More than 50% of people worldwide now use phones to do their surfing and by looking at the statistics, the trend is only getting stronger. But to have a mobile ready webpage that can deliver the same experience on a phone and computer isn’t the big issue that artists face today, the problem is that no artwork will ever look even close to OK while being viewed on any mobile screen. It just isn’t big enough and you might as well be looking at a smudge, because the whole emotional experience of consuming art vanishes.

Of course this is by far no new phenomenon, since the invention of print the shareability of images has grown beyond anyone’S expectations, but on the other hand the effect the originals have on the viewer diminished as much if not more. As photography and digital screens came, this only worsened the idea of what an image really can offer us.

Maybe banal, but I think what has steadily been happening in the world of visual communication can be wonderfully summed up in the ever growing number of kids that believe cows are purple. Because if all you’ve ever seen is pure city life for the past 5 to 10 years with maybe the occasional trip to a lake, of course the only “real” contact with the visual part of a cow will be a Milka Chocolate bar and Google, both not that credible sources of reality if you ask me.

But some say there might be a saviour amidst the visually oversaturated and underdeveloped visual masses of today and her name is Virtual Reality. While the obvious and best remedy would definitely be Going out to a farm and actually meeting a living cow, such ideas are becoming less and less attractive to a lot of younger people. Not because it “isn’t cool” (you can tell I have no idea what the current iteration of cool is), but merely because of how communication is done today.

Communication has stopped being the exchange of emotion and has stagnated to merely an exchange of information. You don’t need to go outside to know the weather is bad, you don’t need to go to Rome to see the Pantheon and we have long been able to have social contacts with others without ever meeting them in person, but with Instant Video at the tip of your fingers, it really became more of a natural extension of our being and less a pigeon that might or might not arrive.

And here comes VR, the soon-to-be-undistinguishable-from-real-life visual experience that lets us see anything we want as if we were physically there — not just mentally like it is with computer screens (and I am sure at the time I’m writing this you can probably buy physical stimulators for an OculusRift or Playstation VR).

Though this isn’t even half of the cause, if we look at the constant trend of imagery replacing real life, we might find interesting correlation between the growing lack of interest in real things and the growing mental health issues we face as a society today. Among other things, like the problem of finding real, lasting connections or even speaking to other people and the severely underpromoted issues of dominance hierarchies amongst peoples of almost all developed countries, the effects of substituting reality for thumbnails and ideas are horrifying, but as with all such things, we haven’t even seen half of it yet.