What’s Missing While Looking At Art Online

It is increasingly common for people to buy art, like everything else, online. So online presence is obviously vital. Perhaps the Covid-19 emergency, while directing attention onto the virtual world, will also indicate its limitations. It has been argued by several commentators that, rather than bringing people together, digital technologies and social media contribute to the creation of a generation of disengaged narcissists under the spell of surveillance capitalism. Other people, places and things are reduced to the status of props in a theatre of selfhood. Yet it seems a little unlikely that the person who checks out galleries online fits that profile. – Irish Times