“Presented as carefully displayed collections, their installations belie the extent to which everyone with a personal computer today has become a de facto archivist,
storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music files.”
The rarity of the exclusive meme has plagued the digital age. No longer are we confined to the walls of a museum or even our own television room. The internet has exploded with the perversity of sharing, saving, and disseminating media. Viral videos are hot until they are not and shared upon a limb. What do we (millennials) need to see that we can’t see on our personal devices? Art, movies, songs are basically free and accessible everywhere we go. Digitization has robbed the exclusivity of galleries, which is most likely the reason why the museum goer has an average demographic of being older. Millennials have no need to travel to see what they can on a point and click. This is an uncertain future for artists as we see in the music world. 10 years ago a cd cost close to 20 dollars but today all we have to do is go on YouTube. Artists like Adele and Beyonce have limited the use of their art to certain media locations and have taken great steps to limit the exposure to free sites in order to preserve their art form so that the exclusivity leads to dollars. This cannot continue due to the perversity of the internet but they keep the artform afloat and provide a glimmer of hope to established artists worldwide. We as a society have to preserve our artists through the exclusivity, however we are not willing to because free is usually better than exclusivity.