This chapter studies the work of the art museum exhibition during the pandemic. The confinement in citizens' homes, as a preventive measure against COVID-19, forced museums to a new virtual staging and an ordering of the works under the technical conditions of the internet. The excess of the virtualization of heritage as opposed to the rational contemplation of art is what establishes the bases of identification of the anticulture proper to capitalist consumption. Theoretical questions of art, philosophy, sociology, and politics are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep waters of visual culture.
TopIntroduction: Towards The Immateriality Of The Art Staging
Social distancing during the pandemic also meant, on many occasions, a distancing of cultural activity from the cities. Especially for art, it meant the temporary closure of its conventional exhibition venues (museums, galleries), as well as a series of difficulties in relations with the public (Art Fund, 2020).
During the quarantine, museums had to reorganize the content generation and orient their work with a non-face-to-face public (ICOM, 2020). To do so, museums undertook digital actions that increased with social networks. This mediating activity with technologies has uncovered a recovery of artistic creativity that affects the museum’s conception, visual culture, and a different perception of art in the scopic regime of virtuality (Bono, 2020; Burgos, 2021; Cultura, 2020; Ibart, 2021; Lucas, 2020; Morla 2022).
The pandemic has opened other paths to the creative imagination of art institutions. The virtual exhibition breaks with the spatial limitations of the physical exhibition. The museum space is increased, decreased, or reorganized without physical requirements; it acquires another format in a virtual network or a multiplication of cyberspaces generated by the various social networks; its extension is global, as the community of visitors and admits the online gallery connection.
The challenge of museums in the face of the pandemic also extended to the historical and artistic heritage of cities. Driven by the new museum concepts (open-air museum) or the museum integrated into its landscape, the cultural gaze on urban heritage also experienced the vacuum of confinement. But, on the other hand, promoting of urban heritage also avoided oblivion and the disappearance of social interest, relying on communication to show itself to the world.
The implementation of digital policies around the exhibition of art brought new challenges for these institutions and the cities themselves; inventories, catalogues, collections were digitized, as well as the face-to-face activities that are usually planned for the public, making them possible on the Internet. The UNESCO report (2020), regarding the behavior of museums in the pandemic, points out a series of digital tools based on communication platforms for their collections, social networks, the digitization of their activities (concerts, online exhibitions, or 360-degree itineraries), and even some exclusive activities created for confinement that required interaction with the public (Samaroudi, Myrsini, Rodríguez Echavarria and Perry, 2020).
The tactic of the internet outlet in the exploration of the artistic heritage of cities stopped at the idea of immateriality, and at the same time, it generated different materiality formed by computer codes, screens, interfaces, etc. (Matthews, 2021). Portable materiality that did not require the physical location that characterizes the cultural heritage inventory. In other words, the physical contracted and increased its distance from the digital, offering a useless prop and an amorphous spectacle. Technological hybridization offered a different approach to the curiosity of tourism designed from the automation of information, the mechanization of vision, and the simulacrum of action/interaction.