Installations, performance, cultural capital: art in the age of technology
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Citation
Abstract
[Why do we look at art? What do we gain from it? What even is it, these days? Art has long been a status symbol and form of cultural capital, but how do we measure that when the days of grand patronage are long gone? Throughout human history, extravagant buildings and beautiful paintings were foolproof methods of capturing the attention of the masses. Eyes on art meant eyes on a message, and regimes of church and state exploited this fact for centuries. These days, however, technologies of image production have moved on from the paintbrush or chisel. A different device is now responsible for capturing our attention- one equipped with pixels and speakers instead. The rise of social media and the unprecedented ubiquity of short-form video content (think: TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc) has driven the contemporary consciousness to expect, or even crave, stimulation on many different somatic levels. We have been trained to understand this sort of media, so the true level of overstimulation is lost on us. But consider the act of scrolling through one’s Explore Page: five-second bursts of information, where the real ‘point’ could be found in either the visual, textual, or audio component. Often, the content’s meaning is sometimes indecipherable without the context of all three. Multi-sensory media has become the norm in our contemporary age. Our engagement with artworks has certainly shifted in the age of social media, but by tracking the history of ‘installation art’, we can see that this is not the first time the purpose and reception of multi-sensory artworks have changed since this genre’s rise in the twentieth century.]