A Different Kind of Search Engine

Vintage lithographs in the age of homogenization

On October 2, Pope Leo XIV met with a group of artists and curators at the Vatican and spoke about something that has been on my mind lately: what art brings into our lives, and what we could lose when everything around us begins to look the same.

His remarks were not about the art market, collecting, or decorating. He was talking about our need for beauty, our unending search for meaning, and how important it is to remain open to experiences beyond our own.

He described art as a different kind of search engine. I thought it was an interesting comparison, particularly now, when we can find almost any image we want in a matter of moments.  It also raises a question worth asking. What do we actually want from the art we choose to live with?

The ear is the eye of the soul

Pope Leo referred to a line inspired by the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen: "The Ear is the Eye of the Soul."

Describing art as something like an antenna, picking up the questions and emotions that people carry.  Art gives feelings a form that others can recognize, relate to, and share.

I like the idea of art as a form of listening. We usually think of looking at art as something we do with our eyes, and yet, there is another part of the experience that is more delicate.  

Sometimes a painting or print catches our attention for reasons we can't quite explain. We might recognize something familiar in it, or be drawn to something entirely outside our experience. We could just like the way it makes us feel.

We do not need to understand it.

Pope Leo spoke about art helping us recognize humanity's aspirations and wounds, our desire for beauty, justice, peace, and meaning. These are big ideas, but they can enter our lives through surprisingly ordinary encounters with art.

A picture hanging in a room can remind us of a place we've been, a person we've known, or a feeling we haven't thought about in years. It can also introduce us to someone else's way of seeing the world.

That's a remarkable thing for an object to do.

When everything begins to look alike

Another part of the Pope's address concerned homogenization, the tendency for things to become increasingly similar.

He warned that in an age of technology and consumerism, the real danger is the amount of noise surrounding us, making it very difficult to pay attention.

And we certainly aren't short of images.

Every day we see photographs, advertisements, videos, digital illustrations, and now an increasing number of images generated by artificial intelligence. This material is designed to appeal to us immediately. We recognize something we like, give it a moment of attention, and scroll past it.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But I wonder what happens when so much of what we see is created to satisfy preferences we already have.

I think we have become accustomed to the familiar.

You can see this in the spaces around us, too. Hotels, restaurants, offices, and homes are often designed around a particular look. Of course there are practical reasons for that. Designers have to consider budgets, scale, durability, and how everything works together.

But a room can be beautifully arranged and still feel as though it could be anywhere.

Art offers an opportunity to give a space some individuality. A work made by an artist from another time or place brings something into the room that wasn't created simply to match its surroundings.

It may fit beautifully or it may introduce an unexpected element. Either way, it has a life and a history beyond the room itself.

What a machine cannot experience

Pope Leo also spoke directly about artificial intelligence and the difference between art created by a person and images generated by a machine.

He argued that the distinction goes much deeper than appearance.

An artist brings personal experience to the work. Memory, observation, curiosity, emotion, and all the things that make one person's understanding of the world different from another's.

A machine can produce an extraordinary range of images in seconds. It can imitate artistic styles and combine visual elements in ways that are increasingly convincing.

But it doesn't have the experiences it depicts.

It hasn't stood in front of a landscape and felt compelled to paint it. It has never looked into another person's face and wondered how to capture an expression. It could never remember a childhood home or feel the bittersweet passage of time.

That doesn't mean technology has no place in creative work. Artists have always used the tools available to them, and new technologies will undoubtedly open up interesting possibilities.

However, there is something special about art that comes from a person's own experiences and the way they see the world. That's part of what draws me to vintage lithographs.

The prints in Avanti's collection were made in the 1970s and 1980s, through a physical printing process involving artists, materials, and skilled production. They belong to a particular moment in time, and the editions were established long before anyone imagined generating images with a few typed instructions.

They are objects with a history, not simply images that can be recreated endlessly.

I think that distinction is becoming more meaningful as digital imagery becomes easier to produce.

Art doesn't always give us an answer

One of my favorite observations in the Pope's speech was his description of art as a different kind of search engine.

A conventional search engine looks for information. We ask a question, and it tries to give us an answer.

Art doesn't work that way.

Pope Leo described artistic inquiry as a kind of focused attention that continues looking beneath the surface, searching for connections and meaning.

I think most of us have experienced this, even if we haven't thought about it in those terms.

We can be drawn to a work without knowing exactly why. Perhaps there's something familiar about it, or something we don't understand. We return to it because it continues to interest us.

And sometimes our response changes.

A painting we loved when we were thirty may mean something entirely different when we're sixty. An image that once reminded us of adventure might later remind us of home. Something that seemed unimportant years ago may suddenly become the detail we notice most.

The work itself hasn't changed.  We have. 

That's part of what makes living with art interesting. The relationship isn't fixed at the moment we buy it or hang it on the wall.

It continues, often without our being aware of it.

Something we can't finish consuming

Toward the end of his address, Pope Leo spoke about art that resists homogenization and makes us stop in front of something that cannot simply be consumed.

That idea stayed with me.

We're accustomed to consuming things quickly. We watch a video, read an article, scroll through photographs, and move on to whatever comes next.

But a work of art can remain in our lives for decades.

We don't need to understand everything about it, and we don't have to feel something important every time we look at it.

Sometimes it's simply there, part of the familiar surroundings of our daily lives.

And then something changes. We notice a detail, remember why we chose it, or find ourselves responding to it in a way we hadn't before.

I think this is one of the differences between art and decoration.

Decoration helps create a pleasing environment, and there's real value in that. We all want to feel comfortable in the places where we spend our time.

But art can do something more. It can bring another person's imagination and experience into our everyday lives, and leave us room to discover our own meaning in it.

It doesn't have to explain itself or ask us to agree with it.

It can simply remain interesting.

Living with art

At Avanti, we're fortunate to be caring for a collection of vintage lithographs that has survived for decades. The prints were created by artists working in another period, with their own interests, influences, and ways of seeing the world.

Part of our work is preserving that history. Another part is finding places where these prints can continue to be enjoyed. Finding a home for each one. 

I like thinking about the lives these works might have in the future.

Some will hang in private homes, where they become part of a family's everyday surroundings. Others may find their way into hotels or public spaces, where people encounter them briefly, perhaps while traveling or visiting somewhere unfamiliar.

Not everyone will stop to look. But I like to think that someone might.

They may recognize a place, remember something, or simply be curious about the person who made the image.

That possibility is part of what makes art worth bringing into our surroundings.

I wonder how often we really look at the art we live with. We choose something because it appeals to us, hang it on a wall, and gradually stop noticing it. But every so often, something makes us look again, and that's when we remember why we wanted it there in the first place.