Life in Real Time: On the Virtual Life of Art
It’s official. Art has moved online and it looks like it is going to stay that way post-pandemic. Art Basel has replaced the annual September fair with viewing rooms. Artnet reported “Hauser & Wirth sold an 18-foot Alexander Calder sculpture through its digital sales platform for $15 million.” Small community art centers to major museums are offering openings, viewing rooms, workshops…nearly everything they usually do in a virtual space from the comfort and safety of one’s home. Virtual life is the future we’ve been promised and that future is now. In light of that, I was curious what history tells about what happens when society runs headstrong into new technology.
The automobile was an incredible invention. Before its time, if you wanted to go anywhere farther than a few hours walk, you needed to round up some horses, assemble a carriage, perhaps organize someone to run the whole operation for you. It was, in modern parlance, a pain in the ass and it was debilitating. Most people spent their day-to-day lives within a ten-mile radius. To go farther was an ordeal. It was exceptionally restricting to women, as social norms forced them to rely on others if they wanted to go anywhere. The automobile liberated people and the increased mobility fundamentally changed society. It made the nuclear family possible. It let more people work outside the home. It let people live outside of cities.
While I would not argue for a return to the days before the automobile, I do acknowledge that the invention was a bit of a mixed bag. For all its revolutionary freedoms, the automobile impacted humanity in unfortunate ways. How we organized ourselves changed. The automobile allowed us to live, work, and play far from homes. We became less dependent on those immediately around us. We could live in a bubble, unaware and unconcerned about our neighbors. If we didn’t like our neighborhood, we could easily move to another one. The automobile facilitated competitive capitalism. It let us pick and choose which grocery store we shopped at or what church we attended. Rather than working out our differences, we could find people more like us across town and go spend time with them.
The internet liberated humanity like the automobile. We can travel virtually anywhere in the world. In a couple of keystrokes, I can be standing on a bridge over the Seine or outside of a temple in Bangkok or in front of your house. Daily interactions with people on multiple continents are commonplace. We are unencumbered by distance, forever pinging and connecting with one another. It is glorious and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. But like the automobile, it is not without its drawbacks. Just as easily as we can connect, we can disconnect. Just as easily as we can organize with like-minded people, we can edit out those who see the world differently. Not only are we in physical bubbles, now we are in virtual bubbles too.
That word “virtual” is becoming more commonplace and it is often intended to express a sense of the modern, the technologically advanced, The Now. Virtual is the “Technicolor” of our time. Virtual often travels with a sense of “more” and “faster”. Better is implied. The virtual offers humanity real benefits and, like the automobile a century earlier, we may not fully understand the drawbacks until it is too late to undo them. The word “virtual” means almost or nearly as described, but not completely. It is real and not real at the same time. In this thinking, virtual communities, virtual relationships, virtual interactions are real and not real at the same time. As the automobile allowed us to escape certain realities, virtual life also affords a certain amount of escapism. Are we running to something or are we running away?
In the 1920s, automobile manufacturers reached market saturation. Most people who wanted cars had bought cars. This was a problem. Their solution was a campaign of planned obsolescence, a program to add new or different features to cars so that older models would go out of fashion or become obsolete. Safety improvements — -better brakes, seat belts, on so on — were a godsend, but “now available in red” sent tons of metal prematurely to trash heaps. Entire neighborhoods — often Black communities in America — were knocked down to build highways that allowed more cars to go faster through our cities. By the 1970s, maintaining what was then a vital economic industry led to government bailouts, environmental degradation, and international wars to perpetuate an unsustainable way of life. Our desire for mobility and our unwillingness to imagine a different way of living was costing us dearly.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our embrace of virtual life. As we shelter in our homes, the internet and our ability to remain connected with one another has been a blessing. Lurking in this affluence of connectivity is the potential for dystopia. A collapse of retail is upon us as we shift from supporting local business to relying on Amazon and Walmart. It is sad to say, but malls and shopping centers were some of our last communal spaces. What will our communities be like if they go away? And what will happen to our communities when all of our goods come from a few giant stores? As people work from home, entire micro-economies in commerce-centered districts are collapsing. Corporate chain restaurants have access to the capital that will allow them to weather this storm. Small, locally owned restaurants do not. The DNA of our communities is being rewritten.
I’ve thought a lot about the tension of virtual life as we embrace this shift. How do we remember what happens when we get together in person? Entire conferences are now being organized online. Panels and talks are a great way to share information, but much of the real work at meetings like these takes place in the conversations one has walking to a session or taking a break outside. People shed professional personas and connect to one other in informal time and space and meeting in person is a great way for those casual encounters to occur.
Art functions best when it is in dialogue with a community. As artists, we need public space and healthy communities for us to do our work. The beautiful will always find a home, but the art that makes us uncomfortable, that is difficult, that helps us see and work through the tensions of modern life, that art needs a public square. A virtual public square is real and not real at the same time. Sometimes people fart in a yoga class. It’s awkward and funny and a completely natural response to relaxing and opening your body. When it happens in a class, it can be embarrassing for the individual, but for the others in the class, it can be a wonderful reminder that we are humans in bodies sharing time and space together. The Dadaists and Surrealists often spoke about flatulence, and scatology in general, not simply because it was socially disruptive to do so, but because it so well reminded people swimming in thoughts and ideas of their corporeality. We are humans in bodies in space and time, simultaneously perfect and flawed, simple and complicated, relatable yet incomprehensible. To see that is to marvel and love humanity. Good art helps us see that.
We lose something when we cannot see art in person, unedited and uncropped. A trip to a museum is about dedicated, focused time. Sometimes it is about who we take with us; sometimes it is about time for ourselves. In the gallery, we see the realness of art, its flaws and brilliance in spectacle before us. Nobody is alone in a museum. We see how other people react, how they move about the gallery. What holds their interest; what they walk past quickly. We can watch as they look; we can follow their gaze. And we can overhear observations be they banal or brilliant. Visiting a museum is more than seeing the art. It’s about being with the art and everything that comes along with it. Let us remember before we forget.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Kolaj LIVE Online Program Book.
