How to save $50 and see great art, free, in Manhattan.

Art museums are becoming just another place to take a selfie on the must-see tourist to-do list.

If a museum doesn’t have The Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Early Sunday Morning, The Kiss or The Gold Finch on display, visitors will fume. Museums are trapped in homeostasis, unable to reinvigorate their walls.

Museum visitors are less interested in appreciating the art on display, and more invested in finding pretty objects to accompany their selfies.

“Look — that’s me next to [insert famous masterpiece]!” 

Dereck Stafford Mangus, Hyperallergic

Last weekend I was in Manhattan for the first time in a long time. Swarms of people blazing through the floors of the museums, photographing themselves in front of the same stuff that was on the walls in 2004 when it reopened. It felt like a trap. Like purgatory.

Whitney same thing. Except for the near empty floors showing Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Which wasn’t on anyone’s selfie list. (The work itself is absolutely brilliant.)

See artworks without the cost on W25th Street

Instead of the Whitney or MoMA, stroll down the Highline and jump off at W25th street and circuit the block along W25th Street, down 11th Avenue, back along W24th Street.

Along the way you can step into galleries showing the same stuff by the same artists at no charge.

There’s astounding unseen works by ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG at Gladstone Gallery.

There’s incredible photographs by Richard Avedon at the Gagosian, and the most in vogue most-photographed artist of the year, Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner.

Best yet, if you like what you see, you can take an artwork home with you. It’s the ultimate souvenir. With the added bonus that everyone will want to come to your house for the ultimate selfie.

Don’t forget to pop over to Little Island while you’re there, an incredible magical island on stilts in the Hudson.