Circulation and Attention in Contemporary Image Culture

2025 12 17

Written for an art history course on contemporary art.

In the contemporary world, images are encountered most frequently on the internet, on social media, on television, and in advertising. These images are often designed for rapid circulation and instant legibility—circulating, shaping behavior, and commanding attention—no longer primarily representational or contemplative. Social media facilitates the automation of attention and valuation. Attention is guided by systems instead of reflective choice, that is, algorithms determine what is seen; and images are evaluated instantly and quantitatively in the form of engagement metrics. When attention becomes measurable and worth is calculated (not debated) through algorithmic systems, social media transforms the act of seeing into a data-driven process. Within this image economy, contemporary art takes on a marginal status, and it appears as though the onus is on contemporary art to distinguish itself as a protest against obsolescence.

Yet this marginality does not necessarily signal obsolescence. As Hito Steyerl argues through the concept of the “poor image,” contemporary images gain power not through quality or depth but through circulation, compression, and reproducibility. Images matter less for what they depict than for how widely and efficiently they move. They function as operational tools that move, classify, and extract value. Contemporary art is not free from this capture. In this social context, the question is not whether contemporary art can distinguish itself qualitatively, but whether it can intervene in the conditions under which images circulate and acquire meaning. This paper argues that artists such as David Hammons and Aria Dean do not oppose image culture by withdrawing from it or rejecting visibility altogether. Instead, they work within and confront regimes of circulation, highlighting how visibility, access, and legibility are unevenly distributed and politically charged. By manipulating absence, opacity, and genericity, their practices demonstrate how contemporary art can intervene critically in image culture.

For much of art history, images were understood primarily as representational objects, depicting people, events, or ideas and inviting sustained contemplation. Their power was located in the interpretive meaning assigned to them by viewers, even when serving purely ideological or political purposes. In the contemporary media environment, however, the function of images has transformed. Images now circulate rapidly across platforms, operating within systems that sort and rank images so as to maximize attention. Toward this end, the conditions under which the image can act socially has fundamentally changed.

As Aria Dean and Hito Steyerl argue, contemporary images are less so singular visual statements than they are units within broader technical and economic systems. In “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Steyerl describes images that are compressed, degraded, copied, and redistributed endlessly. These “poor” images lose visual clarity and authorial uniqueness—in this they no longer have value—but they have power in their capacity to move across servers, platforms, and users, through their speed and reach in the “vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism.” Building off Steyerl, Dean emphasizes that images today operate as interfaces rather than representations. In “Rich Meme, Poor Meme,” she describes how images guide behavior, prompt responses, and structure interaction. A meme, for example, does not ask to be interpreted in isolation; by its nature, it must be fully realized through reposts, remixes, and recognition within a system of circulation. The function of images is determined by their material conditions, in algorithmic reproduction they logistically organize flows of attention, affect, and value. Thus, compression, repetition, and degradation are necessary features of its actualization. An image can become in digital culture more effectively the more easily it can be copied and redistributed.

Given this operational logic, there are a few significant implications for critique. Images that reveal violence, injustice, or exploitation often circulate just as efficiently as images meant to entertain, advertise, or evoke aesthetic sensibilities. In more extreme cases, visibility itself is a form of expropriation that turns suffering or difference into spectacle content, playing on morbid fascinations. Under these conditions, can critique expose hidden institutions or reveal ideological content without participating into contemporary systems of sensationalism toward a passive audience? Rather than relying solely on clarity, it must be the imperative of critique to address systems of circulation that determine how images are seen, shared, and valued in the first place. This may elucidate why many contemporary artists intervene with image culture from within, disrupting assumptions about visibility and value.

David Hammons exemplifies the approach of intervening with circulation by making it unstable, incomplete, and uneven. His practice is often described in terms of refusal, disappearance, or withdrawal from institutional capture, but such descriptions may gloss over the nature of his intervention. Hammons does not reject images outright nor attempt to remove his work from circulation entirely. Rather, he makes circulation incomplete. Visibility operates unevenly in his work as he allows images to circulate without guaranteeing access to meaning, stable interpretation, or ownership of his work.

A key example of this intervention is Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), wherein Hammons sold snowballs alongside other street sellers on a corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place in New York City (Fig. 1). The work produces no durable object and retains no documentation, the only evidence of the event being a small number of photographs that now circulate widely in art historical contexts. The performance thus exists primarily as a circulated representation, and the image substitutes for the artwork, despite increasing degrees of separation from the conditions of the original event. The work critiques commodification in the offering of an object inherently unstable and destined to disappear, innately incapable of capture by institutional bodies that may attempt to own and commodify Hammons’ work. Simultaneously, this process highlights, thus, how artistic value is generated not through material permanence but through documentation and reproduction.

In another example, In the Hood (1993), Hammons adopts a strategy of partial visibility. The work consists of a sweatshirt hood, shaped with a wire to make space for an absent head (Fig. 2). While the object is immediately recognizable, it resists legibility and conventional expectations of representation. The hood implies, with its form, the presence of a body but withholds from view a face, refusing identification. In a media landscape saturated with images that claim to represent and empower Black identity, In the Hood offers visibility without clarity. The hood appears almost as though a portrait frame, one which the viewer is compelled to fill in, but meaning is suspended, and the viewer is left without a clear message to be consumed.

Hammons’ broader practice reinforces this logic. His resistance to documentation and the scarcity of authorized images all lend toward a reputation built through rumor, secondary recollections, and partial traces. His work solidifies this impression by refusing to provide stable meaning or guarantee access, an act of misalignment with institutional expectations of clarity or availability. In image culture specifically, Hammons inhabits the circulation system selectively, allowing images—unable to adequately represent the entirety of his work—to circulate. Thus, Hammons weaponizes partial visibility to expose the dynamics, and through his works we may view circulation as a site of power, dictating who is seen and how they are seen under conditions of partiality and incompleteness. Beyond simple exposure, Hammons’ art focuses more on interruption and absence.

While Hammons intervenes in image culture through partial visibility, Aria Dean addresses the conditions of operational images more directly, theorizing how images circulate in digital culture. In both writing and artistic practice, Dean argues that images today function less so as representations of specific subjects than as transferable formats, moving and multiplying independent of the bodies and histories they depict. Toward the end of transcending representation or abstraction of specific racial identity, Dean sought to define a “Black generic” as a way of understanding of Blackness as a foundational aspect of modern capitalist society rather than a set of cultural signifiers. In “On the Black Generic,” Dean describes Blackness as a condition that is continually expropriated, replicated, and reused across platforms. Images of Blackness, shaped by a long history of the Black imago constructed by the European colonial imagination rather than self-identification, circulate in mass media without requiring the presence of Black bodies. Appearing as memes, tropes, or stylistic cues, Blackness functions as a file format that can be applied, remixed, and consumed; the image becomes fungible and divorced from lived experience.

Dean’s video work Abattoir, U.S.A! (2016) exemplifies this theoretical framework. The piece consists of a slow, immersive tour through a digitally rendered model of an empty slaughterhouse (Fig. 3). Drawing on conventions of horror cinema, it creates an immersive multisensory experience with dark interiors, fragmented editing, and suspenseful auditory tracks. The presence of Black bodies is implied, with the slaughterhouse’s association to industrialized violence and racialized exploitation, but no figures appear onscreen. The work lacks narrative resolution, moral lesson, or explanatory framing. Instead, it produces affective unease without catharsis. Thus, Blackness in Abattoir, U.S.A! is communicated through phenomenological experience rather than representation of a subject. Violence is structurally implied instead of being shown outright. By situating the viewer within an unreal, digitally constructed environment rather than a documentary depiction of an actual site, Dean foregrounds how racialized violence operates at the level of systems as well. Blackness circulates as a condition, present without presence; indeed, representation has become infrastructural.

This logic extends into Dean’s sculptural works, such as Little Island / Gut Punch (2022), which employ manipulated minimalist structures to explore how abstraction itself can function operationally (Fig. 4). Drawing on the visual language of modernist minimalism—associated with neutrality, abstraction, and universality—Dean introduces distortions, material tensions, and pressures that undermine assumptions of transcendence. Instead of abstraction as escape from racial meaning, Dean’s sculptures highlight how even the most stripped-down formal structures are embedded within histories of exclusion and extraction. Minimalism is not a refuge from representation, but another infrastructure through which disruption is an implied force. This disruption escapes visual capture as objecthood, but its presence is perceptible as pressure, distortion, or constraint.

Of course, intervention through refusal is not the only approach to image culture. Beyond Hammons and Dean, other contemporary artists respond to the same conditions through introducing friction in images themselves, retraining attention. The paintings of Sayre Gomez offer an interesting counterexample, demonstrating how art can reintroduce slowness in the consumption of images.

In an image economy defined by speed and legibility, Gomez’s paintings may appear initially to fit into the body of circulating images well, resembling photographs. His paintings frequently depict urban facades, signage, and commercial surfaces drawn from his immediate environment in Los Angeles. These scenes are immediately recognizable in the vast uniformity of capitalist production and distribution, but are curiously emptied of activity. Furthermore, these works resist photographic immediacy through their material construction. Discrepancies and subtle distortions interrupt the illusion of instant readability, rewarding slower contemplation in their viewing.

As Daniel Spaulding argues in “Slow Spectacle,” Gomez’s work engages with Los Angeles as a city defined by surfaces and images. The spectacle of commercial architecture populates his work, but it is drained of pleasure or narrative fulfillment. The paintings hold the viewer at a distance, constructing boundaries between the viewer and a space just beyond view, in the form of blurred windows or chain-link fences. What appears, then, at first glance as a familiar image becomes gratingly opaque upon sustained viewing. In contrast to images in circulation, often designed to be consumed and evaluated instantly, painting introduces resistance through duration. The labor embedded in Gomez’s work is visible—such as in a pixelated ridge on a windowsill (Fig. 5)—and deep consideration reveals the artistic process. Rather than distinguishing painting from images in mass media, Gomez reasserts a slower temporal logic. What can be depicted is withheld from view, but beyond that, meaning is delivered slowly.

This painterly friction, thus, serves a slightly different but complementary critical function to the strategies employed by Hammons and Dean. Where Hammons makes circulation unreliable and Dean highlights its structural violence, Gomez slows it down. His paintings do not escape image culture, but to be fully realized, they interrupt its demand for speed and immediate availability. He suggests that contemporary art’s social role may lie not only in refusal, but in retraining attention.

Taken together, the practices of Hammons, Dean, and Gomez suggest that contemporary art’s social role cannot be understood in terms of visibility or direct messaging. In a media environment dominated by images that circulate rapidly and guide attention algorithmically, art does not meaningfully intervene by producing clearer representations or more compelling visual statements than what demands attention in everyday accessible images. Instead, contemporary art operates by modulating attention, disrupting the temporal and structural conditions under which images are encountered and evaluated.

Hammons demonstrates how circulation itself can be sabotaged. By allowing images of his work to circulate without guaranteeing complete access to meaning, the work, or himself, Hammons reveals the insufficiencies of images in circulation. Visibility and circulation often serves institutional and economic interests rather than subjects themselves. Hammons’ strategic absences and refusals do not reject image culture outright but expose its relation to legibility and availability.

In contrast, Dean’s practice takes on a more explicitly theoretical position, focusing on a representation that is infrastructural. Images function as formats that are given meaning and circulate independently of subjects. In this sense, they erode meaning. Through the Black generic, Dean reveals the limits of visibility as a political goal and demonstrates how images can highlight social conditions even in the absence of subjects. Critique, here, operates at the level of systems instead of signifiers.

As an interesting point of comparison, Gomez’s paintings use a traditional medium to reintroduce slowness and reveal material labor into an image economy defined by speed and efficiency. Rather than refusing representation or focusing on circulation systems, they create friction within, inviting prolonged attention and resisting the demand for instant legibility. Friction, thus, functions as a form of resistance to the automated attention economy. Across these practices, art does not compete with operational images by attempting to outperform them on their own terms. Rather, it interrupts the assumptions of legibility and accessibility. In this intervention, contemporary art may locate its social role not as a tool of clarity but as a site of absence where attention can be unsettled and the limited efficacy of visibility can be highlighted.

Ultimately, this paper argues that when images are expected to be accessible, legible, and operational at all time, art’s refusal to fully comply with these demands may be a viable critical strategy. Through the practices of David Hammons, Aria Dean, and Sayre Gomez, this paper illustrates that visibility does not guarantee completeness and representation does not automatically confer power. Rather, images often fail to function smoothly. Together, artistic strategies suggest that contemporary art intervenes most effectively not by adding to the flood of images in circulation, but by creating spaces where images break down—where circulation stalls, meaning remains suspended, or attention does not give way immediately to understanding. Through these processes, art continues to open possibilities for critical reflection by interrupting conditions under which images claim to operate effortlessly, emphasizing the ways visibility, value, and power continue to be constructed and contested.