Ostalgia at the New Museum (2 Oct 2011)

In the first question of this interview, philosopher Paolo Virno is asked to explain how he can regard Marxism as a "doctrine of rigorous individualism" -- particularly since the mandated ideology of the "really existing socialism" of Eastern Europe tended to emphasize suppressing individuality in favor of an elaborately professed fidelity to the collective. Virno quotes Russian linguist Lew Vygotsky in response: "the real movement of the development process of the child’s thought is accomplished not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual." That is, we must learn to think of ourselves as individuals within a given set of social relations, a process that Virno claims continues throughout adult life: " We constantly have to deal with the interiority of the public and with the publicity of the interior."

In many ways, the Ostalgia show at the New Museum, which collects work by artists who were raised in the Soviet Union or its satellite nations in the Eastern Bloc, deals with precisely this question: how does one express or capture that inner sense of individuality publicly, in a society that pretends to officially deny its existence? The show presents ironic support for the idealized notion that true individuality can emerge only under socialism: Despite the manifest material hardships, the artists evince a kind of hardy, irrepressibly idiosyncratic spirit that can seem sharper, more distinctive, more authentic to jaded Western eyes. It's easy, for example, to read the ad hoc creativity captured in Vladimir Arkhipov's images of improvised household gadgetry (e.g., a maraca made from foam rubber, scaps of leather, and a Fanta can; a tub stopper made from a bent fork stuck in a rubber boot heel) as proof that Eastern European living conditions forced everyone to be folk artists.

That is where the nostalgia (albeit vicarious) comes in for us: the wistful fantasy of a world in which glamour and celebrity don't exist, so no one is under pressure to develop their identity with fame in mind. In "Ostalgia," we see art made in a society without an art market, design devised not for a culture of consumer seduction but for individuals desperate for functionality. No crass commericalism -- the pursuit of distinction in these works is not about ego but simply the essential desire to show that one existed. The works have an ontological desperation that seems to purify them.

It's readily apparent that none of the ordinary people in the 1960s and '70s-era photographs by Boris Mikhailov are posing for him to improve their personal brand. The frank, earthy images utterly lack that kind of calculating awareness; they instead carry an erotic charge that depends not on conforming to commercially established beauty standards but on evincing a surprising singularity, a spontaneous particularity, as if they are only just discovering their uniqueness. Since Mikhailov's work was not sanctioned by the state, his subjects ran real risks by agreeing to pose (often nude). This tends to make them appear as co-conspirators in an act of subversive intimacy. The feeling of forbidden liberation is palpable. Rather than being objectified by the photographs (even though they were paid to model), Mikhailov's subjects seem instead to seize the opportunity to be truly subjectivized by them. The images allow them to express individuality for its own sake. Secret moments stolen from a surveillance state, the photos document poignant private alliances, anti-networking.

This is a far cry from what we are accustomed to in the era of social media, where the idea of secret moments is becoming unthinkable, regarded increasingly as aberrant and antisocial. It is hard to imagine achieving such intimacy or liberation as Mikhailov's images evoke in the time of Facebook, in which not only is everything permitted -- there is no repressive state forbidding personal expression -- but people are pressured to share as much of that everything as possible in a tolerated spirit of self-aggrandizement. Social media have turned fears of a surveillance state inside out and made self-revelation ubiquitous, automatic, virtually unintentional. At the same time, given the sorts of skills needed to secure the jobs reserved for the "creative class," we are forced to manufacture and parade an ersatz individuality, showcasing our flexibility and ingenuity, our ability to anticipate trends, our well-rounded sensitivity to the processes of cultural meaning making.

So despite our culture's emphasis on individuality, we don't generally experience it the way it's depicted in "Ostalgia". Instead we fret about the degree to which we are unique, make a fetish of superficial nonconformity. We are becoming used to the notion of an attention economy, in which our individuality is increasingly inexpressible except as a quantitative measure. It becomes harder to image a life that is obscure, and so such a life begins to seem as if it contains more reality. Ostalgia becomes a nostalgia not for the all-embracing social order socialist states tried to provide or their uneven successes in suppressing the effects of a class structure on ordinary people, but for the way such total systems left inadvertent room for a contested privacy that had monumental value. Now we just give it away through frictionless sharing, and many of us don't know how to stop it even if we aren't inclined to lend our consent.

Convenience of Streaming Services (5 Aug 2011)

An article at the AV Club by Sam Adams looks at the implications of Netflix's streaming service and the growing popularity of Spotify, a music-streaming company. He begins with an observation that seems unassailable to me -- "Convenience and choice are the watchwords of the digital era, in which content must be instantly accessible and as quickly digested, lest consumers flit off to some more welcoming destination" -- but I was confused by the analysis that follows, which didn't really explain why consumers are so susceptible to novelty and what he calls the "convenience trap," the willingness to consume what's available as opposed to what is presumably good for you. Adams fears we may be "unconsciously downgrading anything that isn’t so ready at hand."

But what does that mean? Why does everything have to be graded? And does an unconscious grade have any meaning? If you can't bother to make the effort to make your tastes conscious, then what difference does it make to you what you watch? And why should anyone else care? Adams is concerned that the great works may be lost to history if streaming services don't assimilate them to their streaming libraries: "Spotify’s great, unless you want to listen to anything Hüsker Dü recorded before its major-label debut. Would you trade New Day Rising for the Black Eyed Peas catalogue?" This doesn't strike me as a serious question. If you badly want to hear New Day Rising, try this. If you care about music, you probably won't let Spotify dictate what you can or can't hear, and digital reproduction has made it fairly likely that digital copies of everything will survive and proliferate. (Our real archival concern should be with the survival of analog artifacts that have yet to be digitized -- even though digitization may lead to a not entirely representative version of a work surviving.) The people who have a lot invested in their entertainment choices will supplement streaming services with ready alternatives. The people who don't diversify their supply basically don't really care, and why should they? Because certain art is good for them, and they should be made to consume it through clever institutionalized market nudges?

Adams's implicit concern seems to be that the tasteless masses will be left to languish in their cultural ignorance because the streaming services they thoughtlessly adopt don't force more redeeming content on them. And he also seems to think that if you are not cleaver enough to make redemptive consumer quests for the great works, you will be too dim or disinterested to understand them: "If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it?" Apparently if one lives next door to the Prado, Goya's works there become more or less indistinguishable for you from Hagar the Horrible comics.

Working hard to gain access to a work has nothing intrinsic to do with being willing or able to interpret it. Adams offers an S&M take on art appreciation, that art should dominate and master us while we subserviently mold ourselves to its masterful lessons: "the viewer—not, please, the consumer—is fundamentally subservient to a work of art, in which it is our responsibility, and often our pleasure, to come to the work rather than expecting it to come to us. After all, shouldn’t art be inconvenient, if not in the sense of being difficult to access, then because it forces us out of our comfort zones, requiring us to reckon with its way of understanding the world?" I am pretty sympathetic to this, but I don't think my attitude needs to be generalized. It's not the only way to engage with art. And though I may try harder to get something out of a show I have to travel far to see, that doesn't mean I necessarily cruise through a nearby show on autopilot.

The idea that difficulty is necessary to have a "real" art experience is similar to the idea that something more real happens when the art encounter is "spontaneous" -- being surprised by the beauty of a sunset, etc. It is always tempting to extrapolate a dogma out of such experiences when they are profoundly affecting, but that would be a mistake. I don't think there is a prescription for assuring edifying aesthetic moments. Instead, when people try to push some recipe for the aesthetic onto someone else, they are imposing an encapsulated version of a status hierarchy that favors them. Ultimately, whatever they are pushing now (no matter how universal the principles are presented to be) will be repudiated later in pursuit of some fresh form of distinction. Isn't this an extremely elitist question: "How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?" This seems to mean: You dummies should be watching the hard stuff (like me) but instead you are weak and let the technology trick you into watching what is mere middlebrow entertainment. You're trapped in your own lazy tastes.

Adams points out that "we carry around unspoken assumptions about what’s long and what’s short, what’s easy and what’s hard, and when those assumptions calcify, we may no longer be aware they’re there." Yes, this is how ideology typically works, and it extends far beyond how we choose to entertain ourselves. Making ourselves aware of our unthinking assumptions about what is common sense is probably always a good and worthy practice. But we don't encourage people to join in that project when we imply that the reason it is necessary is so that they can conform to some other dogma about what cultural product is correct and appropriate. That replaces one politicized mystification with another. Yes, Netflix -- like may consumer goods manufacturers -- would probably love it if we consumed simplistic mind candy as quickly and as often as possible; that's good business for them. And that incentive contributes to their trying to shape and promulgate a certain ideology about what it is fun to do. Their pay structure contributes to a materialization of that ideology. Convenience almost always serves an agenda of accelerated consumption, which is passed off as maximized happiness or efficiency. (You've consumed more, so you are better off!) But implying that people need to consume the "right" things instead of the convenient things seems to substitute an elitist ideology for a consumerist one, and may trigger reactionary retrenchment among the consumerists one may be trying to rescue with screenings of Bela Tarr films and copies of Metal Circus.

In 2007 I made the argument that subscription services "almost make the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste." That is, in a consumer society we have this sense that you have to put your money where your mouth is to "prove" your taste. The idea that you need to suffer to acquire access to "real" art in order to appreciate it has a similar inflection to it -- that art needs to be scarce to have an aura of significance, which derives from people earning/paying for the privilege to consume it. But it seems more interesting to break out of the idea that scarcity imposes some mystical meaning on things to see what they might mean beyond that.

The Situation Room Photo (3 May 2011)

The instantly iconic photo of the Situation Room reminds me of Thomas Eakins's masterpiece, The Gross Clinic.

As Rex Hammock points out, the intensity of the Situation Room photo has something to do with Hillary Clinton's eyes, which make a stark contrast with the woman's eyes we don't see in The Gross Clinic. The faces of Gross and Obama make for another evocative comparison, though the bloody scalpel in Obama's hand is only implied by context.

Crowdsourced Curation (11 Aug 2010)

Eric Reasons lays out a case (via p2p foundation) for the inevitability of "crowdsourced curation" -- i.e. automated filtering based on the efforts of other internet users to rank, rate, and recommend content, and on social networks to gather and share links and content appropriate to the groups that form themselves. His argument is that the internet has made it easy to produce and distribute new content, and thus nothing will prevent the channel from being flooded with material not worthy of general attention. With so much material, we will need to democratize gate-keeping functions in order to have all the material appropriately processed. "The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper," he writes, adopting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's cryptic marketing lingo.

But that's a bit of an odd way of assessing the situation. A lot of amateur content is produced with the social network in mind and is presorted -- no one needs to judge the photos one attached to a Facebook profile or most of the YouTube videos people upload to amuse their friends and family. Much of the other stuff getting filtered to us online falls into the category of memes -- cultural material in effect produced by the existence of a vast communications network. Music and blogs and whatnot not produced for friends and family cultivate their own audiences idiosyncratically on the strength of search-engine returns and the relevance of their content until they manage to become memeified: they are adopted by one of the major aggregators and become something that people forward to one another. So the gatekeepers for most of that stuff already exist as well -- BoingBoing, Metafilter, etc. Of course some content gets made and promoted explicitly in hopes of becoming a meme. Some might argue that culture industry product is settling into the notion that the meme in the only relevant commodity it deals in now.

We don't need new gatekeepers for either memes or homegrown friend-and-family stuff that finds its way online. Gatekeepers for the remaining cultural domains are arguably lacking only because the internet has eroded their ability to get paid for their services; the internet shares the essence of their judgments too quickly and too freely. It's not that there is more stuff to be judged; it's that the judges are forced by the new medium to judge for free. Since this leads to nobody doing it as a paying job, it becomes a collective responsibility to get that work done -- hence the free information-processing labor performed by ordinary internet users in their everyday practices, expressing themselves and sharing and so on. They are forced to be productive behind their own backs -- they are not "leaping into production," as Reasons writes.

As Reasons suggests, Apple has a dictatorial approach to this issue. With its closed platforms, it is trying to re-enclose the commons that the internet threatens to become. But when Reasons asks, "Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on YouTube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded?" It is a misleading question. The space of the open internet is limited only by server space and the power required to run the machinery; it requires no special curation to prevent it from being overwhelmed. When Apple approves apps for its devices, it's saying it will basically only consider those from professionals. So, I can very easily imagine Apple's ideal world, where AppleTube rejects 99.9% of potential content out of hand and only approves the material from preapproved suppliers from within the established media giants. The production of amateur content is irrelevant to the media business and helps sharpen the value of professional content, provided you can properly enclose it. In most cases, the only productive work amateurs do online involves processing, not creating, content.

Marina Abramović at MoMA (25 May 2010)

ArtsJournal linked to this New York magazine item written by a performance artist who is performing one of the pieces in the Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA. Here's the first paragraph:

I am a performance artist myself, and it’s unusual for me to participate in someone else’s work. When I stumbled on MoMA’s casting call, I responded because I’d been steeped in Marina’s work for a long time. My own pieces are very slow-moving. I’m doing one now called Tidal Culture, where I film my own still sittings by the ocean, and make objects out of algae.

One's response to this paragraph may be a good barometer of one's attitude toward this sort of art generally. After I read it, I couldn't stop giggling.

In general, I find the proposition of gawking at living, breathing bodies objectified into "works" already so sufficiently disturbing that I am able to persuade myself that I already get what the pieces are about without having to bother going to see them. That's my loss, I suppose. I hope to go check it out, though, this week -- lunch breaks permitting.

The piece that has drawn the most attention in the retrospective, not surprisingly, is one in which museum goers can wait in line to sit opposite of Abramović and take part in the performance of her piece - a very timely encapsulation of the pseudo-reciprocity of much interactive Web 2.0-style culture as well as, by many accounts, a potent demonstration of how affecting these sorts of participatory experiences can be despite (because of?) how contrived and asymmetrical they are. Standing in line, waiting for one's moment in the chair, one must pass through a welter of superficiality and self-criticism. "How desperate am I for the spotlight?" one must wonder. But the transcendence of the microfame one experiences in the chair, the unflinching and largely undeserved attention, seems to justify all the patient waiting. The structure of the piece builds a powerful machine for simulating focused attention, which turns out to be just as powerful as the kind of reciprocity that involves more than staring. As we've learned from the rise of social media, the presence of a spotlight is all that we need to feel the pleasures of notoriety and self-display, or to have the layers of our personality unveiled to ourselves. (See what I mean? I have already decided what the work is about without having seen it, which makes it hard for me to go and actually see it clearly. I wish I would have stumbled on it by accident.)

Arthur Danto describes the genesis of the piece in this NYT essay, but Carles of Hipster Runoff has perhaps the most illuminating take.

Reviews for consumption convenience (16 March 2010)

I understand what Jason Kottke is getting at in this post, but it still struck me as unsettling. He argues that the "new rules for reviewing media" are that reviewers should primarily discuss the convenience of consumption (what formats it is in, how easy is it to carry around, etc.) rather than the success of a work's content, which he seems to regard as a pure matter of personal taste and not apparently not something reviewers of any sort -- "citizen" or professional -- would have anything useful to say about.

In the end, people don't buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts.

That seems to suggest that ease of consumption is the only thing purchasers care about; device integration has trumped aesthetic experience altogether, or worse, using your devices is the aesthetic experience. This seems like designer sensibility run amok. Kottke argues that "Packaging is important. We judge books by their covers and even by how much they weigh (heavy books make poor subway/bus reading). Format matters." And that's true. But one doesn't need a critic to point those things out. And that doesn't mean those concerns are not superficial; it's not as though all texts delivered to Kindles are the same because the medium is the message. Format is not synonymous with form; in some ways format denotes the material aspects of a work the maker doesn't ultimately control or care about when they are done shaping the form of a work. Discussion of form is interesting; discussion of format can be thoroughly exhaustive in a parenthesis under the title. The idea that I would want to read more about that in the text of the review itself seems nuts to me.

This may be a question of how the difference between reviews and criticism is evolving. If Kottke and his ilk have their way, reviews will be about the hydraulics of consumption -- how fast cultural goods can be pumped through the media we have encrusted ourselves with and how well the goods will serve as lifestyle accouterments. Criticism will recede into recondite elaborations of personal experiences with the goods, as the idea of trying to capture a consensus view will have disappeared completely from public discourse. Public discourse itself seems sort of threatened anyway, subject to replacement by social networks. Lost will be that middle ground of critical reviews, which help establish a context of reception that makes our engagement with something far richer and more meaningful.

Design Crime (24 Jan 2010)

Please read my most recent column, "Designing Consent," which is up now. I wrote most of it right after I visited the Museum der Dinge in Berlin, which probably intensified my cynicism about industrial design at the time. At the museum was an exhibit called "Evil Things," a collection of bad-taste objects inspired by curator Gustav E. Pazaurek's "Cabinet of Bad Taste" from the early 20th century. Pazaurek attempted to taxonimize bad taste by devising various categories of flaws that he considered morally offensive. All the objects on display in the museum's exhibition exemplified one of these "design crimes" -- which range from objects mixing the organic with the inorganic to their being counterfunctional to their being ostentatiously decorated so as to cloak shoddy workmanship.

The curators expanded the concept from there. This is from the museum's description of the show:

In the age of stylistic pluralism, it seems impossible to establish definitive criteria of "good" or "bad" taste. But a closer look reveals, first, that Pazaurek's categories are applicable without amendment to countless contemporary objects, bringing to light a design practice that is both ludicrous and ironic, and second, that moral criteria are becoming pertinent again in conjunction with a new consumer consciousness. The "crimes" of today's objects, however, are not evident prima facie, because they are manifested not in the design, the material or the decoration, but in the social, economic and ecological context. For this reason, new categories must be added to Pazaurek's catalogue of mistakes.

Sadly they don't list the criteria in the description, and I was forgot to write them down while I was there.

I left the show buoyed by the idea that one could invent a system that would allow us to rule out objects, to serve as another layer of defense against the onslaught of objects, and the various ways industrial designers try to get us to accept more stuff into our lives. Designers seemed like the enemy from that point of view, yet in the film Objectified, which I write about in the column, they tend to present themselves as the moral heroes of our age, practicing their holy arts to simplify the use of things, so that our lives can be completely subsumed in them. Their smug paternalism seems built into the career -- we make objects that make decisions for you about how to use them; we make them point the way to what is proper. User friendliness is conceived as a kind of moral victory; convenience is next to godliness. I appreciated the Evil Objects show because it wanted to return the power of moral judgment to the consumers of objects, not their commercial-minded makers.

Curatorial compulsion (22 Jan 2010)

Nick Bilton writes in the NYT about the curatorial impulse that living online has unleashed.

I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.
Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

This is a perfect example of how performing free immaterial labor is starting to rule our days, become a compulsion. No longer a hobby, it's an entire mode of being. Life is winnowing down to operations of this limited scope and scale -- pointing and thumbs-upping at texts and images.

If we don't curate online, it's as if we cease to exist. The efforts are existentially significant to us, but we only get back the sense of being alive; the companies and peers who we are producing for can harvest the value of this labor. But as Bilton points out, we recoup some of the value of the labor by capitalizing on the curatorial work of others: "Without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis." But should we even feel obliged to? Isn't that a grandiose and hubristic pursuit? To know the best of everything that is going on everywhere? When the urge strikes me to "keep up with music," I feel what Bilton is talking about most keenly, but instead of feeling caught up, I instead feel hopelessly behind, as I often do when I log in to my Google Reader.

Bilton cites Maria Popova, a curator he follows, who discusses what she does as "controlled serendipity" and "content discovery." These cold, oxymoronic phrases are apt in that they convey some of the mechanistic nature of the process, which Bilton labels a "reflex." But what happens is more like forced serendipity, a demand that the world give forth "content" to satisfy our curiosity, which atrophies, becomes lazier. Online, curiosity loses its active component as it becomes accelerated. I feel it when I fire through the 500 articles in my RSS feed, much of it densely written articles and essays that I cast aside with a glance. Maybe I file it in a shared folder with a satisfied sense of completion. Job well done, curator.

Important art (30 Sept 2009)

Ainsley Drew, a guest blogger at Kottke, linked to this essay by Shane McAdams about how art collectors use the word important in describing the art they have invested in.

There is no better way to shield something from real criticism than to make it taboo or sacred. When that collector said “important” he was without knowing it creating a protective cloak of mystique around the work of art, because “important” is to culture what “holy” is to religion.

What was being protected was not the art's allegedly important meaning, but its actual value in capitalist culture -- its price. Investing in contemporary art is a matter of investing in the highly variable reputation of the artist; it makes more sense if you are in a position to bully public opinion about what sort of art is worthwhile -- which makes it smart for collectors to get involved with museums and other institutions that validate art's importance, staffing their boards and guiding their acquisitions and so on. The reputational issues provoke a lot of aggressive promotional and misleading talk -- "over the course of the last 20 years we’ve watched 'bad' work somehow turn into 'sensational' work, 'sensational' turn to 'provocative,' 'provocative' into 'important,' and 'important' back into 'good.' It’s a collecting world’s semantic shell game" -- that drowns out meaningful criticism, which presumably decides what is truly good. I'm skeptical of that -- I think cultural capital is always at stake in determining what is "important" or aesthetically "good", and the critics merely fight with words because they lack the money to fight on the collectors' turf. That cultural capital plays in determining who is included and excluded in the art world more generally, which in turn feeds into the larger stakes of social class.

McAdams cites an essay by art critic Dave Hickey, “Frivolity and Unction” (pdf), where he imagines resigning from the art world after watching its emissaries try to defend themselves from an attack on its frivolity and corruption on 60 Minutes -- a middlebrow attempt to demystify the art world and devalue its cultural capital. (Hickey calls it "bourgeois punditry.") "The presumption of art's essential 'goodness' is nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers' money for public art education," he concedes, though that is just one example (as McAdams points out) of the many political struggles art can be recruited to figure in to. Hickey ends up essentially wishing that cultural capital didn't figure in at all -- that contemporary art had no cultural capital and was widely ignored, regarded as unimportant, unvirtuous. Then we could go back to appreciating the actual work again rather than what it signified in class struggles, and in struggles for funding. "I could practice art criticism by participating in the street-level negotiation of value. I might disregard the distinctions between high and low art and discuss objects and activities whose private desirability might be taken to have public consequences." His rallying cry becomes: "Art is bad, silly, and frivolous, so what?"

His contention is that the art world is or at least should be "an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things" -- but in so doing, it also lays down aesthetics along class lines, with moneyed interests weighing more heavily in the referendum. Ordinary people, it seems to me, do their best to ignore the dictates of the art world, which doesn't have their ability to appreciate art in mind at all, and instead derive their aesthetics from a hodgepodge of sources as a means of resistance. Taste is best-kept provisional, a work in progress, and all the judgments we share are probably best expressed that way, as theses rather than passwords into some discriminatory club.

The High Line and claustrophobic design (1 Sept 2009)

At Design Observer, Michael Bierut mentioned the High Line -- an old elevated railway track in New York City that's been turned into an awkward, real-estate-value enhancing gated-park space -- as an example of "when design gets in the way." The case he presents for that struck me as a bit incoherent -- the High Line is so well-designed that it has become too popular for its own good, while the ad hoc utilitarian set-up in Times Square (recently closed to automotive traffic) works just as well to please people. Should the High Line have been made less appealing so it wouldn't become overcrowded? Should it have been renovated on the cheap since people might have used it anyway?

I want to agree that design has indeed gotten in the way, because when I visited it last Friday before I left for the shore it made me very uneasy, but I'm confused. I think his point is that design can be more spontaneous and require less bureaucracy. My point would be that designy-ness itself, whether the product of a well-meaning bureaucracy or a marketing firm, is suffocating; its fastidiousness seems to close off user interaction even when it has seen fit to try to engineer it in advance with various heavy-handed interventions. At the High Line everything seemed so thought out in advance that I could only conclude that I was not invited to do any thinking for myself while I was there. It feels less like a park than a useless piece of installation art meant to impress us with its ingenuity. I half expected to see people walking along applauding. I felt corralled into performing the piece's cleverness by traversing it, but I didn't want to perform (unlike the guys conspicuously doing yoga in the middle of the narrow platform). I just wanted a refuge from what is at street level, which is designy-ness harnessed to marketing purposes. Up on the High Line, there's just a more concentrated form of that deisigny-ness, elevated to civic duty, vindicating all the shop windows down below.

The friend who accompanied me to the High Line thought its design was a little oppressive also -- she pointed to the lack of seats in the shade, and the lack of assembly spaces. Its design -- by necessity I guess, given the constraints -- streamlines away the possibility that it might serve as a public place of protest. It's a park for an orderly, obedient people content to walk in single file and stay within the prescribed boundaries. She noted also the fact it can be locked up to bar undesirables, and the way it seemed to mock the death of manufacturing in the city. In terms of what the city produces, manufactured goods have been supplanted by the dissemination of design ideas -- a transition the High Line commemorates with no consolation for the losers. Once the rails moved actual goods and anchored working-class jobs; now they are purposely overgrown, archaicized, dressed up to make the condos for the wealthy built all around the tracks more aesthetically pleasing. But it seems doomed to feel dated (it's very much of the eco-conscious zeitgeist -- like a Method detergent bottle), and after its vogue fades, it will probably become this weird, depopulated albatross we must continue to maintain, a Christo exhibit that never goes away.

Reified design (14 Aug 2009)

The difference between something that is well-designed and something that is merely designy seems pretty self-evident if you base the judgment on functionality. But the difference between the two is always being blurred, usually by marketers trying to gain an edge for a product that's not essentially different from its market competitors. So we get designy bottles of dishwashing liquid, designy stainless-steel appliances, designy retro-looking appliances and other pseudo-novelties. Design improvements that allow us to consume or use a good more efficiently are conflated with improvements that shift our attention away from use to abstract contemplation -- the good becomes a mirror in which we see reflected our own good taste. Designy-ness, like so many consumerist products, lets us consume ourselves.

These efforts to sell products as a vehicle for design combine to create a climate in which design for its own sake is functionality, an aesthetic end that inherently enriches the lives of those who get to handle such "beautiful" objects. Industrial designers like Apple's Jonathan Ive get elevated to the status of artists, as if their aim was not to sell more goods but to create the Good. Consumerism is thereby transformed into a kind of democratized connoisseurship; Target (or, if you are still trying to preserve class distinction, ABC Carpet & Home) becomes a museum from which you can take home the objets d'art.

So what is wrong with that? This may not be a convincing answer, but designy-ness is an ideological sheen on consumerism, redeeming commodification while furthering it, permitting mass-distributed designy-ness to supplant genuine heterogeneity. In genuine heterogeneity is the chance that we might really redeem the promise of individualism -- that we will be able to garner social recognition for being ourselves, and recognition could be separated from being judged or taxonomized. But designy-ness and its off-the-shelf aesthetic (often prepared by lauded gurus) militates against that. However much we enjoy our own tastes in such stuff privately (solipsisticly) we become typecast when we exhibit those tastes publicly.

Terry Eagleton gets at this problem in the Kant chapter of The Ideology of the Aesthetic:

In the aesthetic representation...we glimpse for an exhilarated moment the possibility of a non-alienated object, one quite the reverse of the commodity, which like the 'auratic' phenomenon of a Walter Benjamin returns our tender gaze and whispers that it was created for us alone. In another sense, however, this formal, desensualized aesthetic object, which acts as a point of exchange between subjects, can be read as a spiritualized version of the very commodity it resists.

Designy goods, as spiritualized versions of consumer junk, elevate the practice of their exchange to something more seemingly dignified and become the medium for social contact itself. That is, as good possessive individualists molded within capitalism, we are isolated by our tastes and the goods whispering our ersatz uniqueness to us, and we gloat in our transcendence until the loneliness overwhelms us, and we are driven to participate in society, which we can do only on those same terms, at the level of our tastes in everyday goods, in mass entertainments, and that sort of thing. We think we are curators of our own personal museum of tasteful, design-y goods, but in the end it's someone else's institution and we are just the guards.

(For more deep thoughts about design, see this post at one of my other venues.)

Is authenticity born in recessions? (29 April 2009)

First, I saw this PSFK item that posited a link between the economic downturn and the reutrn of some grunge-fashion tropes.

Ripped stockings, boots, and short babydoll dresses (in floral and solids) are being donned by women, while boys are sporting the ubiquitous flannel button down and tights pants.... One theory on why these trends are re-emerging is that perhaps in times of economic instability youth prefer to dress down out of modesty and solidarity with those experiencing hardship, as opposed to showing off an opulent style, which is prevalent during boom times. This idea isn’t that far-fetched in that grunge fashion as we know it grew to popularity during the recessions of the early '90s, and that the king of all British fashion movements, punk, was in theory started as a social reaction and act of rebellion as opposed to merely a fashion statement. While for some time trend watchers have predicted the demise of heavily branded logo apparel, it seems that conspicuous consumption has truly become gauche in the fashion world.

I am highly skeptical that this is an expression of "solidarity" or a rejection of brands and conspicuous consumption. Fashion can't really be a medium for solidarity -- it is inherently about differentiation and stratification, about making sure one is perpetually insecure about one's fashionability or ultimately one's status. And if I was poor, and some trust-funded kid in Bushwick let it be known that they were wearing purposely shredded clothes in my honor, I doubt that I would feel flattered or recognized. I'd probably feel condescended to, if not utterly effaced. That said, it may be an attempt to capture an ephemeral social mood in one's clothing, an attempt to be timely and at the same time reinforce fashion's supposed vitality and relevance.

If fashion can be made to seem "relevant," than so can narcissism, thereby redeeming all the energy spent fretting about the currency of one's look. At that point both fashion and one's own carefully groomed and signfied identity take on an all-important air of authenticity, seeming to connote something deeper than the ability to predict and track trends. Adhering to fashion, participating in it, for a fleeting moment becomes a way of simultaneously expressing subversiveness, the real, the truth -- about oneself, about the world. In better times, the "truth" is irrelevant, valueless, unnecessary to fashion, which can revert to its more natural function of connoting that special frivolity that comes with purging the accursed share.

Incidentally (speaking of narcissism), in 1992, I was hardly a doctrinaire flannel-wearer, but I certainly listened to the music that would be labeled later as grunge. It never would have occurred to me to consider its relation to the economic climate at the time. I had no idea about the recession at all. Back then I was young and took for granted the notion that economics and art were separate, autonomous spheres -- good music was kept unpopular by some conspiracy of bad taste and ignorance. I was dismayed then was the idea that bands like Nirvana were going mainstream, creating the reified category of "alternative" and ending the viability of the crypto-rebellious subject position I had stake out for myself in college. (It involved wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, going to City Gardens a lot, and donating plasma to buy CDs.) I had thought I was outside fashion, but fashion trends sort of engulfed me -- perhaps I was always already breathing inside its bubble -- perhaps I still am.

Then, I read this Peter Schjeldahl essay about an exhibit of early 1980s "Pictures art" at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, including Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, etc. -- artists that he says "demonstrate the limits of critical knowingness as an artistic strategy." He regards them as also consciously responding to down economic times (which seems more plausible than the argument about fashion): "Born of recessionary, disenchanted times, Pictures art shared menacingly cynical attitudes toward mainstream culture with punk rock, in night-life venues, and with deconstructionist lucubration, in academe. It yawed between those poles: sardonic burlesque and stilted critique."

In other words, it was among the first recognizably postmodern art movements, and it foreshadowed the whole idea of a stable "alternative" culture that could be something other than hermetically avant-garde. Here we see taunting political gestures presented with no corresponding belief that the audience will be inspired to do anything about things; instead viewers will be permitted a smug satisfaction of having "gotten it" and escaped being one of the clueless folks who make perpetuate mainstream culture's oppressiveness. This sort of art creates the possibility of unifying an audience around the idea of indifferent resistance. This group of would-be rebels are always conscious of the impotence of their pastures, but rather than lament it, they find it affirming, guaranteeing as it does their outsider status, their transcending ordinariness. It's a short leap from this sort of ironic aesthetic to the constant self-consciousness that fashion and technology have also conspired to induce.

In general, these two items have prompted me to wonder: Do recessions provide the appropriate, or perhaps requisite, climate for manufacturing authenticity? And by authenticity, I mean not a measure of how true to oneself one may have been as an artist but an aesthetic quality that connotes subversive cynicism without verging into actual revolutionary politics or anything else remotely practical. If so, is that because it is functioning as a valve for unrest that might otherwise find political expression or contribute to populist ferment? Do culture producers, artists, and their agents instinctively recognize the market potential of pseudo-subversive art during downturns, art which also happens to allow discontent to find social expression in a harmless way? It's probably not calculated. But downturns seem like the time when, for example, having the image of being a "band with no image" is a successful strategy. Authenticity is manufactured along those lines, to redeem the culture industry of its frivolity in more buoyant times.

Performance theft (12 March 2009)

Wired reports on a mobile-phone application that lets a user scan a barcode of a DVD and launch a bit-torrent download of it at their home (link via BoingBoing). Somehow this seems more like stealing than using a search engine to find a torrent in the privacy of one's own home. Handling the object you will no longer have to buy seems to make tangible the notion of intellectual-property theft, which makes me wonder why anybody would bother to do it. Are there those among us gripped by a self-destructive desire to flamboyantly to perform theft in public rather than in the peace and anonymity of their own homes? This would be like defiantly parading to the Adult Books store rather than surfing for porn online.

Perhaps straight-up pirates who are looking to steal everything to sell it subway platforms and the like would benefit from a system in which they could just scan everything on the shelf, but it would seem like these people would have more reason to want not to be on camera in a retail outlet doing this.

It has been a long time since I browsed in a store looking for DVDs or music (one of the major quality-of-life improvements the internet has brought my life is that I never have to go to a record store again), so maybe I have lost touch with that level of impulsivity that would make bar-code-automated stealing seem like a good idea. I suppose it has a poetic flavor to it, using the retail machine's tools against the system itself. (And then I'm going to get a tattoo of a bar code on my arm, to make an important statement about conformity.) It's hard to remember what it was like to have to discover new culture by browsing in stores, though it was once my primary mode of cultural discovery. It still is, to some degree, in book stores and libraries. I'm not nostalgic for learning about music from the import section at Listening Booth -- but it is for that sort of nostalgia that this bar-code-reader

But it seems like most discoveries of new cultural products to want are made online -- a depressing fact is that we have our cultural world expanded not by wandering through the world having experiences and encountering unlikely or unexpected things, but through the systematic and highly rationalized, virtually automated mode of searching online. I could set a schedule by my cultural discoveries -- every week or so I spend an hour or so plowing through newsgroups and mp3 blogs to see if anything sounds interesting. I'm not sure if these count as "discoveries" any more. Instead, I'm merely calibrating my internal novelty-seeking metabolism, rendering the very idea of discovery impossible.

Kitsch as dehistorisized aesthetics (9 March 2009)

At 3 Quarks Daily, Asad Raza responds to philosophy professor Dennis Dutton's The Art Instinct, a book that attempts to explain the existence of art in terms of evolutionary psychology. This thesis is probably important to argue if you have some stake in evolutionary psychology, less so if you are interested in art. Without having read the book, I can't see how it can be useful for anything other than attempting to derive a depoliticized and faux-universal aesthetic. Art serves political functions; the sexual selection it may help facilitate is political as well -- the signaling occurs within a given class structure and serve to reproduce it or react against it. Attention to the evolutionary aspect of artmaking (which ultimately strip the history out of art history; i.e. the stuff about art that is actually interesting beyond the sensual pleasure it gives) seems likely to divert attention away from the political aspects of aesthetics, which ideology about the supremacy and autonomy of individual taste already makes it difficult to perceive.

Raza points out some of the inherent problems of attempting to deduce the evolutionary significance of some supposedly universal tastes in art, focusing particularly on Dutton's assertion that landscape painting derives from early humankind's predilection for savannahs:

Your first chapter cites a survey finding that human beings are attracted to a certain type of landscape, which you point out resembles the most habitable savanna landscapes of the Pleistocene: "a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals." You hypothesize that people are attracted to such landscapes innately, and that is why calendars tend to feature them. When we are pleased by such a landscape, you conclude magisterially, "we confront remnants of our species' ancient past."

Raza points out that this is an extremely short-sighted account of the variety of landscape painting the world has produced.

Obviously, some landscape painting is meant to be beautiful and thus pleasurable, especially in European painting between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. But just because this particular genre of painting (lasting only ten generations or so) has some analogues in Eastern painting does not establish, to my satisfaction at least, that humans innately take pleasure in such pictures. To the contrary, most forms of painting, including that which decorates the caves in Lascaux, do not depict perspectival landscapes. Also, much landscape painting does not produce pleasure but fear and awe (think of Friedrich, or Turner). Isn't it just as likely that landscapes with a certain prospective view, from high ground, with sublime natural features such as high mountains at a safe distance, but with an enticingly serpentine river or path winding from foreground to background, producing a sense of exploration and travel, became popular when they did for historical reasons? And, having become popular, were later spread around the world, after technologies for the mass reproduction of images were invented, in the lowbrow form of calendars? Finally, even if you had a strong scientific case as to why humans take pleasure in looking at certain kinds of landscapes, that doesn't explain why paintings of such landscapes have at some times in some places been considered art, which does not mean simply pleasurable things--what you are arguing for (a love of calendar landscapes) might be better called "The Kitsch Instinct."

Regardless of the alleged science behind the pursuit of universal taste, one ends up with an effort to reject the plurality and particularity of actual aesthetics in action, and what purposes they serve and effects they have in a given sociohistorical moment, in favor of generalizations that efface history. Such critics have to generalize and universalize their own sentimentality under a series of scientific veils and recondite justifications. But that generalization inevitably results in kitsch, which is dehistorisized aesthetics. Kitsch is perhaps the only "universal" taste out there -- it is what one is inevitably left with when one is prone to generalizing about what pleases everybody.

Theses inspired by Hipster Runoff (6 Feb 2009)

I will take the bait. Here are a few theses inspired by Hipster Runoff, a site that bills itself as "The Most Conceptually Celebrated Blog in the History of the Memesphere." It strikes me as the apotheosis of a new category of critical discourse that, for better or worse, has been slowly congealing over the past few years via such various modalities as LOL cats, Vice magazine do's and don'ts, flame wars, douchebaggery and douche bags as a widely recognized species, text messaging, sock puppeteering, YouTube karaoke, intensely and disturbingly self-referential video art, and so on. This category still needs a label -- I'm hoping that postpostmodern will not be employed. I'm not entirely convinced that this is not just a fresh iteration of previous forms of postmodernity. Anyway, to the theses!

1. Online sociality has brought on a crisis of identity. The self has been externalized and its evolution preserved in ways that were previously unthinkable. The burden of self has thereby become more palpable.

2. Social criticism has been resolved into self-expression.

3. One can't be against hipsters. Hipsterism consists of its own repudiation. Recognizing the existence of hipsters to a certain degree makes one a hipster.

4. Social networks mandate identity formation on the model of cloud computing. One's corporeal self is merely the local host for a self whose operating system is now fixed elsewhere, distributed across a digital array. Our bodies function merely to transfer data to the cloud, to the networked space in which it may be transmogrifed into identity. Akin to "software as a service," we now have self as a service.

5. The variables we transfer to the cloud increasingly delimit the field of identity and condition what sorts of data will subsequently be considered relevant or applicable. Our data trail winnows, making online recommendation services seem more prescient and useful. These services will work to colonize more and more aspects of social being, suggesting friends and lovers as well as music, hobbies and interests. A song recommendation generated by your online practices will not be some byproduct of one's identity but its very substance. One will exist as the residue of the recommendations that one generates actively or passively through consenting to consign most of one's social activity to online forums and have them tracked and compiled. Our identity will only be as deep and complex as the quantitative density of our Facebook status updates and tweets.

6. Existence online appears accelerated, though in fact it consists of a series of frozen moments. It waits for and demands our input, perpetually presenting options and reminding us of alternatives while confronting us with the history of our previous tendencies. It thus forces on us unremitting self-consciousness. There can be no harmonizing of action and its preconception; no spontaneous authenticity.

7. Online, we are made painfully aware of the existential need to act, though that awareness is tempered by the way in which our actions online are always provisional and easily altered, augmented or supplanted. We can embrace necessary action with none of the responsibility for consequences.

8. Online practice is always a simulation in the sense that it occurs within a world that offers no real resistance to the self. A nondialectical space, the field of online being offers nothing to negate; it only assimilates. If, as Hegel claimed, the "rational is the actual" and vice versa, the realm of online simulacra is a realm where rationality is impossible. No critical intention can disrupt the reality presented online, nor can it merge with action and become praxis. Action results not in self-actualization but merely self-conscious agglomeration.

9. The collapse of language into abbreviations, arbitrary conditions of brevity, self-enforced infantilism and the like are attempts to import the the inflexible conditions of reality, against which we shape ourselves, to the online world, which lacks such conditions and threatens us with an amorphous and intolerable incontinence of identity.

10. Faced with the promise of a seemingly infinite extension of identity online, our actual lived identity shrivels to the disappearing point of spontaneous revisions at every instant, all of which are minutely recorded and make subsequent necessary reinventions that much more implausible and untenable.

The author as brand (30 Jan 2009)

In my post about volunteer criticism yesterday, I complained about writing online degenerating into self-branding via vectors like Facebook. At the Big Money, the Slate business site, Jill Priluck makes a related argument about the book-publishing business:

Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands.

Without support from publishing houses and their marketing budgets, Priluck suggests, authors can become preoccupied with brand building rather than writing. Self-conceived writing professionals of course have incentive to turn themselves into a brand and their writing into "branded content" -- they want to make a living. But noncommercial writers online face the same dilemma; the Web offers the possibility of a measurable audience, and the temptation is always there to write what increases the numbers (Gawker style) rather than write what one thinks. If as Priluck says, authors "trade depth for instant gratification, visibility, and higher advances," then so do nonprofessionals who are just writing for attention. Just as Facebook and Twitter seem to suggest that the purpose of friendship is to have the most friends or followers, the purpose of writing becomes maximizing readership, the content itself is merely a means to that end, which is always the content's ultimate meaning.

Is it possible to have "online presence" without it becoming a brand. Probably because of the centrality of marketing discourse in our culture, branding has become the all-purpose paradigm for all sorts of social behavior, a phenomenon whose recent explosion seems directly traceable to the way the internet lets us quantify the extent of our influence while dramatically expanding our reach. But brands are like distillations of our essence that discard the better part of our spontaneous personality -- we simplify who we are to something that is consistent and capable of being instantly communicated -- like an epitaph. And we consent to let the nature of our identity be openly traded and renegotiated in an open market. As Priluck puts it, "When authors are beholden to a brand, they ally themselves, almost like actors and athletes, with agendas and meanings that are well beyond their control."

We heedlessly commit ourselves to thinking of ways to improve our brand without worrying about the fact that it means we are always for sale.

The sadness of Michael's (17 Jan 2009)

This may be a pointless either/or question since it can be trumped with the response of "both and" (which is a useful trick, by the way, kind of like switching causes and effects to derive theoretical "insight"). But it interested me anyway as a sort of thought experiment. Which is preferable: (1) discussing a professionally produced song or a film or whatever with a friend or (2) sharing with one another songs or films or mashups or whatever that you've made yourselves. I think I prefer the former but often preach the latter. Sharing stuff you've made too often closes off the possibility of critical discussion or interpretational analysis, devolving instead into what my high-school friends used to call ballwashing. "Oh that's so cool! It's so great that you're doing that..." Often artistic professionalism is the cue to audiences that they are allowed to engage seriously with a work, to have an opinion regarding what it was about, to devote the resources to analyzing it, or even to allow themselves to enter into it vicariously. Often with homemade productions, I feel myself holding back, because I have this dread that I won't be able to share the (frequently critical) insights that I would thereby derive. Often, I have the suspicion that the desired and appropriate response is "That's great that you are doing that. Yay, you!" (Maybe I'm just a jerk.)

This question occurred to me because I was in Michael's, the chain craft store, earlier today, and it struck me as a great big repository of sadness. I'm sure scrapbooking and collecting rubber stamps brings great joy to many people, but all I could imagine was failure of creativity inherent in purchasing a decorate-your-own-mug kit or any of those kits where the manufacturers try to package the creativity inside, an effort to assuage purchasers of the fear that they won't be able to rise to the occasion and think of their own mug slogans. "We've thought of the project for you, all you have to do is follow directions." These kits are basically the home-consumer version of deskilling. Rather than sell the raw materials of soapmaking, Michael's sells you a soapmaking kit which pre-empts your learning how to make soap for real. The same is true for dumbed-down computer applications: Most of the people who have GarageBand on their iMacs will never record a song, let alone become musicians (though it presence does allow for some pleasing flights of fantasy about what you could do.) All that tends to happen when an artistic process is simplified to make it accessible to casual, semi-invested would-be creators is the production of substandard products that no one can possibly take seriously. No one who was serious about making something would stock up at Michael's for supplies, right? The chain stands as testimony to the collective crippling of our imagination.

Generally, information has never been easier to come by, yet it's never been harder to turn information into knowledge. Instead the volume of information is an incentive to dabble in things rather than delve into them in pursuit of some sort of mastery, no matter how slight. Is it better to know how to make really good pesto from scratch but nothing else, or to have ready access to many different kinds of passable microwavable meals but know how to make nothing well. (Or is that a particularly nefarious both-and situation?)

I feel a little guilty in bashing Michael's, because my intent isn't to dump on the people who shop there, reject them in favor of some superior set or artistic professionals. But some sort of process of professionalization seems necessary to bringing about a meaningful exchange between maker and user -- a social relation must be brought into being in which the exchange itself matters more than the personal relation. Of course, in capitalist society, professionalization is a matter of getting paid. Making money is the mark of professionalism -- transforming a production into a commodity for sale and finding success in vending it. Get to that point and you show that you're not just dabbling; you are trying to make customers of others and live up to their expectations. That discipline elevates the product beyond hobby and craft -- you're not just dilettanting around.

But professionalism needn't automatically be defined by money -- by selling out to the Man. It could instead be seen as a matter of creating something that isn't merely an extension of one's ego, a matter of wanting to give a social life to some idea or thing that will can then circulate independently from us. Amateur culture often fails to achieve that separation, doesn't rise to level where it can be seriously criticized because it seems that its primary purpose is to secure recognition for the maker. A noncapitalist understanding of professionalization might resemble flow, losing oneself in a process, wherein the end product is secondary to the creative experience itself but not a matter of total indifference. Instead it could have a ready path to manifesting its social usefulness, to finding an appreciative audience without having to be explicitly marketed -- and having its meaning permanently altered by that discourse.

Utopian internet folk probably have this in mind, that the internet becomes a low-barrier-of-entry distribution channel that permits our work to become socially useful without having to be channeled through capitalist means of production first. Unfortunately, capitalist media companies and various internet startups (often under the guise of enhancing the read-write web and so on) have by this time managed to embed themselves online between most home producers and would-be consumers, and in much in the same way as Michael's kits, the use of these intermediaries' services tend to taint our productions automatically with amateurism. Thanks to the corporate-owned easy-to-use services, the space that had been opened on the internet for a different kind of professionalism is now being flooded with look-at-me productions. If we are all narcissists, we'll all remain amateurs, which offers an interesting, albeit functionalist, way to look at the modern efflorescence of narcissism -- it seems as though there is an incentive to try to make us that way, insecure in who we are and preoccupied with gaining recognition. But sadly, a MySpace page will never make us web designers any more than a paint-by-numbers kit will make us artists.

Ain't gonna hang no picture frame (13 Jan 2009)

Rob Walker recently posted about Polaroid's efforts to survive in the digital-camera era. It now intends to offer the PoGo, a digital camera that comes with a built in printer. Judging by the AP review Walker cites, both the camera and printer are somewhat rudimentary, yielding small, low-res prints. This, Walker suspects, will prove to be a feature rather than a bug, since "the imperfections and limitations of actual Polaroid pictures were, in a way, part of their appeal."

This got me thinking about photos as artifacts, as specific objects that acquire a patina. Part of what makes photos worth saving is not their content alone, the image itself, but also the history that the object itself accumulates as it becomes like a heirloom. And as printing an image becomes more onerous and unnecessary, old photos seem to become valuable in and of themselves, as souvenirs of lost technologies, like old 78s or rotary phones. I wouldn't want to take the photos I have in box, scan them all, and throw them away (as I did with my CDs after I ripped them to my hard drive). The physical collection has a gravity to it that would be lost and would probably become inconceivable if it were digitized. Handling the objects seems to affect the feelings I have about what I am seeing. (I feel the same way about my long-since-scattered record collection, sacrificed because of NYC-apartment space constraints.) Paging through photo albums, too, is utterly different than scrutinizing image pools online. (This line of thinking makes me wonder if I should print my blog out and bind it, stick it with my college notebooks.)

With actual printed photos, there is a sense that something delicate and ineffable has managed to survive, a small miracle amidst the rampant image destruction we experience in our disposable culture. They seem to have an occult power, as pictures in lockets sometimes seem portentous, mystically imbued with significance. Digitization, though, puts photos in the same category with flickering TV images, meant to be consumed and forgotten after being experienced as entertainment. A physical archive seems to put them in a category with paintings, which invite us to take the time for contemplation. Digital photos are pushing prints further into the rarefied realm of fine art, the audience for them will most likely become reduced to those with the appropriate cultural capital -- the aesthetic appreciation training and so on.

Anyway, as a result of all this, I find digital-image frames strange and sad. Would you really stop to contemplate an image in a digital frame? Particularly one that will rotate new images into view like the billboards on bus shelters rotate ads? A certain contempt for memory seems to be built in to this technology. It encourages us to regard nothing framed as permanent, and by extension it prompts us to consider every impulse we might have to frame and preserve a particular image as provisional. The disregard for permanence embodied in such devices as this may establish a kind of material base for institutionalized forgetting. (I typed that sentence a few minutes ago, and now have come back to this and have no idea what I was getting at. Talk about forgetting.) History could be effaced, 1984-style, but worse, we could be convinced by the sorts of things we have in our culture that we shouldn't even bother with memories. (When people from my high school who I never talked to contact me through Facebook as though we were friends, I have this sense that memory is already under attack -- technology affords such interconnectivity that it seems to undermine the finality of choices made in the past, as though they never happened.) There may be no reason to automatically assume that memory preservation is inherently important to us. Given the right conditions, and a certain kind of society fixated on novelty, we could end up with every incentive to try to forget as much as possible, and have new images in our digital frames on a quarter-hourly basis.

Copyright of Murakami (24 June 2008)

My expectations may have been all wrong for the Takashi Murakami show, (originally I mistakenly wrote Haruki) which is currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Murakami is perhaps most notorious for designing bags for Louis Vuitton and making a retail location for their sale an installation in his show, so I expected some investigation of consumer culture and branding as contemporary forms of art -- a problematization (to use a good Foucauldian word) of the preeminence of branding in our culture. But instead it was "superflat" to use Murikami's own term for his style -- lifeless and at every turn unprovocative, blankly cheerful when embracing motifs derived from toys, unconvincing when aspiring to creepiness, with the lone exception of a video piece about a E.T. like robot-boy character who wants to be able to love like a real-life junior high school boy, presented as a series of fake commercials for a nonexistent TV series. That piece succeeded in messing with where we placed our empathy as viewers and made us reconsider what nostalgic fantasies of adolescence and sci-fi-themed escapes are about. Teen alienation is literalized, refigured in a way that makes that pain palpable and truly ridiculous at once -- a far cry from the way teen angst is an empty, stylized trope in our culture at large, and definitely in a different league of artistic inquiry than the Super Mario World juvenilia, the McDonald's Playland-like installations, the self-satisfied gestures toward commerciality in the rest of Murakami's show.

Presumably we are supposed to be at a point where we are not expected to be outraged at the commercialization of art, and are instead being asked to appreciate the artistry in the creation of a brand campaign. But if that is so, the joke is still on us for going to see an inferior execution at a museum when much better campaigns are taking place all around us. We'd be better served going to the long awaited grand opening of the Ikea store in Brooklyn. That is branding, democratization of design, identity crafting through purchases meant to shape the field of everyday life on perhaps the largest scale in the world. At the Murakami show, I felt like the artist was trying to cajole me into granting him leeway for the shallowness of his creations, as though they weren't exactly his fault and merely expressed the democratic spirit inherent in niche marketing: Everybody gets their products -- Louis Vuitton bags for the rich, stuffed animals and sticker sets for the less rich. But that's not an excuse for creating works with no frisson, with nothing that seems ingenious or provocative. Instead, there were hollow gestures -- a statue of anime characters with big breasts squirting a milk lasso; a mushroom cloud landscape; a room wallpapered with cutesy eyeballs. Was it a comment on how surveillance infiltrates our lives under the guise of welcomed entertainment? How we mistake Big Brother for something cute and cuddly? It just didn't seem like there was enough evidence to attribute such ideas to Murakami; I felt like I was going to my own bag of argumentative tropes to try to engage with what I was seeing, that I was reading it all against the grain rather than reveling in what was supposed to be, I think, a dazzling tour de force of sensual overload, of fun, flashy surfaces.

In the end I wasn't convinced that pop art is anything other than a dual-edged mockery of actual pop culture and the kind of art consumers who'd rather engage with his work than other sorts of fine art that requires more cultural capital -- more knowledge of artistic tradition, etc. The wall cards suggested that Murakami was modifying various Japanese aesthetic traditions, and maybe you need to be Japanese to appreciate the subtlety of his approach. But that ended up making me think Americans looking for an analogous experience should skip Murakami and instead go to DisneyWorld. Murakami seems to want to bring the spirit of childlike wonder and unreflective excitement typical of theme-park goers to the museum, but instead he made me feel like I now had to take the solemn spirit of museumgoing to the amusement parks. That's the problem with trying to collapse that particular dichotomy -- the dominant term (in this case high culture) wins out and corrupts the populist and potentially subversive pleasures to be found in the subordinate sphere. The inversion of values doesn't stick; pop culture isn't afforded new respect while remaining truly popular -- the popular audience just ends up being alienated from what once seemed like simple pleasures made for all of us by the new audience ironizing and problematizing it all by force of habit.

Absorbed with gadgets (9 June 2009)

At PSFK, Dan Gould posts about Evan Baden, who photographs people entranced by their electronic gadgets. Baden writes, "More and more, we are bathed in a silent, soft, and heavenly blue glow. It is as if we carry divinity in our pockets and purses."

Baden makes much of the technological innovation of gadgets and the "wealth of knowledge and communication" they allow, but it's worth remembering that the 18th century had the same reaction to the technological innovation of the day, books. The site hosting Baden's work poses this ominous question: "Their faces, made cadaverous by the artificial light, are expressionless, suggesting that, as we become more connected by our electronics, we become less connected to our immediate surroundings. This leaves us to wonder: do we own our electronics, or do they own us?" This echoes the society-wide fears of reading in the 18th century, primarily of women being preoccupied with books, which were seen as dangerous threats to their autonomy and education and their presumed role in the world. These fears supplied the substance of an array of plays, essays, and novels that fretted over women spending too much time reading and being emotionally altered by what they read. Like interactive gadgetry, books (novels especially) require the imaginative participation of the reader to make them come alive and work effectively. So perhaps any new media is destined to face this kind of criticism, that it is corrupting its users, removing them from contact with "reality" into some dangerously vulnerable trance state.

Compare this image

with this famous painting by Fragonard.

For more images, professor William Warner has collected a bunch for his essay on the subject here. Warner points out, "Like television watching in the mid 20th century, novel reading took France and England by storm; like television watching, reading novels engendered excitement and resistance in the societies where it first flourished." He cites Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality, a study of 18th-century French painting's representation of absorptive states (such as the ones Baden photographs) and the self-forgetting they suggest. Fried makes much of the way the figures in such paintings ignore the beholder, signifying a total self-absorption that constitutes at the same time a total self-forgetting, the loss of social self-consciousness. To achieve this effect, Fried argues, painters had to take pains to obliterate the point of view of the beholder. The "neutralization" that the paintings achieve enables the beholder to feel, Fried claims. The refusal to be acknowledged by the painting's figures "seems to have given Greuze's contemporaries a deep thrill of pleasure and in fact to have transfixed them before the canvas," Fried writes. This may be because the beholder is made to feel outside the network of surveillance for a moment -- this may be in fact what those staring into their iPods and BlackBerry's paradoxically feel -- that they are orchestrating the flow of communication around them, rather than being caught up in its web.

At the same time, onlookers are made to feel like voyeurs, as Fried claims beholders were when confronted with paintings full of absorbed figures. This heightens the reality-TV feeling of using gadgets in public, and I think it explains why some people feel the need to talk loudly on their phones in public spaces. Using the gadget renders the sense that we are eminently observable more powerful -- because the gadget user is completely absorbed, they are more completely vulnerable to being watched, though the gadget using itself may be a theatrical behavior, seeking to attract the attention it seems to be oblivious to.

Fried posits that "a new kind of beholder" must be created -- in other words, a new kind of vicariousness must be fomented in consumers of art that renders them paradoxically absent and present in the scene represented. They need to identify and judge and oscillate between those positions. Ien Ang identified this very motion in Watching Dallas, a study of how television series function. Ang points to "a constant to and fro movement between identification with and distance from the fictional world as constructed" in the work being consumed. Writes Fried, concluding his analysis of the new kind of art consumer: "The very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as theatrical, a medium of estrangement rather than of absorption, sympathy and self-transcendence." That seems to be the relationship we have with gadgets, and one another when we are using them.