The Art Museum in the New Hybridity
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, media theorists like Peter Weibel were quick to bury the body-based “society of proximity” in discourse. To him, it seemed that gigantic stadiums, concert halls, museums, and the like will be “the pharaonic tombs of the future.” That people would not simply relocate to a purely digital world was already foreshadowed by the first easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, when an almost excessive return to the analog took place. Original artworks were more in demand than ever, and there was a hunger for encounters with other people and objects in the museum. Is the binary rhetoric of analog/ digital, conservative/progressive, and either/or, still appropriate in the post-pandemic age, or should we rather address questions of media specificity and hybridity?
