Lecture by Jason Farago: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Distraction”

Throughout the twentieth century, artists and philosophers regularly understood the work of art as distinct from the wider world. Painting and sculpture, poetry and music, belonged to an autonomous cultural sphere, one evaluated according to aesthetic rather than instrumental criteria, and therefore demanding a particular mode of attention and engagement. But these foundational claims of Modernism have buckled in our century of digital reproduction and circulation, where the work of art appears as one of countless images in our daily feeds. How should we contemplate the work of art today? In his lecture, Jason Farago will discuss how screens, devices, platforms, and algorithms have transformed both the work of art and our encounter with it, and will explore whether and how culture can still champion human values in an inattentive age. Co-sponsoring support comes from the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good and the Arts Initiative at Notre Dame. Jason Farago is a critic at large for The New York Times, writing about culture and its place in the wider world. He regularly contributes art criticism and columns to The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. He is a co-creator of Close Read, a criticism series that delves into a single cultural work, detail by detail. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. This event took place February 24th, 2026 in the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art atrium.