By Anna Zhila, artist, musician and art critic
One suspects the defining artwork of our era is not a monumental Sterling Ruby sculpture or an Alex Katz canvas, but an altogether more abstract creation: the itinerary. It is a masterpiece of logistics, a multi-stop, continent-spanning performance piece whose primary medium is the carbon footprint. Ibiza, Chicago, Shanghai, Paris, Marseille, Gstaad. The locations, as listed in any guide for the global cultural consumer, are not places but waypoints; destinations to be acquired, ticked off a list that offers the promise of cultural enrichment but delivers something closer to existential vertigo.
This is the state of the elite art world now. It is a peripatetic circus of profound anxiety, where the act of seeing has been supplanted by the far more urgent business of having been seen. The art itself, one feels, is becoming increasingly incidental. It is the backdrop, the pretext, the high-minded alibi for a relentless programme of movement. The true creative act is the scheduling. The real collection is not of paintings, but of boarding passes.
I remember a Venice Biennale a few years back, the heat rising off the canals in a shimmering miasma. The crowds in the Giardini moved with the grim determination of pilgrims on a forced march, clutching maps and frowning at schedules. The air was thick not with aesthetic contemplation, but with the low thrum of high-stakes FOMO – the fear of missing out on the correct pavilion, the essential collateral event, the impossible-to-book dinner reservation. The art was an obstacle course. You navigated it, you photographed it, and you moved on. The experience was about conquering the terrain.
This is the psychological engine driving the phenomenon. It is a culture of accumulation, but what is being accumulated is not insight, but evidence. The catalogue of exhibitions serves as a form of social armour for a class of people for whom material acquisition has lost its thrill. When you can buy anything, the only scarce commodity left is the authenticated experience. The Sterling Ruby show at MaMo in Marseille, set in dialogue with a Le Corbusier masterpiece, is not merely an exhibition to be enjoyed; it is a unique confluence of cultural data points to be captured. Artist, architect, location, time. It is a trophy.
The Ecstasy of The Checklist
The art world has, perhaps unwittingly, created the perfect product for the age of anxiety. It offers a sense of purpose – a calendar full of important dates. It provides a community – a self-selecting group you can recognise in the lounges of Art Basel or the private views in Ibiza. And most critically, it offers a narrative of self-improvement that elegantly masks a feverish competition. The language used is telling: Sterling Ruby’s work in Gstaad ‘explores themes of germination, birth, growth, and decay’. The visitor, jetting in from a board meeting in Zurich, is unlikely to be doing much deep thinking about metaphysical cycles. They are there to tick the ‘Ruby in the Alps’ box. It’s a bit sad, really.
This whole dreary business is analogous to the peculiar hobby of ‘twitching’ in the world of ornithology. For the twitcher, the joy is not found in the quiet observation of a bird’s behaviour, its song, or its place in the ecosystem. The joy is in the sighting, the confirmation, the addition of a rare species to a life-list. It is a competitive, acquisitive sport disguised as a love of nature. So it is with the art-world jet-set. Is that an Alex Katz at GRAY Chicago? Tick. Is Rick Owens holding court at the Palais Galliera? Tick. The art is no longer the destination, but a gorgeously rarefied proof of purchase for the journey itself.
One might argue, with a certain hopeful naivety, that this is simply modern patronage. This is, after all, a tide of private wealth that lifts all artistic boats, allowing for ambitious projects in spectacular locations. A good thing, surely? This is to mistake the Medicis for mayflies. The patronage of the Renaissance, for all its sins, was tied to the glorification of a place, a city-state, a civic identity. The new patronage is atomised and self-referential. It glorifies the patron’s mobility and taste. It creates not civic monuments but private memories, instantly converted into the fungible currency of social media posts. The art is not for the city; it is for the feed.
The apotheosis of this is the double-billing of artists at a place like Fundación La Nave Salinas in Ibiza. The iconic 8,000-square-foot space on the Mediterranean is described as a place where ‘artistic vision collides with architectural grandeur’. The collision is the point. It is a spectacle. The names – Spencer Lewis, Pedro Pedro – become part of the experience package, like the all-inclusive drinks or the sunset view.
Ghosts in the Machine
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps genuine aesthetic ecstasy is being had in these repurposed salt warehouses and Alpine chalets. But the relentless emphasis on the new, the next, the now, suggests a different story. It points to a deep fear of stillness, a terror of being left behind by a cultural conversation that moves at the speed of light. The art world has become a game of musical chairs played at 30,000 feet, and nobody wants to be the one left standing in last season’s city.
What is lost in this frantic chase is the possibility of a genuine encounter. Great art, if it is to do its work, demands a certain vulnerability from the viewer. It requires time, quiet, and a willingness to be unsettled, confused, or even bored. It is an intimate, often slow, conversation. The modern art pilgrimage, however, is structured for maximum efficiency and minimum friction. It is a series of transactions. You give your time (in meticulously scheduled, pre-booked slots) and in return you get a cultural asset, a story to tell, a photograph to post.
In the end, one imagines the collector on a plane, somewhere between Gstaad and Shanghai, scrolling through the images on their phone. There is the photo of the monumental candle sculpture, looking smaller on the screen. There is the selfie with the Jean Jullien installation as a backdrop. The experience, once so keenly pursued across time zones, is now flattened, catalogued, and ready for deployment. Another ghost in the machine.
