Who Wins and Who Loses When We Share a Meme

If you attended the 2019 Venice Biennale, you might have waited in a long line to see the prize-winning piece “Sun & Sea (Marina),” an opera performance staged by three Lithuanian artists on a sandy faux beach that had been installed in a warehouse. A couple dozen performers acted out seaside leisure activities—sunbathing, digging, reading—and sang about the destruction of the environment by climate change as audience members peered down at them from a darkened balcony above. The work, which was visually arresting and hard to access directly, found a second life on social media, where posting a photo or video clip amounted to both a promulgation of the art work and a brag at having seen it. In a new book titled “Disordered Attention,” the British art historian Claire Bishop describes this mode of spectatorship as a “continual oscillation between watching and being online.” The viewer first gauges her own experience of the work, then takes a photo, then texts a group chat about it, then returns to looking. Later, she might check a hashtag to see what kinds of photos other people posted about the same piece.