A few years back there was a lot of talk about how artworks had started to behave in ways that indicated that the actual realisation of the work consisted in its photographic reproduction and the ensuing circulation of this image. The term “post-internet” was on everyone’s lips, and an unrestrained fascination with distribution was de rigueur among artists. The exhibition having devolved into a mere photo-op meant that the artwork and its reproduction had to be designed for the visual fitness contest of online image swarms. Fast forward to 2025, and art documentation has gotten a new twist. If ten to fifteen years ago you risked tiring of commercial gimmickery, the problem today is literally the opposite …
Indeed, the crisp installation view is still the predominant form in artist portfolios, on gallery websites, and in the glossy pages of the art press. But if your job is to cover the programs of Scandinavian museums, you can’t have missed how, in recent years, audience members have begun cropping up in the documentation materials shared in press folders and image banks. I am not talking about visitors accidentally caught on camera because they were present at the same time as the photographer, during an opening, for example. No, these are carefully instructed models playing the role of casual spectators.
The sterile aesthetics of post-internet art was a signal that the artwork now belonged in a field of dynamic digital flows freed from cumbersome attachments to geographically confined human bodies and material limitations, and optimised for continuous movement across contexts. The trend of bringing art’s witnesses to the foreground turns this ideal of social detachment on its head, and presumably testifies to institutions’ growing concern with their audiences.
Taking the comparison a step further, you could say that art here is haunted by the bodies it once tried to displace. It is fitting, then, that a subgenre of these audience-infested documentation images uses slow shutter-speed, giving the model a nebulous form reminiscent of so-called ghost photography. A practice from the early days of photography, the genre brings together an enthusiasm for the ability of technical innovations to reveal the previously hidden and a strictly unscientific obsession with the occult (although, curiously, attempts were made to defend the plausibility of ghost photography on rational grounds).
The ghosts that haunt contemporary museums are not content with merely floating above our heads like somber visitations, however; they have places to be and things to do! Obviously, the active viewing on display here fits hand in glove with a widespread impatience with art’s demands on our attention. These animated spectators model a way of interacting with art adapted to the present-day incitement to always be turned on and on the move.
Admittedly, the analogy to ghost photographs is technically imprecise. The trick of ghost photography is, of course, double, not long, exposures. And art documentation, presumably, does not beg dubious supernatural explanations. But considered more abstractly, it shares with the historical genre of ghost photography the goal of rendering visible what we, to use a somewhat sweeping term, could call “energies that lie beyond the frame.” That is, forces that we are inclined to overlook but that nonetheless affect our experience of art.
When I asked a communications advisor at one of the big museums in Oslo why this type of image was so prevalent, she told me it is what newspapers and other mainstream media outlets request. It is only natural that museums adapt to the tastes of those who help to circulate the content they produce. But the source of these preferences remains an open question. What is it about the ‘lifeless’ optics of traditional documentation photography that repels a broader audience or readership? A social version of horror vacui, a fear of spaces emptied of people?
In any case, it is a fact that the presence of an audience reinforces the perception of art as a social event, emphasised by how the long exposure time adds a temporal dimension to the depiction. Art must now always be an event, and an event always has witnesses; that someone observes something unfolding in time is the very definition of an event. And when the art itself is not in motion, the audience must be.
Frederik Næblerød’s exhibition at Arken is actually an obstacle course!
By standing still and being in motion at the same time, the ideal viewer resolves the cognitive dissonance that arises in the crossfire between art’s demand for attention and contemporary culture’s call for ceaseless activity …
Once the session is over, it is time for some well-earned relaxation. If you are lucky, the audioguide features meditation instructions…
The inclusion of witnesses in documentation photos is a trend practically exclusive to publicly funded institutions. They are under continuous – and rising – economic and political pressure to bolster their democratic legitimacy, which is threatened from many directions, not least a rising scepticism towards the inherited idea that being around art yields some sort of edifying benefit. Under such circumstances, to avoid estranging your audience becomes strategically paramount, and nothing is more effective at dampening art’s repellant character than surrounding it with people who casually go about their business.
Sometimes you hardly notice it is there at all…
At every level of mediation, today’s museums try to downplay aspects of art that make it difficult to relate to. Institutions’ fear of failure to convince the public of art’s – and by extension their own – value to society leads to a shift in their self-image: they go from being custodians of art objects and their associated fields of knowledge to becoming event planners and communication agencies. The end goal is to dismantle any sense of distance that undermines the impression of the museum as an arena for broad participation. Subordinated to the concerns of public relations departments, art becomes a means to reach and attract a wide audience.
The new documentary image is part of this toolkit. It situates art in a naturalising choreography that relegates the artwork to the role of everyday prop, a mere foil to the distracted whims and gestures of human observers. What is represented here is the idea of a socially activated art space. The focus shifts from the artwork as the materialisation of an aesthetic idea worthy of attention and contemplation to what takes place in its surroundings. That is, from what art is to what it hopefully generates: reaction, engagement, enthusiasm – or, preferably, pure, unfiltered joy.
