The question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgement that it is no longer accessible to us. For just as modern man has been deprived of his biography, his experience has likewise been expropriated. Indeed, his incapacity to have and communicate experiences is perhaps one of the few self-certainties to which he can lay claim. This does not mean that today there are no more experiences, but they are enacted outside the individual. And it is interesting that the individual merely observes them, with relief. From this point of view, a visit to a museum or a place of touristic pilgrimage is particularly instructive. Standing face to face with one of the great wonders of the world (let us say the patio de los leones in the Alhambra), the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should. 

G. Agamben, Infancy and History. Versus, London 1993