Over spring break, I had the chance to visit the charming and mesmerizing Italian city of Florence. While admiring all of the grandiose art work that the city has to offer, I also had time to observe the behavior of people around me. I am not referring to the gestures that Italians make when they talk, I am already well aware of those since I am Italian myself. Rather, I am referring to the astonishingly uniform and futile behavior that most people seem to adopt when visiting museums and art galleries.

While walking around the beautiful Uffizi Art Gallery, I could not help but notice that many young adults, just a couple years younger than myself – the so-called Generation Z – were roaming around the world-renowned museum with their smartphones on picture mode, vertically positioned in their hand, ready to take a photo. At first, I thought that this was merely a coincidence – perhaps I had bumped into some sort of reunion for tech savvys, or a course on how to use photoshop in cultural heritage sites. I soon realized however, while visiting other museums and cultural sites throughout the city, that it was a systematic behavior possessed by the grand majority of people visiting art museums.

You might be asking yourself, “Why should I care about this behavior?”

Well, other than the public danger that these individuals pose – since they constantly bump into each other, while they are too busy filtering their latest Instagrammable photo of a painting they won’t even remember the artist of – there seems to be no tangible problem. After all, we are free to behave however we like, as long as we respect the laws and culture of the country we are in.

And yet, there does seem to be a problem – or at least a radical shift – in how people interact with art. The absurdity of all this is that after the picture is taken, the painting or sculpture instantly, almost magically, loses all of the intrinsic value it may have held before the shot, and effectively becomes – for the smartphone holder – as valuable as toilet paper. This is demonstrated by the fact that after snapping the short, the average smartphone holder doesn’t bother to spend a single minute more observing what he just photographed. He or she doesn’t look at the painting or sculpture without the aid of a smartphone camera. He or she runs away from the artwork like a culprit would in a crime scene, with the slight difference being that a criminal runs away with the artwork, understanding its incredible value, while the smartphone holder does so only with a picture, ignoring the piece’s greater significance.

It is also economically irrational to behave in this manner. Why spend money on a ticket to an art gallery or museum if you allocate most of your time inside the gallery to taking pictures rather than allowing the works of art to captivate you with their greatness? If what you want is a picture of the artwork, you could easily look it up on Google Images; there is no need for you to take your own picture of it. And by the way, my dear smartphone holder, the picture you are taking will, without a doubt, come out blurrier than the picture you could have found on the web.

Alternately, I can understand why someone would want to capture a sunset; it is a unique moment that you, and not many others, are experiencing. Nobody will be able to capture the sunset from the same position or in the same instant you are photographing it. However, with artwork, there is not much uniqueness in photographing it, since there is already a collection of high definition images on the web that portray what you are photographing. The experience ceases to be about the art, and instead it becomes about yourself and how you want the world to see you. In other words, it is about the need to show the internet that you are living a more glamorous, happy and interesting life than those around you. Posting that picture of the artwork on social media quenches your thirst for attention and reinforces your self-esteem.

This behavior is probably the reason why many art galleries are reinventing their marketing strategies. Instead of advertising their vast art collection, they are increasingly relying on internationally recognized celebrities to spread the word. Two striking examples are provided by the Smithsonian museum in Washington and the Louvre museum in Paris; the first hosted the kitsch paintings of Mr. and Ms. Obama, while the latter became the stage for the latest music video of pop celebrities Beyoncé and Jay-Z. These decisions by art gallery directors are not arbitrary. Having worldwide celebrities associated with their gallery incentivizes social media maniacs to visit the museum. Remember, it is not about the thing you are photographing, it is about yourself. After all, who doesn’t want to be in the same spot where Beyoncé shot a music video viewed by 165 million people?

Due to the observations I made throughout my spring break trip in Florence, I came to a revolutionary and unpopular conclusion: the only way to re-establish a sense of appreciation for art in people's’ hearts is a total and complete abolition of all smartphones inside art museums. Leave them at the entrance. Of course, with the increase of petty crime in Italy, it won’t be easy for you to find your smartphone when you come back out of the art gallery; but at least you will finally spend time reflecting on, and truly appreciating what a painting or sculpture has to offer. Or, of course, you will have the most boring time of your life, but at least you won’t escape it through the screen of your smartphone, rather, you will live through it and will have learned an important lesson for the future: avoid art galleries and museums in the first place!