See, that’s how you shoot a photo of a mirror artwork. The Kunstverein für die Rhineland und Westfalen, Düsseldorf showed us the way, way back in 2001, when they published Spiegelbild, Isa Genzken’s contribution to their bougie annual artist editions series for their members.
It’s been downhill ever since. Shooting mirrored artworks from behind a blank white scrim to eliminate any reflection or trace of presence is a sales tactic, like staging a house. This kind of market lubrication and context erasure betray the experience of any artwork; mirrors just make it obvious. But the impact remains, and spreads, and eventually we’re swamped by the art equivalent of white modern farmhouses with grey laminate floors, everything around us optimized for resale.