#11 Comments on Culture
Why I feel the Vice article on Letting GenZ make reels in art museums is flawed.
I stumbled across a newsletter I had written around two years back. I was thinking a lot about art and our medium of interaction with it. About how the whole edifice evolves and fits into the present cultural moment. What led me to revisit this particular piece was a Vice article doing rounds on Instagram, which talks about letting GenZ make reels in art museums. On first read, I liked the intent, the messaging of breaking art away from the clutches of an elitist and snobbish populace and letting people consume art the way they wanted to. However, the more time I spent thinking about it, the more I felt like something was missing. There was a gnawing feeling of a lack of further analysis, like it touched upon an essential piece of discourse we should be having, but stopped right when it could have analysed it more. Maybe the intent was not analysis. Maybe the intent was to express a deep rooted frustration with the elitism of the art world, and to open an avenue for the uninitiated to explore the world in their own ways. However, the fundamental lack was that it pitched the problem as a problem of individuals. The underlying motif throughout seemed to be a GenZ against millennial debate. Every time, I read about problems posed as a recurrent evolutionary problem of two warring groups, I ask myself the historical question of who profits from this battle of ideas. Hence, I wanted to write this, as an addendum or some additional thoughts on letting GenZ make reels in art museums.
The first time I read the title of the article- Let GenZ make reels, I wondered who isn’t letting them make reels. The structuring of the problem makes GenZ the disadvantaged group. The second question that presented itself was that in the present cultural moment, who dictates what art is. Who progresses the culture? The inherent assumption that a few Twitter think pieces which mock GenZ (which I feel is wrong, since it structures the problem as an individual problem) could outdo the cultural impact of how efficiently and quickly reels can transmit culture, is flawed. In this cultural bargain, the language seems to presuppose a power dynamics which does not exist.
The second pertinent question that the article raises is the question of “meaningful engagement.” It exposes the history of the art establishment, which has mostly coincided with the commerce establishment of the particular time, and questions if stressing on “one way” of correctly consuming art still holds true. The critique is on point, and opens the subjectivity of experiencing art but fails to close it. It answers the subjectivity, as art is meant to be experienced as beauty, which is a beautifully abstract answer but equally vague. A lot of questions present itself to me, when I think about the idea of meaningful engagement with art. The first one is that the whole idea of engagement with art has to presuppose that the engagement is happening between the art and the person, and not multiple peripheral mediums in between that reduce the art to aesthetic collateral. However, one might justly argue that a lot of us read our first book to impress someone, or didn’t even understand the intricacies of a particular art form till we necessarily engaged with it in theory, which is a function of privilege. Continuing on this line of thought, the first engagement with art maybe only adheres to the abstract idea of beauty, as mentioned in the article. However, I wonder about this idea of beauty in itself. I am reminded of Jean Baudrillard, in Simuclra and Simulation when he talks about the recurrent imageries fed to us, and writes, “The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.” I do wonder how much of this experience of beauty is a commodified experience that is fed as a pre-packaged way of enjoying the art museum through the reels, where the art of not participating in a specified manner, where the fear of missing out on the world knowing that you visited and “experienced” art is more than the actual experience of the art. The important qualifier here, obviously has to be that this is not specifically a problem of GenZ but of our times, so when the author writes, “Taking multiple selfies at art shows and in front of artworks might seem annoying to those of us who don’t, but what if we acknowledge it instead as a different form of engagement with art, specific to the times we live in?”, I am ready to acknowledge it as a different form of engagement but I also want us to acknowledge that we live in tumultuous times where understanding the insidious logic of capitalism and hyper-efficiency of communication which abhors silence, is important before giving in to subjectivity. Any experience of beauty has to be mediated by the understanding of the forces that dictate beauty, and the idea to build a communal environment where we can experience art with each other cannot be built on the isolation that social media platforms propagate. In our attempt to define meaningful engagement with art, we need to be open and critique the art establishment which has historically been an elitist space but also not be exploited by the commerce establishment which reduces art to a commodified entity, the interaction with which can only be reinforced by appealing to the short attention spans of an entire generation.
This brings me to the final point where there is a constant repetition of the fact, that somehow allowing people to make reels makes this art more accessible. At one point, the author writes, “If the true goal is for Gen Z to experience a “meaningful engagement” with art, then the first step towards that is to motivate them in ways that appeal to them. This can mean including opportunities to click nice pictures. And once you have them in your clutches, what stops you from giving them a healthy dose of an informative, meaningful experience?” I truly believe the intent here is good, but it sounds a lot like pandering to an entire age group who you believe can only engage with art when they are held captive with their reels and their phones. It seems like giving into the reinforced marketing logic of manipulation through addiction, wherein the inherent capability of the consumer, even to adhere to a healthy habit has to be reinforced through little dopamine hits and a sort of Pavlovian conditioning, where the allowance of making reels seems like a front for a further end goal of some form of higher engagement with art. The whole logic here seems contradictory, because if art is to be democratized to the point where there are no metrics for meaningful engagement, then each person engages with it as they want. It has to be completely irreverent. However, if we feel that we will somehow lure them into art by creating these visual experiences where social capital can be attained by making reels, in the hope that a few of the people will find something meaningful through this experience, then we are playing into the lie of an establishment that is using us as its marketing agents. The fundamental thesis over here is us assuming, that we are “letting” people make reels which we never had the power to begin with.
To end it all, in pure cynical fashion, I do not believe any of these opinions truly matter. It is a moot discourse that occurs on the sidelines of an ever evolving civilisation. Technology always progresses, and what becomes important is to understand how we engage with it. In the rhetoric of the subjectivity of human experience, should progress with the deep analysis of where our impulses come from. I do not think we can stop reels. It appeals to a biological and cultural need, and I do not have the prescription for the future of the civilisation. However, the postmodernist pitfall of everything is allowed because everything is subjective, seems like a dangerous idea to me because the erosion of all higher human impulses thrive on the lack of a consensual truth. The question that I often ask myself is the one that David Foster Wallace asked years back, “The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?” I hope we have the answers.