After four days of divine gastronomy in Miami’s Latin American barrios I needed some brain food. Fortunately, the resurgent city is awash with options, from the new Artechouse and Feana art space on Miami Beach to the impressive Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) downtown.

But just when I was cooling off in the air-con and allowing myself to be absorbed by the interactive, enveloping abstracts at Artechouse, I was distracted by Russian girls filming themselves in one of the dozen or so light installations. Not content with the complex patterns programmed by French digital artists Adrien Mondot and Claire Bardainne, the wintering Muscovettes proceeded to take over the space and shoot their own “art”. One of them was, apparently, an aspiring modern dancer, letting her arms drape around the touch-sensitive curtain like a Diaghilev in hotpants. The other was more of a face photographer, filling every take with a gurn.

I met them later on in a sort of 3D cinema, once again blocking my view and demolishing the optical illusion of travelling through space.

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At the Pérez, which is big enough to accommodate ten times its number of daily visitors, you’d think there was plenty of room for quiet mediation. But no, now intruding on my view were gangs of teens. Not the schoolgroup chaos of, say, the Tate Modern, nor even the caption-snappers and Van Gogh hoggers of the National Gallery, but the more assertive, ambitious, annoying selfie-ists of 21st century America: boys and girls garbed in garish bermudas, baseball caps and summer dresses standing in front of huge canvases in order to place themselves in prime position. Me, me, shoot me, like this, like that, no like this!

You could call this a new kind of interactive – or interruptive – art, but, is it, really? A recent anti-travel book by Argentine rising star Andrés Neuman is titled How to Travel Without Seeing. The author makes lively reference to jet-speed, advertising, 24-hour news feeds and his own hectic schedule to show how we can whiz round the globe and not observe much more than our own navels. But the narcissistic escapades of the digital generation have honed this nihilistic approach by seeing everything – fine art, contemporary architecture, manicured gardens and historic landmarks – as mere props to their own mono-thematic story. And the theme is always: Me. Me, with arms akimbo. Me, with my new clothes. Me: saturated, cropped, improved, shared – multiply by a thousand thousands.

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