The sense of presence in a virtualized society

Virtuality is becoming increasingly normalized in our society. For museums, virtualization can be particularly challenging. The requirement to move people’s bodies to a specific place—the space of the exhibition—at specific times seems to become anachronistic and increasingly rare. Now that so many experiences, including the artistic, are disengaging from participants’ physical context and can be accomplished by going online from any location, requiring physical presence in a given place seems a luxury and a cost (in time, money, effort, and commitment) that must be justified. How do curatorial approaches respond to this? How does the meaning of exhibiting work of art in the museum space change when society offers more and more, and increasingly rich and flexible, digital spaces of experience? Why should people be willing to take on the burden of going to the physical place of the exhibition?