1. Virtual panic: manifestations and implications

The rhetoric of institutional survival has increasingly become synonymous with digital acceleration. Over the past decade, and particularly in the wake of the pandemic, the discourse has treated digital transformation not merely as an operational upgrade, but as an existential imperative, warning museums that digitalization and gamification are the only way to capture the attention of younger audiences.Footnote ¹ Museum boards and administrators, watching audiences flock to frictionless, Instagram-friendly pop-ups like Immersive van Gogh and the Museum of Ice Cream, often internalize this logic.Footnote ² The panicked museum attempts to lubricate its own spaces, hoping to make the encounter with art as effortless as a swipe. The manifestations of this panic are pervasive. We see it in the explosion of projection-mapped exhibitions—where the resistant, physical boundaries of historical paintings are dissolved into floor-to-ceiling videos and light shows—as well as in augmented reality (AR) apps that gamify the gallery space.

Underlying these trends is what Anna Kornbluh identifies as a cultural obsession with ‘immediacy’—a drive towards frictionless, unmediated consumption in which the gap between subject and object is treated as a flaw to be engineered away.Footnote ³ The “digital twin”—a high-resolution, infinitely zoomable surrogate—exemplifies this drive. Stripped of its physicality, the masterpiece loses its alterity, offering optical mastery at the cost of genuine encounter.Footnote ⁴

To argue for the museum as a counter-environment is not to adopt a Luddite posture. Digital archiving, open-access scholarly images, and online pre-visit planning are valuable advances of the modern museum. The crisis arises only when the logic of the digital interface—its demand for immediacy, its intolerance of friction, its gamified reward systems—is imported into the physical gallery to mediate the encounter itself. The problem is not that museums use digital tools, but that in their panic to remain relevant, they mistake the frictionless delivery of information for the resistant work of humanistic encounter.

2. The museum as counter-environment and “attention sanctuary”

To describe the museum as a counter-environment—to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s term for those spaces and practices that make the surrounding medium perceptible by standing outside its logic—is not to romanticize slowness or reject technology outright.Footnote ⁵ It is to recognize that museums are organized around a fundamentally different relation to the world than the one that structures most contemporary digital environments. Where digital systems increasingly privilege speed, immediacy, and control, museums foreground duration, mediation, and material resistance—features increasingly treated, as Kornbluh has argued, as obstacles to be eliminated rather than as the conditions through which meaning and judgment become possible.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa has poignantly diagnosed why modern life feels strangely empty. He argues that meaningful relations to the world cannot be produced through optimization alone, using the term resonance to name encounters in which we are addressed by the world and respond in ways that change us—encounters that depend on openness, duration, and a fundamental lack of control.Footnote ⁶ Crucially, Rosa insists that resonance requires ‘uncontrollability’—the fact that such encounters cannot be manufactured or engineered. Environments designed to minimize friction in the name of efficiency risk closing off precisely the conditions under which resonance can occur, rendering the world increasingly manageable but affectively mute.

“Resonance,” Rosa argues, “requires a world that can be reached, not one that can be limitlessly controlled”; the confusion between the two “lies at the root of the muting of the world in modernity.”Footnote ⁷ Virtual panic is an institutional expression of precisely this confusion. In our rush to make artworks maximally accessible—zoomable, algorithmically curated, informationally exhaustive—museums risk converting reachability into controllability and, in doing so, mute the very encounters they hope to facilitate. The digital twin makes a painting entirely controllable: it can be zoomed, rotated, annotated, and consumed at will. But it is precisely this total control that forecloses resonance. The physical painting in the gallery, by contrast, remains reachable—we can stand before it, attend to it, allow it to address us—while preserving a fundamental uncontrollability: the work does not yield itself on our terms.

The consequence of this frictionless environment is what Rosa calls “alienation”—a condition in which the world appears as a resource to be managed rather than a living counterpart capable of answering back.Footnote ⁸ When museums succumb to virtual panic, they reproduce this alienation within their own walls. A visitor following a perfectly optimized digital pathway may ‘see’ every masterpiece and trigger every interactive prompt, yet leave entirely untouched. The efficiency of the interface forecloses the vulnerability that resonance requires. If the museum’s public task is to offer an alternative to contemporary alienation, it cannot do so by mimicking the very technological interfaces that produce it. It must stubbornly protect the conditions of uncontrollability.

Rosa identifies the museum as exemplary of spaces that cultivate readiness for resonance: “a place,” he writes, “to come into contact with things in a way that is geared not towards escalation or control,” but “where we are inwardly open and ready to be called.”Footnote ⁹ The museum, on this account, is not merely a repository but a dispositional space—one that creates the conditions of openness under which resonance becomes possible, though never certain.

Museums, at their best, quietly resist closure by functioning as what D. Graham Burnett and Eve Mitchell call attention sanctuaries: sites for the active, collective cultivation of attention. They advocate the purposeful construction of attention sanctuaries as a “valuable component of any comprehensive strategy for addressing the public consequences of societal-scale digital platforms.”Footnote ¹⁰ On this account, they must be designed, maintained, and collectively upheld—not accidental by-products. Crucially, attention sanctuaries do not dictate what one must attend to, nor do they promise protection from distraction altogether. Instead, they protect the conditions under which attention can become sustained, receptive, and self-directed.

Long before this language emerged, museums enacted this function through their design, norms, and practices. To enter a museum is to cross a physical threshold that interrupts the reactive rhythm of the street—not by enforcing reverent silence (the hum of conversation and shared discovery is the very sound of a healthy public sphere at work) but by functioning as a spatial speed bump. Ascending steps, checking a coat: these are somatic acts of unburdening that signal a shift in how the body is expected to move. Inside, the enfilade of interconnected galleries or the deliberate spacing of objects forces a pacing that resists the logic of the endless scroll. Benches invite lingering without outcome. These are not neutral aesthetic choices but ethical commitments to slowness, attention, and reflection—commitments the artworks themselves honour by resisting instant comprehension.

Seen in this light, the contemporary impulse to make museum experiences ever more seamless, interactive, and digitally immersive reflects a misunderstanding of the institution’s public humanistic task. The risk is not technological mediation per se, but the erosion of the attentional conditions that make encounter possible. As counter-environments and attention sanctuaries, museums do not compete with digital culture on its own terms. They offer something increasingly rare: a space in which attention is not captured but cultivated—and where resonance, though never guaranteed, remains possible.

This urgency is particularly acute for younger audiences.Footnote ¹¹ Adolescence is a foundational period for identity construction and the development of personal narratives, but today’s youth face new anxieties and the relentless pace of the digital feed; the space for self-reflection is increasingly compressed.Footnote ¹² When museums mimic the speed of smartphones, they deprive young people of one of the few remaining civic spaces designed for introspection. Recent observations from NYC Teen Arts Week suggest that teens themselves may crave the conditions museums are equipped to provide—willingly setting aside their phones and valuing sustained, face-to-face connection with peers who share their interest in the arts.Footnote ¹³

3. The educative and civic value of the museum as attention sanctuary

In a digitally saturated city where physical space is increasingly optimized for transit and commerce, the museum offers a rare civic footprint designed explicitly for loitering, pausing, and returning. While the spatial architecture of the museum implicitly supports these temporal encounters, a growing number of institutions are now explicitly countering “virtual panic” through the programmatic adoption of contemplative pedagogy. Rather than investing solely in digital overlays or gamified apps, these museums are actively training visitors in the rigors of sustained, mindful attention. Programmes such as ‘Mindful Moments’ at the Getty and “The Observant Eye” at The Met, as well as various programmes at the Guggenheim, Rijksmuseum, and Yale University Art Gallery, demonstrate a deliberate institutional pivot towards introspection and slowness.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, initiatives like ‘The Sanctuary Series’ at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the ‘ArtinSight’ programme at MASS MoCA approach the gallery not as a space for the rapid extraction of art-historical facts, but as a site for deep, embodied looking.Footnote ¹⁵ Many of these initiatives are grounded in the ethos of “slow looking”—a pedagogical commitment summarized perfectly by educator Rika Burnham: “if you don’t stop, you don’t see anything.”Footnote ¹⁶ Since 2008, there has been an annual initiative called “Slow Art Day” that now garners more than 200 participating museums hosting slow-looking events.Footnote ¹⁷

By formally programming mindfulness and intra-spective encounters, these institutions are actively fulfilling their mandate as attention sanctuaries. As scholar Nico Roenpagel has noted, this contemplative approach “re-shifts the focus to the experience itself, more specifically, towards an awareness of the experience,” demanding a concentrated state of “presence.”Footnote ¹⁸ Museums must recognize that in an era of digital immediacy, the public does not just need access to art; it needs to be taught how to hold attention, tolerate ambiguity, and recover the interpretive distance that the digital feed has systematically erased.Footnote ¹⁹

As editor Michelle Moon notes in a recent special issue of Journal of Museum Education titled “Museums and Contemplation: Acknowledging Our Roots, Renewing Our Approaches,” this is not new terrain for museums:

However, Moon cautions that while our primary goal of revitalizing the contemplative in the museum is, as with this tradition, to facilitate a “deep encounter between a visitor and an object,” we must be careful not to replicate the principles of authority, elitism, and singular interpretation of history, culture, and objects embedded therein. Instead, we must invest contemplative practice and pedagogy with our modern “principles of shared authority, multivocality, and personal meaning making,” inviting visitors to “fulfill their own purposes for learning, connection, and growth.”Footnote ²¹

4. Lessons from multiple encounters with Picasso’s Girl

I have returned to Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror (1932) at MoMA many times over the years.Footnote ²² Each time, the painting seems unchanged; each time, I am different. What draws me back is not recognition but the conviction that our conversation has only just begun.

On another visit, I found myself lingering longer than intended. The painting did not demand my attention, but it did not release it either. Looking at the doubled woman, I became acutely aware of my own temporal doubling. I remembered the first time I saw the painting as a young woman, anxious and uncertain, reading myself into its bright surfaces and dark interior. Returning following a period of intensity, the painting felt less like a mirror of present identity and more like a companion across time. Past, present, and possible future selves seemed to gather there, not in resolution, but in uneasy coexistence. Each return carried forward what Dewey calls “funded” meanings—accumulated significance drawn from previous encounters—while also opening the possibility that this visit might reveal something unforeseen.Footnote ²³ The painting had become, across these returns, an “epiphanic memorial”: a stable ground to which I could return across geographic and temporal displacement and from which new understanding might emerge.Footnote ²⁴

The painting does not offer a smooth, illusionistic window into another world; it is aggressively flat, heavily outlined, and structurally dissonant. The woman on the left is rendered in curving lines and luminous tones, and her face divided into a serene lilac profile and a sun-like frontal view. Yet, the mirror offers no true reflection: the figure in the glass is darkened, her colours bruised, her features slipping towards abstraction. The thick black lines that separate the colours compartmentalize the canvas, creating visual friction. The painting refuses to synthesize its contradictions, demanding that the viewer hold the serene and the grotesque, the youthful and the aging, simultaneously in mind.

To see this dissonance at all requires a suspension of the urge to scroll past—and what made that suspension possible was not simply the artwork, but the conditions of the gallery itself. There was no pressure to move on, no notification tugging at my attention, no imperative to extract meaning efficiently. My habits of scanning and interpretation began to slow. I noticed the thickness of the paint, the way the figure’s outline wavered, the subtle violence in the mirror’s reflection. I noticed my breathing.

This was not immersion in the sense promised by digital experiences. Nothing surrounded me; nothing responded to my gestures. I was held, instead, in a space that allowed attention to deepen without direction. I did not feel transported elsewhere; I felt more fully here. The museum did not merely house the artwork; it made possible a form of attention through which the work—and I myself—could matter again.

Yet while my encounter with Picasso’s Girl felt deeply interior, it was not isolated. My quietude was supported—and occasionally interrupted—by the physical presence of strangers: the shuffling of feet, the hushed murmurs in different languages, the negotiation of stepping aside so another might see. These are not distractions from the artwork; they are reminders of our shared embodiment. We practise presence not in a vacuum but in public, witnessing one another’s attempts to slow down and grapple with objects that resist instant comprehension.

5. Scaffolding contemplative encounters for the public

I call the contemplative, attentional practice I’ve just described—of coming back into relation with an artwork and with oneself—Re-presencing. Footnote ²⁵ Through ritualized return to the same artwork across time, Re-presencing transforms aesthetic consumption into something educative and potentially transformational. The past is not consumed as information but encountered as something that addresses us; the present is not optimized but inhabited; the future is not predicted but opened as a space of possibility. This temporal thickness is precisely what is flattened in digitally accelerated environments, where experience is designed to be immediate, interchangeable, and endlessly updated. Re-presencing invites us to inhabit questions rather than rush past them towards answers—reframing uncertainty as a space for engagement, connection, and discernment.

These are capacities that do not develop automatically; they must be cultivated. Research suggests museum visitors spend less than 30 seconds looking at each artwork on average—a statistic likely to worsen as attention is increasingly ‘fracked’ and commodified.Footnote ²⁶ As Maxine Greene insisted, “the capacity to perceive, to attend, must be learned.”Footnote ²⁷ Many young visitors report anxiety around subject knowledge or feel ill-equipped to analyse what they see, leading to feelings of exclusion in the gallery.Footnote ²⁸ True democratic access, therefore, requires institutions to scaffold the experience of looking rather than engineer the friction away. Contemplative programmes like The Observant Eye or Re-presencing provide frameworks for deriving meaning from complex objects, transforming the museum into a training ground for sustained attention. There are no guarantees here—but this is the “beautiful risk of education” museums must take.Footnote ²⁹

6. Understanding the collective and civic stakes

What the Re-presencing example makes visible is not simply an individual moment of reflection but a broader humanistic function that museums are uniquely positioned to serve. The experience of lingering before an artwork, of allowing time to stretch and meanings to remain unresolved, is central to the museum’s mission. Beyond personal benefit, the museum functions as a training ground for “civic muscles”—patience, receptivity, and the ability to dwell with ambiguity. As digital platforms enclose users in algorithmic echo chambers designed to accelerate outrage, the gallery’s insistence on the slow unfolding of meaning serves as a vital democratic counter-practice. By maintaining the gap between viewer and object, the museum demands that we bridge that distance not through technological shortcuts but through sustained attentional labour.

To stand before a painting made centuries ago is to be reminded of our provisional place in a larger historical continuum—relief from the narcissism of the immediate present.Footnote ³⁰ Where digital platforms operate in a flat, perpetual “now,” the physical object insists that meaning is not downloaded but collectively forged across generations.

This practice is essential for intergenerational learning, where access to information is too often confused with formative encounters with difficulty. The rise of generative AI—the apotheosis of Rosa’s controllability—only intensifies the stakes. When AI presents complex histories as seamless, authoritative summaries, it strips away the human labour of interpretation. The museum’s task, then, shifts towards what we might call a pedagogy of not-knowing: by placing us before a cracked canvas or an incomplete sculpture, the institution insists that some things cannot be instantly resolved. In an AI-mediated world promising immediate answers, the museum remains a rare civic institution brave enough to leave a question open.

7. Somewhere to land

As contemporary museums find themselves under the pressure of virtual panic, there is a danger that they may neglect not only their mission but also their “unique points of differentiation,” to borrow a term from the business world. In the rush to remain relevant, museums risk mistaking speed for vitality and seamlessness for access. Yet what the museum uniquely offers the public is not speed but space—a place to slow down, to attend, and to encounter a world that does not immediately yield itself. Conceived as counter-environments and attention sanctuaries, museums offer the conditions that contemporary life increasingly erodes—the gap between object and interpretation, the stretch of time required for perception to deepen, the quiet in which self-reflection becomes possible. These are not luxuries or nostalgic holdovers. They are civic and humanistic necessities.

Rosa’s distinction between reachability and controllability offers the most precise way to understand what is at stake. When museums succumb to virtual panic—when they attempt to make the encounter with art as frictionless, immediate, and controllable as the digital feed—they do not expand the public’s access to art. They foreclose the conditions under which art can address us at all. “Our exasperation,” Rosa writes, “has its roots not in what is still denied to us, but in what we have lost because we now have it under our control.”Footnote ³¹ The museum’s task is to resist this loss—to preserve spaces where the world remains reachable precisely because it has not been brought entirely under control.

The future of the museum, then, does not hinge on outpacing the digital or perfecting immersion. It depends on the institution’s willingness to preserve spaces where friction is allowed, where attention can settle, and where encounters remain unpredictable. In doing so, museums continue to perform a vital public task: helping individuals and communities relearn how to be present—to the past, to one another, and to the fragile possibilities of shared futures—without rushing to resolution. The visitor I watched in that gallery, scrolling through the digital guide while a painting waited in silence, was not encountering the work. The work was reaching out, as it always does, but the interface had made the visitor unreachable. The museum’s most urgent task is to ensure that this reaching out—unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irreplaceable—still has somewhere to land.