The Sacred Experience of Art Is Losing Its Power
Once upon a time, entering a museum felt like crossing the threshold into a contemplative sanctuary. Not a place for spectacle, but for stillness. You lower-ed your voice. You slowed your step. You faced the painting as you might a priest: with humility, seeking meaning, not affirmation. Somewhere between the echo of your footsteps and the golden glow of an Old Master, a ritual occurred—quiet, unspoken, almost sacred.
The Noise of Modern Intentions
Today, that hush is broken. Museums have become noisy, not in volume, but in intention. They are spaces of transaction, not transformation. Instagra-mmable installations, pop-up selfie booths, and immersive theatrics lure visitors more adept with phones than with reverence. The temple of awe has become a content factory.
Today, that hush is broken. Museums have become noisy, not in volume, but in intention. They are spaces of transaction, not transformation. Instagrammable installations, pop-up selfie booths, and immersive theatrics lure visitors more adept with phones than with reverence. The temple of awe has become a content factory.
The Era of Attention Inflation
What changed? We live in the age of attention inflation. Our eyes, once trained for patience, now twitch toward motion. TikTok scrolls, Instagram loops, a dozen tabs open, always hungry. The average time spent viewing an artwork is now less than 27 seconds. That’s shorter than most ads. And yet art asks for more—more time, more trust, more surrender. The kind of surrender we no longer know how to give.
Civic Sanctuaries to Digital Corridors
There was a time when museums were seen as civic sanctuaries. The Victoria and Albert Museum was once called “a palace of the people,” a place of aspiration. People dressed up to go. They read the labels. They argued over brushwork. The museum was not passive; it demanded engagement. It was a space for what Bakhtin might call chronotopes of slowness—bending time around experience.
In contrast, today’s galleries mimic the behaviour of the algorithm: faster, brighter, louder. Content, not contemplation, reigns. Installations change every six weeks. Viewers walk through exhibits as if passing through airport lounges, skimming rather than absorbing. Once, we whispered in awe. Now we perform in front of it.
From Sublime to Selfie
But the deeper shift is not behavioural. It is philosophical. As a species, we are losing our capacity for the sublime. Edmund Burke once wrote of awe as that which makes us feel small in the face of something immense. But in a culture built on self-importance, awe has become inconvenient. Art is no longer an altar at which we kneel. It is a mirror in which we pose
Anthropological Insights into the Erosion of Reverence
This phenomenon is not without precedent. Modern-day anthropologist Grant McCracken describes museums as “sites of controlled enchantment,” where ritualized behaviour invites a kind of soft transcendence. In his research, McCracken notes that when enchantment is replaced with efficiency—as we see with digital culture—the sacred is diminished, replaced by the commercial. Similarly, cultural theorist and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has warned of a world in which experience is rapidly replaced by its simulation, stating: “We are at risk of substituting experiences with the technologies that mediate them.”
The anthropologist Victor Turner once explored the concept of “communitas”—a moment of shared liminality and connection often arising in ritual settings. Museums, in their original form, offered such an experience: the quiet recognition of others lost in the act of looking. But what happens when we no longer engage with each other in shared reverence, but compete for digital validation? In many ways, the museum has ceased to be a place of communion and become a theatre of individual exhibitionism.
The Crisis of Deep Attention
Psychologists have traced this to the erosion of deep attention. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in The Disappearance of Rituals that modern life has stripped meaning from repetition and reverence. In museums, this means we no longer approach art with a ritualistic gaze. We don’t return, re-see, re-read. We glance, snap, swipe.
Anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita, in his book Mediated, suggests that the self is now curated for consumption. Art appreciation becomes another form of self-expression rather than self-suspension. “We are not looking at the art,” he says. “We are looking at ourselves, looking at the art.” In such a mediated environment, the sacred is diluted by layers of self-performance.
The Metrics of Meaning
The shift is also economic. Museums, increasingly reliant on blockbuster exhibitions and commercial partnerships, subtly reshape our interaction with art. Anthropologist David Graeber’s work on the commodification of cultural experience warns of how even our most sacred spaces are monetised, marketed, and managed like brands. What began as temples of enlightenment are now being tailored to metrics: visitor numbers, click-through rates, and engagement analytics.
Pockets of Resistance and Slow Art
And yet, not all is lost. Across the world, pockets of resistance bloom. “Slow Art Day,” an international movement, invites visitors to look at five works—only five—for ten minutes each. Some galleries offer “silent hours,” banning phones and chatter. Others introduce guided mindfulness sessions in front of paintings. And in these quiet corners, something magical happens: people begin to look again.
A Return to Ethical Aesthetics
There is also a small but growing resurgence in aesthetic education. Scholars like Martha Nussbaum advocate for the arts not as entertainment, but as ethical instruction. Artists and curators are reimagining exhibitions to be not interactive but introspective. A turn, perhaps, not backward but inward.
Some contemporary anthropologists suggest this revival is more than a cultural whim—it is a psychological necessity. In an overstimulated society, spaces for slow reflection are not luxuries; they are survival tools. The human psyche, shaped over millennia through ritual, narrative, and shared awe, hungers for deeper modes of engagement.
Recovering Awe in an Age of Noise
And maybe that’s where the future lies: in recovering the interiority of experience. In resisting the urge to capture and instead allowing ourselves to be captured—by a painting, by a sculpture, by a moment. To feel awe again.
Because in a world of constant noise, choosing silence is an act of rebellion. And in an age of performance, surrendering to stillness is perhaps the last sacred ritual left.
So the next time you find yourself in a museum, pause. Linger. Let the art look back at you. And remember what it means to be humbled by beauty.
Even now, the death of awe need not be inevitable. But its revival will require something unfashionable: your full attention.
