Tuesday, August 23, 2011

People spend way more time looking at art on the internet than they do in person.


For the moment, you may call me a one hit wonder. These are screen shots of my website's google analytics. An average day brings 5-10 visitors, and today brought 837. The spike in traffic is thanks to designboom.com, todayandtomorrow.net, notcot.org, journal-du-design.fr, smileinyourface.com, and others. They have all recently featured a sculpture I made with Mike Fleming in 2010, called Eternity.

What amazes me is that the average time spent on my site is nearly a minute and a half. This might not sound like much, but the average time people spend looking at a work of art in a gallery or museum is 4 seconds. Is the internet really making peoples' attention spans shorter, or is it allowing them to focus on one thing at a time? Which experience is more overwhelming - surfing blogs, or visiting the MoMA?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think it certainly is. I can just remain sedentary and hit enter and move to the next image. In a gallery I have to physically move my sloth like body.

The speed of the internet is getting faster all the time