The Metaphysics of Visibility: To Exist Is to Be Indexed
Last Friday, I visited Provenances. Wayfaring Art at the Berlinische Galerie, an exhibition about how artworks travel through time, exchange, and loss. Forty paintings hang salon-style on a single wall. In the center of the room, a touchscreen console lets visitors trace each piece's provenance: ownership chains, gaps, restitution histories. The curator quotes German critic Adolph Donath from 1925: "Works of art go wayfaring. That has always been their destiny and will never change." What struck me wasn’t the art alone but the terms of its visibility. Each painting’s presence now depends on its data trail. To hang, it must be documented. Legibility conditions existence. Standing there, I realized I was looking at the future of retail.
When OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, ChatGPT became a storefront. U.S. users can buy from Etsy—and soon Shopify—without leaving the chat. Discovery and payment collapse into a single flow. As PYMNTS notes, agents are fast becoming gatekeepers, compressing discovery to a handful of ranked options. In this world, what the model cannot parse, it cannot propose. Messy metadata, unclear provenance, incomplete attributes—these push a SKU off the shortlist. The museum operates on the same principle. Works with disputed histories stay in storage until research resolves them; the show even spotlights Fidus’s Tempeltanz der Seele, identified as Nazi-looted, restituted to heirs, then repurchased—traceability enables repair. In commerce, traceability underwrites refunds, returns, and fraud control—the operational face of trust. To travel, be describable.
This is a shift from aura to schema. In the gallery, each painting sits beside structured fields: artist, medium, prior owners, and restitution status. In retail, style becomes metadata: fabric composition, origin, care instructions, certifications. Beauty gets serialized for machines. Browsing recedes; discovery compresses to a shortlist. This echoes what Theodor Adorno warned about in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). He argued that mass culture turns art into consumption and taste into administration. Standardized forms train audiences to desire what they're already offered. Choice becomes choreography, carefully designed to feel spontaneous. Adorno couldn't have imagined that the choreography would one day be executed by algorithms trained on preference itself. If mass taste was once administered by radio programmers and advertising executives, it's now automated by recommendation engines. We no longer choose from what's offered—we're offered what has been predicted. Agents infer our patterns and return them as curated reality. Like Adorno's radio listener, we're flattered by the illusion of choice even as our options narrow.
Heidegger called modern technology a revealing of the world as Bestand, standing-reserve. AI agents enact that revealing: products appear not as things but as retrievable entries. What isn’t indexed scarcely exists. When retrieval replaces revelation, art and commerce converge: to be seen is to be processed. This raises responsibility. Delegating choice also delegates moral distance. Who answers when a product misleads or a supply chain hides exploitation? Museums pursue restitution through provenance. Commercial agents will rank “ethical” options and surface risk. One in the name of justice, the other in the name of convenience. Either way, trust remains humanly earned. Adorno’s pessimism offers a task, not a verdict. The durable brands—and exhibitions—will translate aura into schema without erasing ambiguity. You must be machine-readable to appear, but you cannot exist only as machine-readable. Leaving the gallery, I looked back at the wall. For a moment, the metadata fell away. The paintings returned to silence. That’s the challenge now: exist in data without existing only as data.
