“The centre cannot hold,” Yeats wrote, and we should be thankful for that. How else would be chart new courses? But it’s difficult for things to not be lost as things are gained. For instance: Can sculpture, challenged already by modernity, survive the Digital Age? From a Nation article by Barry Schwabsky:

“The digital revolution has given us, for the first time, the image in its pure form, an image without body. The image conveyed by a painting, on the other hand, is always a material entity, however unobtrusive, a particular thing made out of pigments, binders and a support. Sculpture, in turn, is often far more physically obtrusive than painting, and to the extent that it offers a multiplicity of possible viewpoints, it generates many images, but typically none of them are the image of the work. The physical impression a sculpture makes is more powerful than its imagistic content, which seems merely transitory by comparison.

In other words, because of its material nature, sculpture has a hard time finding a place in the material world. The digitization of culture has made this more evident, but it’s long been the case. A visitor to eighteenth-century Rome remarked that one-quarter of its population consisted of priests and another quarter of statues. That’s never been said of a modern city.”