A small group of friends meet with my wife and myself on Zoom every week. On the past two occasions we have had mysterious technical problems, causing visuals to freeze and sound to cut out. It is all very annoying. The daft thing is, however, we all live within walking distance of each other!
Why are we doing this? Is it another case, I fear, of our tendency to assume automatically that contemporary technology offers us the best option …. for almost anything. Of course, that isn’t necessarily the case.
I has made me reflect on the role of art sales over the internet. I had cause this morning to look through one of the earlier volumes of my log of work. In fact, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the proportion of my work which I actually sold back then …. before I had a web-site. There is no evidence as far as I can see that my sales have actually improved over time, and nearly every sale I make these days is the result of somebody seeing the work directly in an exhibition. I have no regrets about maintaining the web-site, because it serves several other functions, and I experience no temptation to abandon it. It is the case, even so, that we really do need to think before we jump to the automatic conclusion that because something is new it must be better than the older alternative.