Dangling Digital Carrot
A media savvy associate of mine sent me this illuminating article from NPR on the use of interactive games at museums to increase interest and participation.
So I’m having this profound existential problem with the marketing of art, and the dangling of digital carrots in front of would-be arts consumers. I absolutely feel like I am not mentally up to the task of unraveling the issue. I have this vague sense of disassociation that has a twinge of the irrational about it, which causes me to second guess what other people might call intuition. My intuition pushed me toward Baudrillard who I have supposed had some kind of a grasp on this.
The trouble with turning to the philosophical set is that they are always disagreeing with each other in arcane but not insubstantial ways. I don’t have the time to read Baudrillard, just the Wikipedia article and the Stanford article on him – a fact no doubt that he would use to indicate the validity of his point.
“For …Baudrillard, reification — the process whereby human beings become dominated by things and become more thinglike themselves — comes to govern social life. Conditions of labor imposed submission and standardization on human life, as well as exploiting workers and alienating them from a life of freedom and self-determination. In a media and consumer society, culture and consumption also became homogenized, depriving individuals of the possibility of cultivating individuality and self-determination."
That rings a bell. It’s more or less the beginning of the articulation of my concerns about what it means to use interactive technology to create an homogenized interface (a "sign" to Mr. B) between one human and the symbolic communication of another human (such as a painting).
The motives behind the creation and dissemination of these interfaces is primarily economic: if the curator says “we need more people to come” what they’re really saying is “we won’t be economically viable if more people don’t come and I'll lose my job and see the demise of a form and institution which is valuable to me.”
The reason you can be sure that’s the case is because the other option is considered nauseatingly elitist (which won’t due in century 21): “If the unwashed, plugged-in masses can’t appreciate our art at face value – screw them, the Philistines."
A final thought: I read in some hard-line business journal that mergers are what the corporate set does when they want to avoid real work. What do we artsy types do when we want to avoid real work (in addition to blogging)?
So I’m having this profound existential problem with the marketing of art, and the dangling of digital carrots in front of would-be arts consumers. I absolutely feel like I am not mentally up to the task of unraveling the issue. I have this vague sense of disassociation that has a twinge of the irrational about it, which causes me to second guess what other people might call intuition. My intuition pushed me toward Baudrillard who I have supposed had some kind of a grasp on this.
The trouble with turning to the philosophical set is that they are always disagreeing with each other in arcane but not insubstantial ways. I don’t have the time to read Baudrillard, just the Wikipedia article and the Stanford article on him – a fact no doubt that he would use to indicate the validity of his point.
“For …Baudrillard, reification — the process whereby human beings become dominated by things and become more thinglike themselves — comes to govern social life. Conditions of labor imposed submission and standardization on human life, as well as exploiting workers and alienating them from a life of freedom and self-determination. In a media and consumer society, culture and consumption also became homogenized, depriving individuals of the possibility of cultivating individuality and self-determination."
That rings a bell. It’s more or less the beginning of the articulation of my concerns about what it means to use interactive technology to create an homogenized interface (a "sign" to Mr. B) between one human and the symbolic communication of another human (such as a painting).
The motives behind the creation and dissemination of these interfaces is primarily economic: if the curator says “we need more people to come” what they’re really saying is “we won’t be economically viable if more people don’t come and I'll lose my job and see the demise of a form and institution which is valuable to me.”
The reason you can be sure that’s the case is because the other option is considered nauseatingly elitist (which won’t due in century 21): “If the unwashed, plugged-in masses can’t appreciate our art at face value – screw them, the Philistines."
A final thought: I read in some hard-line business journal that mergers are what the corporate set does when they want to avoid real work. What do we artsy types do when we want to avoid real work (in addition to blogging)?
Comments
Post a Comment