#artlust

Cultural capital is not convertible into economic capital on demand. Taste, distinction, the embodied feel for a field: these are accumulated over a lifetime of attention, not bought the week of an event. Hito Steyerl, in her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” wrote that the low-resolution copy, the watermarked rip, the JPEG passed around until its compression artifacts have become its own aesthetic, is itself a political object, a record of how an image circulates among the dispossessed. The Temu knockoff Madame X is, in a way, the inverse problem: a poor image worn by someone who could afford the original a thousand times over. It is wealth performing the aesthetic of the dispossessed without any of its meaning. Madame X is one of the most famous paintings in art history. I feel like most people who have gone to the Met, or had a tour by one of the curators (and I’m sure they have), understand that that work was seen as shocking in its time. But here is one of the things about art: you cannot shock in the same way someone was shocked before, because it’s no longer a shock. The artwork at the moment proved that you cannot do that. The avant-garde, as Peter Bürger argued, has a one-shot historical structure; once it has done its work, repetition becomes academicism, or worse, kitsch. Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” went further: kitsch is what culture produces when industrial reproduction meets a public that has been trained to want pre-digested feeling. It is the aesthetic of efficiency, the feeling without the work. A Temu Madame X on a billionaire is kitsch in the purest Greenbergian sense. To be basically strapless in a society where half the women in the room are already strapless is already foolish. Second, to imply that you can replicate the shocking nature of a historical moment is ridiculous. And then, finally, to be at a museum event where you didn’t understand the art is ridiculous. She serves as a cautionary tale. She can’t buy being thoughtful. She has to build that. And what she implies is that she thinks there’s a shortcut to being an intellectual. Borrowing somebody else’s amazing moment doesn’t make you amazing. It just proves how amazing that other person was. The aura, again, refuses the transfer. It always has. It always will.

We have lost so much since the advent of smartphones and algorithmic social media. Nicholas Carr in The Shallows tracked what the network was doing to the deep reading brain, the kind of brain that sustains attention across a long argument and doesn’t need to be jolted into focus every six seconds. Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist of reading, has shown that the deep reading circuit is something we build, individually and culturally, and we can lose it. Sherry Turkle in Alone Together warned us we were trading conversation for connection, and we did, and we are now learning what conversation actually was, in retrospect, by its absence. What’s worse, the people who need to hear about how dire it’s gotten don’t have the attention span to learn what's wrong. We’re like end-game Dunning-Kruger, and they don’t even have the tools to go beyond the shallows of thought. We have also given over much of our humanity to the machine. Now, I don’t just mean technology. It’s also to the machine of celebrity. This culture industry is built on our adoration, but it largely doesn’t love us back. Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, would say that celebrity is myth in the technical sense: a sign whose history has been emptied out so that something ideological can be poured back in.

We have made knowledge very accessible, but also allowed the cheapening of ideas. Online, every idea is equivalent, and so nothing matters. Bernard Stiegler said in the “proletarianization” of knowledge, memory is externalized, but then we also lose the ability to think for ourselves. Stiegler points out that knowledge isn’t the accumulation of facts, but instead thought processes. When the machine just serves up ideas, you both don’t understand how to find them, but then lose out on building your own finding mechanisms. Knowledge is constructed. Mark Fisher in Ghost of My Life pointed out that this loss of thought is not just personally devastating but instead a wholesale “slow cancellation of the future.” We’re putting ourselves in an endless loop of mindlessness. Without thought, we will not be able to get off this roller coaster of reboot, sample, remake. We are content cycles, not people.

Most people have not grown their ability to understand nuance. Our technology makes it so they continue to misunderstand nuance, and then our culture makes us feel like we should stan celebrities to the point of never criticizing them, basically like goddesses, and that affords us very little thought. This is exactly what Marcuse warned about in One-Dimensional Man: a society that closes off the dimension of critique by absorbing every dissent back into the system as content. Slavoj Žižek would name the structure of stan culture even more precisely. He calls it the “obscene supplement,” the unofficial, transgressive enjoyment that props up an official ideology. The official line is that we just love the artist; the obscene supplement is the unspoken license to swarm, dogpile, and harass any critic in the artist’s name while the artist herself stays sweetly above the fray. The fandom does the dirty work the brand cannot afford to do openly. That is the engine. bell hooks insisted that critical thinking is not optional; it is a practice of freedom, and the refusal of nuance is not just an aesthetic failure, it is a political one. Stuart Hall would remind us that we never receive a sign in only one way, that meaning is made in the moment of decoding, and the discipline of citizenship is the discipline of reading carefully against the dominant code. We are forgetting how. We need to understand the complexity of our society. We have so many problems. Nuance is how we’re going to connect across so many boundaries we’ve now seen thrown up. And instead we live in a society where sound bites are meant to stand in for actual things. As I was writing about the exhibition yesterday, I said so many people misunderstand “bread and circuses” and use it to shut down thought, but this is the same thing. Neil Postman saw this coming in Amusing Ourselves to Death: the danger isn’t Orwell’s boot on the face, it’s Huxley’s pleasure machine, where we drown in trivia and lose the muscle for serious public discourse. If we cannot look at the works of celebrities in a fashion show and discuss them, we have nothing. We cannot connect. We cannot think. We are beyond missing out on the potential of each of our souls. We are more than consumers. We are more than somebody who can stan a famous person and make them richer. Enrich yourself, rather than the machine.

We’re a market but not a village. We yearn for community but don’t know how to be villagers. Our souls are atrophying with this loss. We’re like the intellectual walking dead. Soul ownership is a business model, but many of us don’t even realize we signed on the dotted line. We have somehow been swept up into the worst sort of Oz, one that has placed us in a society where the yellow brick road only leads a very few of us to the Emerald City. But even worse, the people in the Emerald City are doing it in the most boring ways. As Guy Debord said when talking about the society of the spectacle: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”

Intellectualism #arthistory101