick a bit clumsily and tearing the sky a new comet), and they are surely right.

But selfie sticks are not just a physical danger to museum collections. They are also a spiritual menace – as are selfies themselves, and cameras, and smartphones.

A museum should be a place of calm contemplation. You cannot experience the power of Jackson Pollock’s One in MoMA without standing (and gently moving about) quietly, pensively, privately. Art is serious. It is not light entertainment. Pollock may have played jazz when he dripped and flicked paint on his canvases, but we wouldn’t dream of playing jazz in the gallery. We need peace from distractions to come to terms with One. And this is a work that is comparatively easy to understand by the standards of the MoMA collection.

To ban or not ban: selfie sticks turn focus to museum photo policy