(Inter)change Blindness

The other day I had created a piece of digital art, and uploaded it to my website. By accident I was prompted to share it to Pinterest, first displaying a screen of similar images, some natively digital, some photographs of paintings. On a screen, all images are fungible, which is the reason we should see the art live. Seeing it live you know what's digital.

But even in a museum we can be misled, specifically with caption cards, which are not always logically placed. At a recent visit to a museum, someone commented, “That’s a lot of paint”, as he confused the caption cards for a small painting and a plaster sculpture on the floor. I also had switched the titles of two de Kooning paintings, and it is ironic that one of them is titled "Interchange" and the other "Untitled".

When the density of art is high, we might become blind to interesting and/or important details, which is even more problematic to sort out on a screen. "Interchange" was one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.