Pokémon at the Met
Museums in the US, including the MoMA in New York, are getting with the times and have started embracing Pokémon Go, much to the annoyance of purist art lovers. Summer is the year’s quietest season for cultural institutions so museums are making the most of the mobile game craze in an attempt to get more visitors to pay entrance fees.
Launched earlier in July, Pokémon Go is available in 27 countries and already counts 26 million daily players in the United States alone. The augmented reality mobile game allows users to catch Pokémon monsters against a real world backdrop using smartphones and it’s said to be even more popular than Tinder and Grindr. The app is proving to be hugely successful with the servers being down in parts of Europe. But not without some controversy with gamers falling off cliffs or casually finding corpses while hunting in Pokéstops.
Pokéstops are the GPS-programmed areas where gamers snatch monsters and collect points. The MoMA currently has two (one at entrance and one inside) while the Philadelphia Museum of Art has eight Pokéstops.
But not all artgoers are amused with the hoards of Pokémon Go players in the museums who in comparison might look like zombies holding mobile phones. Perhaps this is also the time for “zombie formalism” to have a come back – we hope not.