Art appreciation no longer revolves around the authentic contemplation of an artist’s world, nor the insights and inspirations that often result from that act.
Rather, in the Digital Age, it has become something agnostic to these things. Our ears, eyes and minds now play a secondary role to our focus on accumulating photographic tokens, by association with which we hope to convey something curated, and largely inauthentic, about ourselves to our own audiences.
Art is, by and large, now no more than a proxy; it is a currency the value of which is in one’s proximity to the object being digitally captured and shared on social media. In the process, that same object is largely ignored, per se.
A large majority of museum patrons today are "art-adjacent": physically near, with photographic proof in hand, yet otherwise shockingly absent. Nowhere in this paradigm does the art itself exist in its intended form: there to externalize something internal, as a catalyst for self-learning and for communicating those lessons to the viewing public. Instead, the art patron's attention now lasts as long as the screen grab.
Sadly, perhaps for the first time, art is no longer the barometer and currency of our collective cultural inheritance.
That was yesterday.
Today, the accumulation of tokens is all that remains. That is, if the patrons are even paying attention.
© Anthony Fieldman. All Rights Reserved.
For information about availability, editions and prints, contact anthony@nomadecivilisee.com
