A Praxis of Contextualized Controversy

In the age of the Internet, why go to an art museum? This is not an idle question. It is one display institutions must fundamentally grapple with if they hope to survive. According to the National Endowment for the Arts’s 2015 Research Report, “A Decade of Arts Engagement,” the percentage of American adults who visited an art museum or gallery at least once a year dropped more than 5 percent in the last decade, from 26.5 percent of the population in 2002 to 21 percent in 2012 (in fact, the sole group to see an overall increase in museum attendance in this period was those over the age of 75).¹

The report is quick to point out that this does not signal an overall drop in interest in the arts, noting that in 2012 45 percent of Americans “reported consuming arts broadcasts or recordings” via the Internet. It is important to note that that number doesn’t include people looking at individual works of art, meaning that the number of Americans viewing visual art online is almost certainly higher. This statistic was unfortunately not tracked in 2002, but it is fairly safe to say it has increased over the last decade, and will only continue to do so until climate change destroys the planet (and with it, the Internet).

The information we can potentially view online is nearly limitless, and we (mostly) direct our own experience of it, as though the Encyclopedia Britannica had been rewritten as a Choose Your Own Adventure. It is ironic that this untrammeled freedom has a tendency to make the information we actually consume more narrow and partisan, as we seek out or have shared with us only those points of view that already conform with our own—the infamous “echo chamber” effect. Although this is troubling in general, for queer artists who are looking to be taken seriously by mainstream institutions, this electronic ghettoization can be a career killer. Because this process is invisible (as privilege so often is), many gatekeepers may not even realize what they’re not seeing. The role of the display institution, therefore, must in part be to counteract this human failing, or at least to be cognizant of the fact that works of great quality or import may only be known in small, circumscribed communities.

Exacerbating our personal blind spots are the algorithms that underlie such sites as Facebook and Google, which are designed to provide results based on information about us and what we already like (an effect that author and Internet activist Eli Pariser termed “the filter bubble” in his book of the same name).² As journalist Alan Martin put it, “as the web becomes increasingly tailored to the individual, we’re more likely than ever to be served personalised content that makes us happy and keeps us clicking.”³ Unless mainstream audiences are specifically looking for it, this suggests that content (which could be anything from art to listicles) from a nonnormative perspective may never cross their feed.

And even without machine assistance, we seem organically predisposed to weed out the novel or challenging online. Although there have been few scientific studies as to why this is, some researchers have posited that it is our brain’s way of dealing with information overload. In a 2012 study from the KAIST Graduate School of Management, researchers examined participants’ ability to assess conflicting information in consumer reviews.⁴ As the Atlantic put it in their analysis, the researchers found that “when the respondents felt overwhelmed... they tended to rely on reviews that matched their induced mindset.”⁵ In other words, when there was too much information, they went with what they were already told to be true. This is a variety of confirmation bias, our tendency to pay more attention to information that corroborates what we already believe.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China, as my dad would say? If art museums are to entice modern visitors off of their screens and into our galleries, we must offer some “value added” over looking at art online...