Upon Reflection,

oh no, @arthistory.bsky.social succumbing to the allure of the selfie in LACMA’s glare and reflection machine Or maybe let’s not. Maybe an $800 million museum designed to deracinate you from the constructs of history, culture, and reality, and optimized for objects of distraction and reflection and selfie production is actually a bad idea in an era where everything else is already a screen, a mirror, or both. That’s the sense I’m getting after reading John Paul Brammer’s extraordinary essay, “Your Reflection Is Not You,” a cautionary plea to avoid the dissociative, narcissistic magic of our own images that threaten to drown us in our screen-based world. Liz Deschenes, Untitled (Claude glass 1), 2023, Glass with wood artist frame, 21 1/2 x 36 3/4 x 1 1/8 in., image via Miguel Abreu Gallery Just minutes before, I’d set out to find a list of works that could not just withstand the light of LACMA, but that could thrive in it. I looked at Liz Deschenes’ Untitled (Claude glass), a…