I went to the final day of the Van Gogh exhibition at Tate Britain. It was completely sold out – Van Gogh is about as blockbuster as a show gets. Yet what I found myself gawping at was not the art, but the vast numbers of people crowded around the paintings, looking at the art only through the medium of their phone screens.

Visitors jostled for advantage on the approach to the most famous paintings, snapped the canvas (or had their photo snapped in front of it) and swiftly moved on. I watched this happen over and over again, bemused and a little bit baffled. Meanwhile, visitors to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris have complained that they are given barely a minute with the painting before being obliged to shift, despite queuing for hours. If you’ve been, you’ll know this modestly sized Da Vinci is constantly surrounded by a vast ring of tourist paparazzi. Again, no one’s really looking. Or at least, not in the way people used to.

The National Gallery gave up trying to police photography in 2014. Go to MoMA in New York and it’s selfies galore

I’m not above taking photos at art exhibitions. There are some very good arguments for doing so: to capture detail for research, to linger afterwards on what you particularly appreciated, to show friends and family, or to post on social media. A curator friend also notes that it can help with gallery communications at a time when budgets are being slashed and the pressure to increase footfall is more intense than ever. Being allowed to take photos and post them to social media often boosts visitor numbers quite dramatically. But the proliferation of photo-taking – and selfies – now seems to have reached a critical mass, to the point where there is no longer either mental or literal space for direct engagement with the work. Instead, that engagement is mediated by a screen. It is disrupted and distanced – leading to the kind of detachment the situationist Guy Debord presciently identified as a condition of the mass culture of late capitalism, when he wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he wrote.

As a member of what you might call the “bridge” generation – old enough for life before the internet to have made a strong impression yet young enough to be a digital native – standing in that gallery felt like the culmination of a process that has been accelerating for as long as I have been alive. The tangible object in front of us, the work into which Van Gogh had poured so much feeling, the lush textures of his brushstrokes telling us so much about his state of mind and his way of working, had been stripped of its meaning, flattened, disseminated. It had ceased to matter in the way it once had.

Switch off your phone and get lost in a gallery | Letters Read more

Maybe I’m just old. I’m happy to acknowledge that ageing can mean suddenly feeling out of step with the rest of the world; that sudden sense of vertigo. In any case the debate over whether to ban photography in galleries, as some desire, is redundant. The battle is lost. The National Gallery gave up trying to police photography in 2014. So did the Uffizi in Florence. Go to MoMA in New York and it’s selfies galore.

I have also discovered that even to suggest that to look at a painting through a phone is a lesser form of engagement provokes ire. To me it’s so obvious it barely needs stating, but to some younger people the thought is offensive. I conducted a (now deleted) online poll on whether photography should be banned in galleries. The backlash to even the suggestion of a ban was furious.

Yet it’s not a new observation to say a simulacrum of the work lacks the power of the original. We all know this, otherwise why go to a gallery at all? In his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, cultural critic Walter Benjamin reflected on the impact of photography, writing: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space.” Art removed from its context is stripped of what Benjamin termed its aura, that almost supernatural, unique quality.

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I’m not one of those who argue that the gallery should be a place of quiet deference, that all photography is a “spiritual menace”. But the gallery has become a place that I do not recognise, and that gave me a feeling of loss. I couldn’t find the aura. There were too many phones in the way.

Aura is precious. It’s why US musician Jack White takes your phone off you at his gigs, and why the Berghain nightclub in Berlin puts a little sticker over your phone camera. It’s why their absence is so striking in Jeremy Deller’s recent documentary about rave – EveryBody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992. God... the drugs, the fun, the freedom. It’s why you can’t film in theatres. So while there may be little point contemplating a ban on phones, we should recognise that the absence of a phone feels like a kind of freedom – a freedom that is now lost forever. The world has changed, irrevocably, and with it, the way we look at art.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist