In a modern media moment, Barack Obama and David Cameron were photographed in 2013 posing for a selfie taken by Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, at memorial services for Nelson Mandela. It was an amusing shot because it echoed the party selfies of less responsible people – the leaning together, the goofy grins; they were barely restraining themselves from making peace signs behind each other's heads – and funny because Michelle Obama was caught to one side, looking away sternly, as if disapproving. They all looked like teenagers.
This has actually been one of the main encomiums to Obama, since the end of his presidency: how at ease he was with popular culture.
Columnist after pundit has come out to claim that one of Obama's many strengths was a familiarity with pop music and comedy, and an ability to goof around (as with the selfie), to appear natural and self-deprecating at the same time. He appeared on late-night talk shows, he played along with comedians (Zach Galifianakis, Key and Peele, Jerry Seinfeld), he had rappers at the White House. The guy compiled Spotify playlists (on an official White House account). This, surprisingly, did not make him look unpresidential, just cool.
This goes against the intuitive feeling that many of us – well, many of us over 40 – have when contemplating the role of the selfie in young people's lives. The taking of many amusing, sexy or boastful phone-shots, does not look, generally, to be conducive to the obtaining of high public office. Most of the selfies we see posted by young people on their social media seem to be perpetuating a culture of narcissism. Their lack of dignity and their salaciousness, we fear, endanger their future careers.
A German-Israeli artist named Shahak Shapira made an Internet splash recently with a project that aims to mock and shame the selfie generation. Shapira was troubled by the number of pictures he saw posted online taken at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. This place has a maze-like section, a grid of gravestone-like obelisks whose patterns of shadow make really cool backdrops for photos. People, insensitively, picnic and do fashion shoots there. Tourists, particularly young ones, trained since birth to recognize a great shot, automatically take out their phones and shoot themselves smirking, high-fiving, sometimes doing yoga poses against the sombre and silent stones. Shapira has trawled the Net looking for such shots, stolen them, superimposed them over actual concentration camp photos, so that it looks as if the gleeful tourists are mocking the suffering behind them.
The results are genuinely troubling. The project is grimly called Yolocaust and has attracted a great deal of praise online for calling out – shaming – carefree youth. (Anyone who has had their picture used in his project can ask Shapira to remove it, by writing to the withering e-mail address undouche.me@yolocaust.de; he is into maximum humiliation.)
Just as such anti-selfie sentiment seems to reach an apex, the Saatchi Gallery in London is planning a major exhibition, to open March 31, entirely devoted to the notion of instant self-representation in the contemporary age. It is more ambitious, though: called "From Selfie to Self-Expression." It juxtaposes painted self-portraits – by van Gogh and Rembrandt – with staged and stylized contemporary photo self-portraiture – by Tracey Emin and June Calypso – and the candid, amateur selfies of celebrities, including Obama.
Its point is simple: that selfies are a part of a long tradition of great art. Painters have practised techniques on themselves since the invention of paint, and they have also used their own faces as vehicles for mood and self-expression. They are often vaguely defiant. (Think of all those sober, frowning painters' faces: What are they so mad about?)
Endless photos of oneself in various guises or identities have also become a repeated form of feminist art: June Calypso shoots herself undergoing fantastical beauty regimens in luxurious bathrooms, surrounded by mirrors; Cindy Sherman poses as threatened heroines in nightmarish faux-Hollywood movies. Tracey Emin's notorious narcissism – an oeuvre that celebrates the artist's own trashiness – is also defiant, a challenge to received ideas about femininity. A photo of hers in the Saatchi show portrays her with legs splayed, scooping paper money into her crotch. These are in a sense commentaries on the selfie age and angry defiance of the disapproval of female vanity.
Are less self-conscious self-portraits – the identical duck-mouthed glamour shots of millions of teenage girls for example – also some kind of resistance to a controlling culture? It has certainly been argued that they all are – that a teenager's desire to ape the idealized beauty of fashion magazines is actually a subversion of that imagery, because the girl is in control of her own image. I don't believe that myself (sometimes vanity is just competitive and unhappy, and teenagers are not always the best judges of what is best for them), but it is at least clear that the line between social posturing and high art is a blurry one. The Saatchi show will probably underline that always has been, and that narcissism and defiance have always been present in self-portraiture in equal measure.
It is easy access to self-portraiture, probably, that makes the educated uneasy about it. The fact that we all carry high-quality cameras and the ability to instantly exhibit our work globally has made every goofball tourist an international artist. It's embarrassing when they don't respect sombre memorials to serious things, yes. But resistance to self-promotion generally is mere snobbery. And remember that Obama will go down in history as, among other things, a guy unafraid of – and in control of – silly Internet things.