Months back, when the pandemic was still running strong, I wrote about how much I wanted to go to a museum—even a mediocre one. Well, now I can and I did and I remembered that most things are bad. We can do whatever we want again, including wonder why we choose to do it.

Though sometimes art is good, it usually isn’t. This has been true throughout history but, also throughout history, the edge has traditionally been taken off this state of affairs by art exhibitions having some kind of social purpose. “It may just be another bull running from a guy shooting arrows,” the paleolithic critics used to say between sips of stale yak milk “but at least it gives us all an opportunity to get out to the cave.” 

For a long time this social purpose was frankly religious or statist—there was a statue of a great man or an archangel. Even if it sucked, it was still George Washington and you were supposed to know what he looked like and that he could be impressive—and on a horse. Eventually a further purpose developed—social and commercial business was increasingly going down in larger and larger rooms and art was needed to decorate them. Parlors, salons and chambers of all kinds were expected to have pictures of sailing ships, dogs or the people who owned them—paintings filled the walls, statues gathered in the corners, and these announced that the spaces they occupied were both safe and spoken for. In this way, art was a force for civilization in the most crass and middle-class terms: it announced these spaces were attempting to be civil. You didn’t have to look at the art, just being around it was enough to establish your status as a non-ruffian. 

While modernity brought with it forces that would bring these assumptions into doubt, the forces themselves settled, often unconsciously, on a new answer to the question of the purpose of exhibiting art. The self-consciously bohemian classes realized that they couldn’t talk about revolution at work, that they shouldn’t talk at all during Godard movies, that they couldn’t hear each other at Pink Floyd concerts, and that when they were home watching TV there was no one listening, so they needed to find entertainments that were neither loud, nor immersive, nor convenient. Art shows filled the bill. For approximately 100 years they became an extension of cafe society, a place to broadly advance the project of being well-educated with a funny haircut while hating (or at least hating-on) capitalism, and the art increasingly reflected that stance in form and content. Often the art was much more fun to talk about than look at, but the people who liked it were okay with that. Insofar as art sat like a mute centerpiece at the table of the chattering classes’ social and intellectual ambitions, it was doing a job they needed done.

Nowadays, however, when you can not only talk to all your friends and thousands of strangers about defunding the police, organizing your mutual aid society and planning your performance/rave/happening while watching TV but you can see every piece in every art show in full color without leaving your couch, it seems like the social role of shows is due for another revision. One of the many questions NFTs raise is, really, what counts as “looking” at a piece of art and how much do you really have to do it to receive what it has to give?

When I’m out at a show I am definitely looking at the thing and I am—if the people around me are ones I trust very much with absolutely no social connection to the artists—going to tell them what I think about it but …we could be doing that at my place. About not just what we saw that day but about anything ever made. “Do you know Chavelet? Well let me google him.” I am not saying there’s no reason to go to a show—I am simply saying there are fewer and fewer unique ones.

Maybe art shows won’t have a social role anymore—maybe they should cultivate an anti-social role. Maybe we need art to lean into its ability to disconnect us from what everyone else wants us to care about: No longer the twice-life-size marble Virgin at the far end of the block-long museum queue, but unknown shrines off unmarked dirt roads, dedicated to gods unknown.