Artists were the first selfie-takers because they were the only creatives in the past who could actually do them. What is now easy used to be difficult. Before the advent of smartphones and mirror functions, only those who could paint and draw to a high standard were capable of preserving a convincing likeness. Not only did you need to stare into a mirror for hours, wrestling with your own reality, but you needed also to say something meaningful. Looking like you was never enough.

No wonder the great self-portraitists are such a miserable bunch. The greatest of them all, Rembrandt, is one of art’s glummest presences. Rembrandt painted about 50 self-portraits in all — Kardashian numbers! But in none of them does he appear to enjoy what he sees. Even in his earliest selfies, the young Rembrandt looks as if he is counting the days. By the time he gets to old age, his face is as lined with pits and wrinkles as a pensioner’s scrotum. Yet this, too, is role playing. Those funny hats he wears, the gold chains, the fur coats, are studio costumes put on for the picture. This was not the clobber he wore in the street. Rembrandt’s selfies are fantasies about the passage of time, the shortness of life. [...]

Among art’s keenest self-portraitists, not one of them, not Gauguin, not Van Gogh, not Frida Kahlo, can be described as an optimistic presence. Something about looking into a mirror, staring deep into yourself, turned the self-portraiture of the Old Masters into a dark and profound pursuit. [...]

That is no longer true. Today, taking selfies is simples. Just point and click. Anyone can do it. Famous politicians gathered at important summits can do it. People falling out of aeroplanes can do it. Women in the bath can do it. Astronauts orbiting the moon can do it. We can all do it. The disappeared have disappeared. A Niagara Falls of selfies is cascading down on us from the heavens as every nobody on the planet is handed the tool with which to turn themselves into a somebody.