An art gallery owning friend was expressing her frustration with gallery visitors a few days ago. Many were in and out in two minutes – a quick walk around the walls and out of the door. There was no indication as to why they had visited the art gallery or what they had expected to get out of the experience but it was obviously extremely limited and ultimately unsatisfied. Did the visitors even know why they were there?  In many ways this is contrary to everything literature tells us about people spending hours contemplating a painting or sculpture and the work changing or enhancing their lives. If this was indeed the past, just what has changed? Was this just literary fancy or wishful thinking?

Contemporary media exposure is often blamed for lack of focus or lack of attention. The sheer volume of data, its complexity and the short life span of such information can rob an individual or a whole society of the ability to determine what is important enough to absorb or make decisions about. The ramifications for elections are obvious but probably no more so than for personal life decisions. Being able to determine beforehand which direction your life or choice of occupation might take has always been fraught with difficulty – too many choices in essence as seen in university and college course guides let alone those school guides to a career where the options are book-like. However, all of those possible choices mean little when the current employment market shifts and changes by the day with the real possibility of every person having to train and retrain every five years or less as jobs disappear as options.

However, it is more complex than just too much choice when it comes to art. A determining factor in spending time looking at a work of art, let alone buying one, is the ability to connect. A reliance on instinct has got many buyers to the point of making a decision. You just know. In less complex times the reliance on the senses made sense. The need to see, hear and smell danger was paramount. Certainly, such awareness may well be of benefit in crowded city centres but even there, pedestrians ignoring all signs of danger, ignoring designated crossing points or drivers simply ignoring speed limits, is to be seen everywhere. The senses are still working to an extent but the need to be somewhere else outweighs all combinations of danger signs. In the same way the contemporary fear-of-missing-out overrides everything and connection to a mobile phone or a social media platform takes precedence. Even when it comes to food, demolishing a plate of food at pace in order to speed to the next event, destination or supposed life-changing happening, removes any sense of taste so lovingly prepared by a chef. Is there in fact any sense that is of value or being valued at present? Seeing certainly isn’t. Most people progress through their days with blinkers on and if they are focussed at all, it is only on the immediate ground in front of their feet.

In addition to losing the ability to concentrate, smell, hear nothing but a cacophony and be unable to interpret visual data, we also seem to be losing the ability to dream. How many people claim that they do not dream, cannot remember dreaming or remember anything that happened at a sub-conscious level? Dreaming has always been assumed to be the state in which the day and life events are processed and where perceived information is processed and reprocessed. We assume that that process is still going on but the connection between the dream state and non-dream state has also always been via sensory triggers and processed memories. Has in fact the dream state been supplanted by the ability of media to absorb all of our attention in what are ultimately pointless activities? The ever-present phone has become the dream machine. Our gallery patron, who may well be on the phone, using none of the senses and none of the triggers contained in a painting or sculpture in essentially elsewhere.  Why enter a gallery in the first place if your attention is not on the work? Desperation? Knee-jerk reaction? Cultural memory? Maybe all three.

Does this decline in the role the senses play have any benefits? Perhaps. The last thing an employer wants is distracted employees. The last thing a teacher wants is distracted students. Extreme focus is encouraged. Narrowly defined tasks with neatly specified results parameters are increasingly the norm. Remove doubt, alternatives, inner conflicts and distractions, speed up decision-making processes and reduce empathy and what have you got….. Macdonalds and increased profits. And Macdonalds is not alone.

There has always been an assumption on my part that the audience plays a significant role in what a work of art means. Trying to paint for an audience comes with its own pitfalls but if the audience is making no contribution and simply rushing in and out, ticking the ‘experience’ off a list to to-dos, where does that leave the artist? Novelty? That in itself is an increasingly rare commodity. ‘Originality’? An even rarer commodity. Familiarity? The number of art competitions and prizes devoted to approximations of the landscape proliferate lending weight to the argument that what you know is better than what you don’t. My gallery-owning friend can attest to the fact that a room full of landscapes will march out of the door, mostly on opening night. That creates a dilemma. If as the owner you need to pay the rent then rooms full of landscape painting will guarantee commission payments and such exhibitions becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Every other kind of artist may well need to avoid commercial galleries.

Of greater concern though is where we as an art-consuming species are heading. If the senses are playing less and less of role and art is no longer triggering memory/dream responses where does that leave us? Ants and bees are extremely focussed on the task and bred for the purpose. Free will does not exist. Art is irrelevant to both species but they both build impressive hive structures.