On-demand art is slowly erasing our artistic memory, and where does love live if not in the of the artistic mind? No one is immune to this erasure, but becoming aware of the necessary relationship between the collapse of the collective artistic memory and love itself, might just help us slow it down.
It’s no new thought that we all have an internal drive to be seen, to be loved. Whether this is achieved through putting in years of work and dedication to hone a craft, whether it’s having dreams of becoming writers, film critics or simply curating the most enviable Instagram, the drive to matter remains.
But, the overconsumption and false archival of over-available art and experience into our digital “memory,” and the instant gratification associated with that consumption, achieved via Spotify stream, Letterboxd reviews, Goodreads logs and even online-dating apps, is limiting complex digestion of the art that we consume and the experiences we have. Each occurrence is presupposed on the availability of a “next encounter.”
What once required digestion now demands only documentation. Every encounter exists under the shadow of a next one: the next listen, next watch, next match.
The result is a diminishing of attention itself. And if we aren’t paying attention to something, we certainly cannot love it.
Transposing this phenomenon onto interpersonal interactions, more broadly, beholds a bleak, but hardly deniable truth: we are trapped in an endless cycle of searching, dominated by a socio-cultural “on-to-the-next” logic that hollows the present.
If we are consistently thinking about and preparing for a “next” prospect, or flipping tabs without paying close attention to what we are experiencing, what exactly are we committing to memory? And if we don’t remember, did we ever really experience it?
The way we scroll through art, always looking for the next song or film, reflects the way we scroll through people, both governed by the promise of a distinctively unidentifiable “something,” just beyond reach.
This erosion of memory is not just cultural but emotional. Love, like art, requires a kind of repetition — the willingness to revisit, to linger in something, to be changed by it.
To love is to return. And the ability to return to something is denotatively a function of memory.
As Freud observed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “we are compelled to repeat what has marked us,” even if it hurt us; that “repetition is not regression but a search for mastery, for meaning.” Critical thinker Julia Kristeva in her “Tales of Love” says, “To love is to return again and again to the scene of recognition.” This is not a return of sameness, but a capacity to dwell in, and grow with, what cannot be made new.
But what happens when the structure of return itself collapses? When art and intimacy are replaced by the “algorithmic new,” the repetition that once deepened us is replaced by the refresh and mute buttons.
There was a time when delay and desire were intertwined. Going to the bookstore. Waiting in line for a film. Buying a record and listening to it obsessively because it was the only one you had. Writing to someone you met by chance, waiting weeks for a reply, holding them in imagination while they were away. These acts stitched love and art into the long memory of a life.
As Sven Birkerts wrote, the old emporia of art “symbolized the presence, the value, of their presence in the community.” Now, art is no longer in the community; it is the community, a shared feed of endless circulation.
When art fails to stimulate us in the span of its acquisition, we abandon it. Speed has become not only our condition but our aesthetic. Summoned instantly, art is consumed instantly — and forgotten just as fast.
If love’s last refuge is truly in the artistic mind, in remembering, then each act of forgetting isn’t simply an aesthetic erasure, but a failure to love.
