Post digital age?

What do people write in the comments book after a visit to your studio?
Now that Forth Valley Open Studios is over for another year I took a close look today at my book.

Guess what? The mud paintings and the opportunity for people to try it themselves along with the garden got praised again and again.
As for my digital work, video and photography that hardly got mentioned.

Now, for some time I have suspected that what people are looking for these days is an experience rather than the purchase of an object.

So I read Simon Jenkins article today in The Guardian with particular interest.
“In the post-digital age, people still thrill to the power of live.”

He is writing about the long queue of people outside the Serpentine gallery to see Marina Abramovic the performance artist who communes in silent mindfulness with visitors.

The Serpentine director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, whom I heard speak at the recent Hay Book Festival said:”In the digital age there is a real necessity for a live experience, for physical interaction.”

Simon Jenkins quotes the Boston Consulting Group who studied upmarket spending and found it “shifting rapidly from ‘having’ to ‘being’, from owning a luxury product to experiencing a luxury.’”

OK that’s a long way from my mud paintings but I think you get the drift- people now want to be inter-active with the art.

Welcome to the post-digital age!