This thought first struck me during a visit to London’s National Gallery, where I found my gaze shift from the paintings to the people viewing them. They would drift toward a painting, stop, read the placard, lift their smartphone, click, and move on to repeat the process for the next work of art that caught their eye. The whole ritual took about fifteen seconds—twenty, if the work was famous enough to merit a selfie...
My Internet-trained generation stands before the Caravaggio without religious sentiment or aesthetic education, and panics. We know its greatness in theory only; our hearts remain stony. We act upon it with scrutinizing eyes; the painting does not act upon us. The agent does not become the patient; the outside object does not become the source of movement within our soul. We do not feel.It's as if dystopian fiction wasn't actually fiction, but prediction.