Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably caught wind of the new Taylor Swift album. Since its release in April, The Tortured Poets Department has broken records left and right, selling the equivalent of a whopping 2.6 million copies across all formats. In vinyl sales alone, Swift shifted an unprecedented 859,000 units. There wasn’t just one version, though; Tortured Poets has six different vinyl versions, four of which contain their own unique bonus
track.
The Tortured Poets Department, on clear vinyl, on display in a record store window.
So, why do Swifties bother when they can get all of those extra songs in one go on Apple Music or Spotify at no additional cost to their monthly subscription? The answer might lie in what they feel they’re getting in exchange - a strong sense of connection with Swift’s work that they just can’t replicate with music streaming services.
Traditionally, owning an artwork has mostly meant owning a physical object. Purchasing a painting, for example, means possessing the tangible strokes of an artist's hand - a direct connection to the creative genesis. It’s one reason that NFTs, for all their technological innovation, are still subject to suspicion as a means of art ownership. Criticisms of these
digital items range from faddy get-rich-quick schemes to rip-offs with no inherent value.
Ai-Generated images. Generated via Deepai.org
Leaving aside digital items like these, there’s clearly a cutoff when it comes to what counts as owning art. Prints offer a more accessible alternative to a fine art canvas, giving a similar experience without breaking the bank. Yet if I purchase a tea towel with Starry Night printed on it, I can't claim I own a Van Gogh. (The line seems to be drawn at the point where people aren’t horrified by me using a masterpiece to dry my washing up.) Still, for many, that tea towel will spark a stronger emotional connection to one of the world’s most famous artworks than saving an impressively high-resolution JPEG file somewhere on their desktop. (By the way, if you want to discover how you can feel a real connection with high-res digitised artworks, check out our meditative video series A Mind Full of Art on YouTube).
My Tea Towel or: Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
Ditto poetry or literature - many dedicated e-reader users or audiobook listeners will still purchase their favourite books to display as “shelf trophies.” The benefits of filling your home with books might not even be inseparable from reading them. Most book lovers will be familiar with the nagging guilt of the “TBR pile” - that stack of books ‘to be read’ - even as we leave the local Waterstones with two or three new additions. However, inspired by Umberto Eco’s gargantuan library of unread books, statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that these ‘antilibraries’ hold their own kind of value - sparking an appreciation and curiosity for all the things we don’t yet know. And whether you fall in the guilty or appreciative camp, studies suggest that children who grow up around books develop greater numeracy, literacy and ICT skills due to the “social practice of print book consumption”.
Shelf Trophies or: Two Bookcase Doors Depicting Shelves with Music Books by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, c. 1720-1730
Music, as a performance medium, is a little more complicated, but there are parallels; having a record, CD or cassette tape to take out and play just feels different than opening up Spotify. And what you hang on your walls, keep by your record player, or store on your shelves become vehicles for social connection. We use book “shelfies” to tell the world about our tastes and teenagers bridge generational divides by rifling through their parents’ record and CD collections. Rare is the student’s bedroom that doesn’t contain a painstakingly curated and organised collage of photographs, artwork and other paraphernalia, used as currency to make friends and make a new space feel like home.
These kinds of relationships with our personal arts and culture collections aren’t just anecdotal. Dr. Rebecca Mardon of Cardiff University has conducted a years-long study that identifies three key reasons why we feel less attached to our digital possessions than their physical counterparts. Firstly, she identifies encountering restrictions with digital media, which limit the sense of control we have over our collections. The way digital platforms let us organise our music or image libraries, for instance, is more restrictive than the way you might choose to organise CDs or display art. Secondly, we experience instability. The companies we pay for access to the arts frequently retain the right to change or update digital collections, such as remotely deleting e-books from readers’ devices, or changing the cover art to reflect newly released film adaptations. Finally, digital collections suffer from invisibility. Art stored on devices or in the cloud provokes fewer opportunities to spontaneously reminisce or reflect on albums, books, or artworks when they catch our eye.
Gallery of the Louvre by Samuel Finley Breese Morse, c. 1831-1833
So perhaps we should make more of an effort to follow the Swifties’ example, going that extra mile to bring some tangible version of the things we like back into our homes. When you find a singer that you love on Spotify, consider buying the CD or the vinyl. If a work catches your eye in a museum, you don’t need millions to bring some of that art back into your home and personal spaces; buy the tea towel in the gift shop and stock up on the postcards. And if your wallet is a little light because you bought all six versions of The Tortured Poets Department, bring a pencil and paper and make your own “Taylor’s version” of that statue or painting you like and pin it on your wall. You, and the people around you, might just reap the benefits.
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