The Year of Looking
Art “at maximum capacity” will never satisfy the viewer quite like art does when on a slow simmer.
The rise of AI will forever change whole industries. Robotics will displace factory and warehouse workers while self-driving ride-shares will spread from San Francisco to the globe. Everything from wood to meat to functional human organs will be grown in laboratories. Thanks to artificial intelligence and new vaccine technologies, medical discoveries will leapfrog our expected learning curve by an order of magnitude. Wealthy tourists will roam the lunar surface. Augmented reality will become quotidian reality.
These and more disruptions lay just on the other side of a small stretch of time. Whether in 2023, 2024, or 2030, it seems impossible to prepare for the technological progress bearing down on us.
When selecting for this exhibit, I intentionally included work from established and totally new mediums — AI, 3D, collage, photography, glitch, and paint.
As the capacity for the world to create art increases at an incomprehensible order of magnitude, the most critical skill an art lover can cultivate is “slow looking,” defined by The Tate Modern as “an approach based on the idea that, if we really want to get to know a work of art, we need to spend time with it.”
“Slow looking is not about curators, historians, or even artists telling you how you should look at art. It's about you and the artwork, allowing yourself time to make your own discoveries and form a more personal connection with it.”
Despite the speed of development, art “at maximum capacity” will never satisfy the viewer quite like art does when on a slow simmer. With this small exhibit, I encourage the MakersPlace community to devote more time to looking in the New Year. Pick just one piece and see how rewarding a prolonged looking meditation can be.
