EYES FULL, HEARTS STARVING: OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH IMAGES

We have become image eaters. There’s no point denying it: we no longer look at the world — we ingest it.

This is where our relationship with images reveals itself: intense, compulsive, hungry, yet increasingly incapable of listening.

It feels as if we have slipped into a toxic relationship with everything visual. We are dependent on it, we obsessively seek our daily dose, but we no longer taste it.

If art was once a place we entered on tiptoe, almost with a sense of sacredness, today it has turned into a 24/7 fast-food counter, where every image is a quick bite — badly chewed and swallowed even worse.

And yet, in this bulimic way of looking, there is something deeply tender and romantic. We are desperately hungry for beauty. We search for meaning in the chaos of our days and hope to find it in the harmony of a photograph, in the warm tone of a filter, in the perfection of a frame.

At its core, it is a need for love: the desire to make our lives less grey, less ordinary. But this is exactly where we stumble. Beauty is no longer a gift that stops our heart for a moment — it has become a currency.

Our Relationship with Images: When We No Longer Look, but Consume

The point is that we no longer ask a work of art, “What do you want to tell me?”. We ask, “What can you do for me?”. The image has become an accessory — a fragment of our identity to show others, like a pin on a jacket.

When we stand in front of something truly beautiful, our first instinct is no longer to stay still and let it shake us, but to pull out our phone. We have to “capture” it, lock it inside a file, take it with us so we can shout to the world that we were there. But the moment we possess it, we have already killed it. It is no longer a living emotion — just a trophy in a gallery.

This constant rush is wearing us down. The screen flattens everything: a breathtaking sunset occupies the same space as a plate of pasta or a terrible piece of news. Everything flows under our thumb at the same speed, lasting only a few seconds before disappearing into nothing.

It is a form of cannibalism that leaves us anesthetized: our eyes are full of stimuli, but our minds and hearts remain painfully hungry.

Perhaps, to feel well again, we should relearn how to fast. Or at least how to slow down. We should give back to what we see the right not to be used, but simply admired.

We should have the courage to look at something beautiful without feeling the need to photograph it — letting it remain a secret meant only for us. Perhaps only when we stop devouring the world will we finally start seeing it again.

Looking as a Radical Act

Maybe the problem is not how many images we see, but how little time we allow them to stay with us. We have turned looking into an automatic, fast, defensive gesture.

We look in order not to feel. We archive in order not to stop. But art — real art — does not ask to be saved. It asks to be crossed.

Recovering a slow gaze today is a radical act. It means stepping away from the flow, choosing silence over sharing, experience over proof. It means accepting that not everything needs to be shown, explained, monetized.

Perhaps we do not need more images — but to radically rethink our relationship with images.