Damon Stapleton: Creativity. Why do people still go to art galleries?

A blog by Damon Stapleton, Chief Creative Officer, Droga5 ANZ

 

Recently I was in Melbourne with a spare afternoon. My wife Minky and I decided to go to an art gallery. It was very full. I asked myself a simple question. Why do people still go to art galleries? Those paintings and sculptures are all available online. Why do people bother? What is it that makes them go? Why do they want to see something real? The answer brings me very neatly to the way things might go going forward. Let’s be honest. Right now, many of us are looking for answers. Now I am not saying this is the only one. But it could be.

I believe in the future there will be two worlds. Very fuzzy. But definitely there.

There is an old line from Ernest Hemingway: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” I’d like to borrow its spirit and say the desire to be surprised, to encounter something un-digitised, un-algorithmic, will stay with us too. Even as the world fractures into two realms. One of pure information and one of real experience. People still go to art galleries because somewhere inside us lives the hunger to be astonished. We want to find things we were not looking for. Things we could not imagine. And most importantly, we want those things to have meaning to us.

In 2020 the pandemic hit very hard. Galleries and museums closed or drastically reduced visits. One survey found that almost 70% of museums reported a loss of more than half of their annual visitors.

In theory this could have been the end of them. Yet by 2023 an analysis of the world’s largest art-museums showed visitor numbers returning to or above pre-Covid levels. In the US, one survey in 2024 found that 33% of adults reported going to a museum in the past year which is slightly above pre-pandemic norms.

What does this tell us? That despite the convenience of online culture, people still make the pilgrimage to physical spaces. Because in a gallery you can’t just scroll. You enter, stand in front of something, let it work on you. There is surprise. A painting you didn’t expect. A corridor. A light shifting. A distinct smell of the building. The surprise of presence. The delight of experience.

Galleries bring something that the smartphone cannot. Scale (the large canvas, the installation), context (you among others, visitors, the architecture), unpredictability (what will the next room reveal?). They are places where time slows. Where you feel like you are somewhere as opposed to connected to everywhere.

As I said I think there will be two worlds. Information vs. Experience. And yes, I get the lines will be very blurred. And yes, these worlds will collide and sometimes be the same thing. But, and this is the important thing, I believe humans will crave both. And you could argue, the stronger one gets, the more we will crave the other. We need to really pay attention to this. As the matrix becomes stronger, it’s the glitch that will become special.

I also believe as our business evolves this will have a profound impact on the industries future.

1. The World of Information

This is the realm of instant, infinite and optimised. News feeds, algorithmic recommendations, e-books, streaming art talks, virtual galleries. It’s data-driven. It’s efficient. It’s everywhere.

In this world you can acquire knowledge, you can consume content, you can do all the things. But you do so through screens, through interfaces, through pre-filtered systems. The surprise is usually well-engineered. The unexpected is often moderated. This world will be the most important operating system and the glue between a billion things.

2. The World of Experience

This is the realm of presence, object, surprise and encounter. The physical art gallery. The music concert. The bookshop. The theatre. A place where you can say I was there. A physical encounter or space where you are not exactly sure is going to happen. Which is the point. You are part of the experiment and the outcome. The conversation with a stranger about a painting. The brush of a page. The building’s acoustics. The musician screaming fuck for 30 seconds because they just feel like doing it.

In this world you are the audience. You sit in the moment. You allow the unknown to happen. This world is about that one unexpected thing you remember.

And humans will always crave this. Because no matter how many gigabytes we stack, no matter how many e-versions we read, there is a part of us that longs for the unknown. We like the thrill of not knowing exactly what will happen next.

We will increasingly live in a world where information is easily delivered, but where experience becomes the scarce currency. And something that is scarce has enormous value.

In that sense, the quote about Paris being a moveable feast applies. Our culture of experience becomes a feast that moves with us. You might carry the memory of that painting, of that passage in a book, that musician screaming fuck in your face. And like Paris it stays with you. We want things to stay with us. We want things to feel special and have meaning to us. As humans.

Perhaps that’s the essential difference. Information can change the way you think. But experience changes you at an even deeper level. An experience becomes yours. It becomes you. It is also one of the main reasons we get up in the morning. It is why we live.

And that is a pretty big difference.

damonsbrain.com