{"id":7148,"date":"2016-07-14T15:11:23","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T21:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7148"},"modified":"2016-08-06T08:59:26","modified_gmt":"2016-08-06T14:59:26","slug":"art-in-an-age-of-augmentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7148","title":{"rendered":"Art in an age of augmentation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"authenticity\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Instagram shows us what a world without art looks like.” \u2013Theses in Tweetform<\/a>, #19<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ricky D’Ambrose, in “Instagram and the Fantasy of of Mastery,” a mournful\u00a0essay<\/a> in The Nation,<\/em> examines what he sees as\u00a0a fundamental shift in aesthetics:\u00a0“the transition\u00a0from art, long vaunted as a special, and autonomous, area of sensuous intelligence, to creativity, to which art can only ever be superficially related.” Society’s love for\u00a0the overlay, the\u00a0template, the\u00a0filter, is on the rise, inexorably it seems. In place of a personal style born of a mastery of technique, we have the instant application\u00a0of a “look,” a set of easily recognizable visual tropes, usually borrowed either from an earlier artist’s style or from the output of an earlier\u00a0creative technology, executed through a software routine. The McCabe &\u00a0Mrs. Miller<\/em> look. The Brownie 127 look. The Ms. Pac-Man look. Looks take the work, and the anxiety, out of art.<\/p>\n

With looks, there is no time for squinting, no time for whatever is, or might be, inexplicable. A look\u2014insofar as it has any resemblance to style at all\u2014is a kind of instant style: quickly executed and dispatched, immediately understood, overcharged with incident. To say that a film, a photograph, a painting, or a room\u2019s interior has a look is to assume a consensus about which parts of a nascent image are the most worthy of being parceled out and reproduced on a massive scale. It means making a claim about how familiar an image is, and how valuable it seems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The shift from style to look is abetted by technology, in particular the infinite malleability of the digital artifact, but it seems to spring from\u00a0a deeper source: our postmodern cultural exhaustion, with its attendant\u00a0sense that fabrication is the defining quality of art and that all fabrications are equal in their fabricatedness. As the\u00a0erstwhile\u00a0taste-making class becomes ever more uncomfortable with the concept of taste, a concept now weighted\u00a0with the deadly sins of elitism and\u00a0privilege, the middlebrow becomes\u00a0the new highbrow.\u00a0The egalitarianism of the digital filter makes it a particularly attractive refuge for the\u00a0antsy fl\u00e2neur.<\/p>\n

An insidious quality of the aesthetic of the look is, as D’Ambrose notes, its insatiable retrospective hunger. It gobbles up\u00a0the past as well as the present. The very style that gave rise to a\u00a0look comes to be seen as just another manifestation of the look: “One can now watch John Cassavetes\u2019s\u00a0A Woman Under the Influence<\/em>\u00a0just as one watches Joe Swanberg\u2019s recent\u00a0Happy Christmas<\/em>: in quotation marks. (Both have ‘the 16-millimeter look.’) The look and its source become, in the mind of the viewer who knows the corresponding filter, identical.” The exercise of taste, like the exercise of creativity, becomes a matter of\u00a0choosing\u00a0the correct filter.<\/p>\n

The phenomenon isn’t limited to the visual arts. Popular music also increasingly has a digitally constructed “look.” Writing\u00a0is trickier, more resistant to programming than image or sound, but it’s not impossible to imagine a new breed of word processor able to apply a literary filter to a person’s words. A Poe filter. A Goethe\u00a0filter. A Slouching Towards Bethlehem<\/em> filter. Instagram for prose: surely somebody’s working on it.<\/p>\n

Should augmented reality take off, we’ll be able to rid ourselves of\u00a0artists and their demands once and for all. We’ll all be free\u00a0to exercise our full, transformative creativity as observers and\u00a0consumers, imposing a desired look on the world around us. Blink once\u00a0for sepia-tinged. Blink twice for noir. Already there\u00a0are earbuds in testing\u00a0that allow you to tweak the sound of a concert you’re attending. They’re controlled by an app that includes, reports<\/a> Motherboard,\u00a0“a bunch of\u00a0custom sound settings like ‘dirty country,’\u00a0‘8-track,’\u00a0‘Carnegie Hall,’ or ‘small studio.'” Sean Yeaton, of the band Parquet Courts, admitted\u00a0“it could be cool to match your soundscape to your mood in mundane settings like the grocery store, but [he] balked at the idea of giving the audience control over the live sound at concerts. He pointed out that it would be pretty fucked up to go see Nine Inch Nails only to make it sound like Jefferson Starship.”<\/p>\n

I guess your perspective depends on which side of the filter you happen to be on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Instagram shows us what a world without art looks like.” \u2013Theses in Tweetform, #19 Ricky D’Ambrose, in “Instagram and the Fantasy of of Mastery,” a mournful\u00a0essay in The Nation, examines what he sees as\u00a0a fundamental shift in aesthetics:\u00a0“the transition\u00a0from art, long vaunted as a special, and autonomous, area of sensuous intelligence, to creativity, to which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-takes-command"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7148"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7189,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7148\/revisions\/7189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}