HIGH ENTERTAINMENT
“From the start I was unapologetic about my work’s embrace of entertainment culture. As things progressed, entertainment became more deeply integrated into my thoughts and actions, moving me progressively farther from an interest in the internals of art. For a long time now I’ve not been addressing art in my work, but certainly I am addressing being an artist, and locating that role’s contemporary coordinates. I don’t think you find those, today, by considering the art context alone. When you’re young you identify the culture in the artists you admire. The culture is in them, they’re in charge of it. The years go by, and you keep working, and one day you understand that you’re the culture now. The culture was always in you, but now the culture is you. Once you realize that, you can take the culture where you want it to go. You don’t ask the permission of a museum or a university art program. You just do it.”
Changes ushered in by the digital revolution have only begun to be sensed and identified. Among them is one I’ve been terming high entertainment. A new category of imaginative production, high entertainment balances art’s emphases on form-discovery and experimentation with entertainment’s emphasis on accessibility. Born of the new production and distribution opportunities of the digital era, high entertainment encourages the independent imagination to apply art’s experimentalism to mainstream media formats such as commercial film and television. High entertainment is intended too as an alternative to thinking through the frame and concerns of the visual art context.
We are, collectively, in the early stages of adapting to a phase of technology wherein we may efficiently create highly personal work in mass-media formats and, with equal efficiency, offer the unfiltered result of our efforts to the world. We will be on this plane of cultural evolution for some decades.
That’s fine with me. Having hoped for something like it for years, I am, personally, in no hurry to move out of it. I recall recurring conversations with artist friends, in the early ‘90s, about whether to work in video, conversations that invariably ended up beached on the same sandbar: video looked crummy, editing video was tedious and difficult, and other than (sporadic) opportunities in art galleries or museums there was no place worth the effort to make them. Now that’s all changed, enough that we can move on to more complex questions — among them, one recently posed by another artist friend of mine. “You’re uploading a video,” he said, “toward what purpose? What’s it for?’” In a word, Why? He’d prefer that these new capacities we’ve been handed be applied toward critical ends. As far as I’m concerned, though, the act of pursuing creative work that doesn’t conform to what we expect of art or entertainment is not only in itself sufficiently critical of both contexts, it’s actually more powerful, because it confounds a template of goals that have already been tried. We’ve been handed an opportunity to find out something else about ourselves, so let’s take it. Do we have the imagination and, then, the courage to act on what our imaginations conjure? We’ll see. For now I’m fine with wedging open the door marked Why and sticking around to watch a menagerie of futures pass through it.
High Entertainment went online in 2009, expanded from an essay written a few years earlier. I have resisted the urge to update some of the, now period, technological references included in it, preferring to respect the original circumstances and spirit of the text. Here and there I have endeavored to improve a sentence..
Read the complete High Entertainment book below.
HIGH ENTERTAINMENT
In our time the vast, congested world of image-makers is organized around two poles. Around one pole gathers the sort that pursues Refinement, while around the competing pole cluster creative minds that have adopted Accessibility as their mantra. Most usually, the refinement-oriented image-maker, aspiring to offer complex and ambitious communication product, has, after surveying the cultural terrain, identified the art world as the realm best suited for the exercise of their talents and the pursuit of those aspirations. They apply themselves to making art–paintings, sculpture, and the like. Given the difficulty of engaging the production economies of the mainstream popular culture, not to mention the lowish aspirations for humankind often conveyed in the wares offered by the aggressively Accessible mass culture, anyone’s decision to enlist in the smaller and more specialized realm of art is understandable. Yet a decision of that nature doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Repeated decade after decade by thousands of first-rate creative minds it accretes, and forms a pattern. And in the shadow of that pattern substantial questions mushroom.
What, one wonders, have been the consequences to the whole culture of a flow of first-rate intellectual and creative ability away from the mainstream, decade after decade? Is it not conceivable that the flow of ability and aspiration, opting always for the same course, cutting a channel ever deeper, has actually worked to perpetuate the divide between the art culture and the accessible, popular, “entertainment” culture (the very divide, of course, that made the refinement-seeking mind feel it had no realistic alternative but to enlist in the art world!)? Furthermore, doesn’t this continual, dependable, predictable flow of first-rate intellectual and creative ability into the specialized realm of art effectively guarantee both the marginality of the art culture and the generally low aspirations–sex and money, sex and money, sex and money–of the (now global) mass culture? Aren’t both cultures weaker for that division? And doesn’t the wholeness of culture–society, if you will–suffer for it?
There is, I’m saying, a sort of brain drain at work in the contemporary culture, enacting a pattern so long established we don’t even question it let alone imagine that it might be corrected. This brain drain configures our culture at deep structural levels. It underwrites a tired theater wherein a comparatively small art world looks down on the mainstream culture while, for its part, the popular, mainstream culture, self-charged with entertaining The People and thus feeling somehow “obliged” to find repellent not only the elitist economy of fine art but the very principle of exclusionism that a culture of refinement feeds on, represents, trades in, and promotes, walls itself off from the formal, material, thematic, and attitudinal questing that defines the fine artist in the modern era. In truth, the rules of this theater are held in place more by the players’ vanity–in the case of art, the need to feel oneself superior and special, and the need for an association with exclusivity; in the case of the mass-culture, the illusion that one is speaking for The People, and “giving people what they want”–than by any condition intrinsic to either the media or the venues through which the refined and the mass cultures communicate with their respective audiences. Unchecked and unchallenged, the tired theater has settled in for a long run. Surmising that their sensibilities and interests will never be accommodated by the baldly mercenary machinery of the entertainment culture, refinement-seeking minds flock en masse to the art world, while minds geared to the valid and not unvirtuous goal of seeking to communicate in forms that are understandable to the largest possible audience sponsor, in the name of that audience, a suspicion of intellect and a fear of experiment. With each sticking to their own kind, who can be surprised that professionalized ghettos of thought and sensibility have been the result? A few individuals prosper, the ghettos thrive as ghettos–and the wider culture continues to be less than it might.
But–good news!–a counterforce has been unleashed, one with the potential to inject plenty of brightening fizz into this stale arrangement. Advances in technology once again are restructuring the culture. This time around it’s the digital revolution that’s disturbing entrenched social patterns right and left. Independent imaginations have been enabled to work directly, efficiently, and economically in the forms and formats of the mainstream media culture. The kids are pointing cameras and microphones at things and creating their own entertainment–movies, pop music, and TV-culture-influenced videos. They’re burning these onto DVDs and CDs, uploading them, downloading them…–which means they’re able not only to create in mass-media formats but, crucially, distribute them as well. This marks a new stage as, previously, corporations had had a stranglehold on the technology needed to communicate via the language of the mainstream media culture they’d been instrumental in establishing. In transforming this long institutionalized imbalance of technology, the digital revolution has handed this society the tools, and the opportunity, to reverse the persistent brain drain as well.
Exactly what it’ll mean to have an entire generation of independent imaginations pointing cameras and microphones at things and creating their own movies, pop music, and TVesque video without obligation toward or concern for the apparatus of the media state–and keep in mind this will be the first generation to do so, not the last–isn’t clear yet. Already, though, this freshly-minted phenomenon, coined only yesterday morning, is destabilizing both the context of art and the context of mainstream media technologies–the anti-intellectual “entertainment culture”–by indicating a realizable middle-ground between the two.
“High Entertainment,” I’ve taken to calling one sector of the emergent middle-ground. Drawing upon the better aspects of both worlds, High Entertainment will combine entertainment’s accessibility with art’s experimentalism and bent toward form-discovery. Here I hasten to emphasize that High Entertainment really is entertainment. It isn’t art, insofar as it doesn’t share visual art’s fixation on the complex issues surrounding representation, visual art’s obsession with articulated interplay between form and content, visual art’s propensity for criticality, or visual art’s narrow historicity. Anyone who expects to read High Entertainment according to the rules and codes maintained by the visual art system, as manifested either in its professional or academic wing, can expect to be disappointed. High Entertainment “fails” as art because it’s not trying to be art. High Entertainment is entertainment, and wants to be, but it is entertainment that shares something of art’s ambitions for the culture–of art’s ambitions for you.
High Entertainment is where some of art–or rather, some artists–will be going. Writing about that destination is, at this stage, mostly a predictive operation, but it isn’t entirely or only that. I base my thinking in part on my own evolution, and on identifying the different, quite real thought- and sensibility-waves I’ve felt as a result of making the kind of work this essay means to delineate. Something of the character of the coming High Entertainment can be known. The essay that follows may be predictive but it isn’t science fiction.
One DVD Burner, One Vote
While the idea that an artist might, say, make a painting one month and a movie or TV show the next has been around since Andy Warhol, that production model had rarely been explored after he’d invented it. To do so was, for a very long time, “too Warholian;” real artists, looking to make their own mark on art history, will always seek a personal model of production. Today, though, producing in both traditional “fine” and contemporary media forms is easily and efficiently executed–one no longer need go to all the trouble of being Andy Warhol in order to use the production model he’d pioneered–and consequently it’s becoming much more widespread. (That Warhol had become the boy or the girl next door was, incidentally, the news brought by the film American Beauty.)
The new recording and computing technologies are so good, and the results they produce so closely resemble the real thing (I refer not to Warhol’s production but to the top-notch audiovisuals that media-corporation-owned technology offer an audience) that the quality gap between the kind of media work made by an independent imagination and that generated by the likes of CBS, Warner, and MCA–a gap until recently positively grotesque–has become negligible. The close of that quality gap means that an independent imagination who opts to think in terms of film or video (whether for all or only part of their output) is now that much closer to having his or her work absorbed by the gigantic systems of the mainstream culture. Thus an independent imagination is no longer restricted to thinking in terms of gallery or museum but may now consider communicating via DVD distribution, website, theatrical release, even (gasp!) broadcast.
Are the distribution and evaluation systems of the mainstream culture prepared for this? They are not–not by a long shot. Do they welcome it? They do not. But it’ll happen anyway. As imaginations that have been trained in other traditions (including some conversant with the culture of refinement) increasingly produce in mainstream formats, gradually the existing distribution systems will feel the pressure. (The systems that have long been in place for distributing and evaluating pop culture are already starting to groan from change, and the new era I’m describing has just begun!) If today 12,000 (to choose a number) independent imaginations are producing in formats absorbable by the mass culture, before long 120,000 will produce in this way, and then 1,200,000…. The existing systems will have to accommodate it. Eventually they’ll see the commercial advantage of doing so. It’s only a matter of time. And even then the independent imagination will still have real, practicable alternatives to the corporate production and distribution system.
To this phenomenon (which, as I’ve indicated, is only just beginning) a swarm of questions attach. For what sort of movies and “TV” does someone trained in, say, the vocabularies and history of fine art make, exactly? How will they be different from, and how the same as, the movies and TV that are produced by the official entertainment culture? Is the independent imagination in question just “making art with digital technologies,” or have they perhaps some obligation to respect the integrity of forms and formats that, designed for the mainstream, have their own history? (A TV sitcom is just as specific a form as an abstract painting, after all.) What, in other words, is the relation to the mainstream of an artist able to work in mainstream forms and formats? Need that artist’s mainstream production–a movie, a “TV show”–be integrated with their “fine art” production, in the manner of a modern artist like Warhol? And what if that independent imagination chooses to work exclusively in mainstream media formats, and distribute their work independently? If they aren’t bound either by the production rules of the entertainment industry or the rules of presentational logic maintained by the art system, what is that independent imagination’s cultural location? Are they an “artist” or an “entertainer”?
For some of you, questions such as these are waiting just around the corner.
What Is Entertainment, Anyway?
On the periodic table of culture, entertainment is assigned a lighter atomic weight than art. Entertainment’s structure, however, is as specific in its own way as art’s.
Set aside the question of media for the time being–when it comes to communication, some medium is assumed to be involved–and focus on the consistent underlying structure of the entertainment transaction. Entertainment’s structure is binary. There is 1) a maker (the “entertainer”) and 2) an audience. It is an aggressively audience-centered model–which is to say people-centered. The entertainer is free to do “anything” to entertain an audience. Delivering pleasure to an audience is always the goal but the method of accomplishing this is wide open. Additionally, proof of a given method’s effectiveness is instantly available: something either “entertains” or it doesn’t.
This minimal, binary structure of entertainment may be attributable to the fact that, usually, entertainment is defined by the actions of a performer; to be entertained, an audience really needs nothing more than a proficient, entertainment-minded human standing in front of it. Although its presence isn’t required, a human performer is the basic integer of entertainment. Audience members will relate to that human performer with a directness that something made of, say, wood, paint or bronze does not permit.
Entertainment has a certain directness in its genes, then. Art, by contrast, is inherently indirect. In art, there’s 1) a maker (the “artist), who bounces a creative signal off 2) an imaginary abstraction, (termed, broadly, “art”) to reach 3) the audience. Art’s structure thus has three parts, with the satellite off which the signal is bounced going by a number of aliases–“art” being one, “history,” “meaning,” and “discourse” others. While the audience still receives the signal, it does so indirectly, and secondarily. The satellite, Art, always receives the signal first.
“Something ‘entertains’ or it doesn’t….”–entertainment’s binary structure seems to be simpler, yet it masks a complex, ancient transaction. What, after all, does it mean to be “entertained”? What do we feel, really, when we feel “entertained”? What are the qualities of this sensation? How is it induced in human beings? The fact that each of us has experienced “failed” or “bad” entertainment–i.e. entertainment that didn’t entertain–clearly indicates that it’s a specific sort of enterprise, and a specific sort of experience.
If there are many ways to entertain, many methods, many means, a constancy nevertheless courses through them all. The constancy may be described as a sort of vibration. Entertainment is a vibration created in humans by humans for the sake of pleasure and delight. Question: need a vibration be justified? Let’s go further: Is it possible, even, to justify a vibration? Music may be a useful analogy, here. Consider the pleasing electric guitar note. What justification is required of that note beyond the pleasure it is bringing you? Absolutely none. The entertainment vibration is similarly beyond, or before, justification.
Entertainment is to be accepted, then, as a large, significant, and mysterious human event, the exact nature of which can never be identified. Therefore to be able to do it and do it well should be–and is–sufficient. To delight others is enough. Such additional validation as elevation to the condition of Art bestows isn’t required.
High Entertainment proceeds, then, from a belief that to entertain well needs no additional justification. High Entertainment pursues, and then aligns itself with, the entertainment vibration.
The Space of the Mainstream
We sorta know where it’s going
We sorta go where it’s flowing
The Mainstream
Flowing to you
Flowing through you
The hits just keep on coming
Always room for one more
In the mainstream
Flowing to you
Flowing through you
It’s coming for you
All for you and one for all
In the mainstream
On and on
Floating on
Floating in
The mainstream
Try and stop it
Stop and try it
Everybody buy it
We sorta know where it’s going
We sorta go where it’s flowing
The mainstream
“The Mainstream”
Copyright 2003
Music by The Ingredients, lyrics by DR
The mainstream is a powerful force in modern life. As a cultural producer you can’t entirely escape negotiation with it. Your work is either part of the mainstream or it isn’t. Your intentions for your work will count for only so much; the mainstream decides. And of course, further complicating things is the fact that the mainstream evolves; some day your work might become part of the mainstream–even against your will!
The fate of any individual’s cultural production aside, the mainstream is in everyone’s peripheral vision. We ask ourselves: “Who is my work intended for?’Everyone’? Why? What do I gain by emphasizing accessibility? What do I lose? Does the effectiveness of my work depend on embracing or rejecting specialized languages of presentation?” Concerns such as these, shaped by the force of the mainstream, have special vibrancy today because of our recently enhanced ability, courtesy the digital technologies, to work directly, efficiently, and inexpensively in the languages and formats of the pop motherland. Movies, TV shows, and pop music are mainstream communication formats, the communication formats of the mainstream, and the ease with which today’s independent imagination deploys them brings a consequent pressure to develop our thinking about the mainstream. (When there was less chance of our participating in it, the mainstream demanded less thought from us.) Visual artists in particular will find this an unfamiliar mental exercise: in the modern era the art context has aggressively set itself apart from the mainstream culture and reveled in the separation, the difference, the liberating marginality that had ensued. High Entertainment does not participate in this tradition.
A High Entertainment does not scorn the mainstream. It takes the mainstream into account. It respects the idea of “a mainstream” and the legibility and accessibility of mainstream product, yet at the same time it does not pay undue respect to the particulars of the mainstream–this or that production method, this or that product. A High Entertainment product enjoys the game of trying to reach as many people as possible but, knowing that it is a game, avoids being defined by it.
Mainstream 101
At present, Mainstream Studies is a field about which we have more questions than answers.
We take the existence of “a mainstream” for granted, and yet what, really, is the mainstream? It’s a cultural force, yet it has the presence of a natural force. Like nature the mainstream is everywhere, constant, and self-renewing.
Why is there a mainstream, i.e. what is it for? What purpose does it serve? Who is it for?
If we say that the mainstream functions to confirm, what does it confirm? Certain ideas that a society has about itself? Such as?
Is the idea of a mainstream a universal, appearing in all cultures? Is a mainstream equally important to all cultures, or is it more important to some? (It could be argued, for instance, that the concept of a mainstream plays a much more central role in democratic societies than in royalist.) Has there been a mainstream as long as there’s been culture, or was there a stage at which the idea of a mainstream became more emphatic? Is so, what brought about that change?
What are the vehicles by which the mainstream is delivered? Is, say, the craft of needlepoint a mainstream vehicle? No. Is wood-carving? No. Why aren’t they? In their means of execution, in their possibilities for distribution, needlepoint and woodcarving are inefficient. Not enough speed, not enough dispersion in needlepoint or woodcarving. Rapid speed and wide dispersion would seem, then, to be two of the operative energies defining mainstream vehicles in our time.
Three Articulations of the Mainstream
Let’s take a break from the questions for a moment and glance at three ways in which the space of the mainstream has been articulated in architecture.
Most familiar is the sort of repetitive, “brand” architecture typified by such chain restaurants as McDonald’s. Brand architecture intentionally unifies the space of the mainstream, by emphasizing ubiquity and standardization. When we complain of too many modern cities looking too much the same, when on a road trip we drive past yet another McDonald’s in another small American town, when we resort to eating at McDonald’s to give ourselves a break from deciphering menus in some foreign land, we have entered a theater of unified space authored by a corporate brand. Brand architecture indeed suppresses any reading of mainstream space other than unified; it relates one big contemporary truth (that it has itself engineered!) while at the same time suppressing myriad other, equally valid truths about the organization of space. (This is what irritates us about brand architecture.)
A second example of the embodied mainstream comes from Morris Lapidus, whose buildings are, like brand architecture, a post-war phenomenon.
Morris Lapidus understood the game of the mainstream and excelled at playing it. His Miami Beach hotels of the 1950s–the Fontainebleu and the Eden Roc among them–unashamedly embraced the reality of pop commerce, and advanced that reality into form. “What am I selling?” Lapidus asked himself. “I’m selling a hotel, a luxurious, playful atmosphere. There’s nothing else to sell.” His designs infused the spirit of Watteau into architecture–“My hotels are to tickle, to amuse…”. Lapidus made frankly populist, audience-centric architecture, buildings not in the service of the state or abstract historical discourse but, rather, the People–a specific demographic with a specific use for a specific type of building. Lapidus: 
“Whose tastes was I trying to satisfy?…The critics were not going to be guests at the Fontainebleu.” His epiphany? “I finally realized that American taste was being influenced by the greatest mass media of entertainment of that time, the movies. So I imagined myself the set designer for a movie producer who wanted to create a hotel that would make a tremendous impression on the viewers. Wasn’t that exactly what I had wanted to do when I studied architecture? So I designed a movie set!” Ah, but with a crucial difference: 
“My sets were not for a play or a stage, they were the interiors of a grand hotel.” Lapidus’s hotels, observed Thomas Hine, “would have no particular expectations based on traditional proportions, historic styles or particular building materials or construction methods. Lapidus built according to what people had in common, which was not education or taste but the experience of mass media. It is the architecture of people who yearned to join the mainstream and have succeeded, through their own efforts, in joining it.” [Thomas Hine, Populuxe]
At the same time that Lapidus’s hotels embodied “hearty vulgarity” and “intentional nonsense” (“I…do what I think is a sort of baroque in good taste” in a style “neither period nor modern.”) they possessed formal and conceptual integrity. “My buildings would express what was taking place in the interiors, and if the interiors would curve and undulate, my buildings would curve and undulate.” The form did follow the function, in other words–only here the definition of “function” broadened to include overt recognition of the centrality of fantasy and leisure. For mainstream American architecture, this was a big step forward.
A third type of design that reflects mainstream space–and another sort of “people’s architecture”–was designed by the SITE Architects in the 1970s for the Best Company. Although the opposite of Lapidus in terms of style, the SITE architects—James Wines, Alison Sky, Michelle Stone, Emilio Sousa–position the audience in a similar, and similarly theatrical, way to his. Like Lapidus’s hotels the Best buildings tap the collective unconscious (here played out in a strip mall environment) by picturing dynamic processes–peeling, crumbling, tilting. Instead of referring to design or architectural history a building is treated as a found object–a box, to which things are done. These are simple structures articulating clear narrative situations apparent to all.
Doing the Math
The mainstream (based on the evidence of these various monuments to it) comprises communication product–manifested in format as much as in intent–that is defined by its legibility and accessibility. Legible by, accessible to whom? To as many people as may desire access to it.
Considered mathematically, this is simply remarkable: the scale of entity X (here, The Mainstream) is determined by the number of people who acknowledge X!
The mainstream is, then, a game of numbers–a game of scale. Adults are known to be attracted to games of scale; attempting to enter the mainstream is one of the games that adults play to pass the time in adulthood. (Of course, not all work does well to seek the scale of the mainstream. Some work is meant for altogether different scales of culture–smaller, more intimate scales. In its heart of hearts, though, our time isn’t so interested in work meant for scales smaller than the mainstream–a serious mistake, perhaps, on the part of our culture, but there it is.) Why is it desirable to be absorbed into the mainstream? For one thing, it can be lucrative. The mainstream is the big market. Too, absorption into the mainstream symbolizes history’s acceptance, and who doesn’t want that?
There’s a catch to entering the mainstream, however. In order to enter the game that the mainstream represents, the particular communication product seeking absorption must restrain any criticism it might have made of that consortium of forces which sees to it that the mainstream continues to flow and irrigate. That restraint is essential, for (what amount to) political reasons. The forces that feed and maintain the mainstream are (it should be obvious) capital and the power that controls capital. Those communication forms that rely on a large capital investment–movies, TV shows, pop music among them–will be more obliged, therefore, to restrict any criticism they conceivably might have leveled. They are designed, in other words, to not reveal all that they know. The limits to truth-pursuit and truth-telling that these communication forms impose on themselves keep them in the shallow end of the pool, and it’s this, survivalist’s willingness to remain in the shallow end that, at least in part, defines these works as “entertainment.”1
High Entertainment challenges this tradition. Anyone who can shoot, edit, print, and distribute their own movies and TV shows isn’t under the same constraints faced by producers of conventional mainstream entertainment. A High Entertainer is even free to activate the mainstream as theme, as concept, as material to be exploited. (Was it The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper cover, a collage of mainstream and cult figures, that announced this possibility? Didn’t that album cover, created by Peter Blake in 1967, signal both a conscious recognition of a mainstream and the idea that this conscious recognition might be put to use?) By so doing he or she may very well advance these matters on a broad plain.
Conceptual Art for the Masses?
If a High Entertainer is free to use mass media communication formats toward conceptual ends, does that make High Entertainment some sort of “conceptual art for the masses”? Is that really the goal here?
I’m hesitant to endorse that interpretation. “Conceptual art for the masses”: how is the phrase (and the idea it suggests) in any way distinguished from plain old mass culture, or advertising, or marketing? Don’t we already have “conceptual art for the masses”?
The Mainstream and Time
Like the Present, the mainstream is huge and invisible and constant. The mainstream is the eternal present tense of culture.
Characterizing the mainstream as a stable, constant cultural force assumes some pre-conditions. It assumes not only the existence of a certain kind of stable, constant production but also a stable, constant audience for that production. And in order for a mainstream to work its myriad effects, the audience must have time to engage with those effects. Leisure is thus a major factor informing any conception of the mainstream.
Leisure is all about time. Time for what? Leisure! The mass experience of leisure is born of time-saving tools and processes. As our brains evolved we innovated many such tools and methods that, commonly described as time-saving, were equally time-creating. All that freshly minted time had somehow to be filled. We became very good at filling it. We learned to fill time ever more subtly. The expansion of time yielded not only leisure hours and a need to fill those hours but a self-consciousness about filling those hours–a capacity, in other words, to reflect upon or comment upon time passed in leisure. Entertainments, activities, and artifacts that were created for leisure consumption came increasingly to be informed by our reflections on leisure.
In an information age, this development appears right and natural. In a sense, then, it is so like us to ask: What is leisure for? Are we supposed to be doing something with it? Is it an end in itself, or is leisure, which would seem to be all process, actually the product too? That some ambivalence should attach to leisure isn’t at all new. Questions about the role of leisure were raised even by Aristotle, who suggested that “leisure time be used to do something that was desirable for its own sake.” As usual, Aristotle had his mind set on nobility of purpose. Seneca, more cynical and practical, argued that “as a perfect state of life is unattainable, a life of leisure constitutes the next best thing.” Cicero saw leisure in practical terms too, but more positively–as a way to re-charge. Montaigne “made palatable the notion that people, in the interest of their mental welfare, must ‘escape from reality’….” [“The Coming of Media Entertainment,” Dolf Zillmann] (It should be pointed out that in the modern world, where leisure doesn’t merely reflect on experience but fills so many hours that it indeed comprises experience, Montaigne’s notion of entertainment as “escapism” has its limitations.) Fretting over leisure was once reserved for philosophers and the idle classes. But just as all classes now share many of the same leisure-time pursuits, are entertained by many of the same products, and benefit from the same time-saving devices, so too has the tendency to reflect on leisure become democratized. We can all participate in it.
In the process of expanding the availability of leisure to all classes, would not a median condition of leisure have formed? Is it this “median condition of leisure” that “the mainstream” refers to? Is it a pre-condition of the emergence of a mainstream that roughly the same kind of leisure be available to all classes?
Of course, to present leisure as something separate and apart from the world of work and ambition is to present a false or at best partial picture. We frequently pass our leisure hours entertained, and the kinds of entertainments that we use don’t materialize out of thin air, they come from somewhere–from, for the most part, a small number of enormous corporations. The space of the mainstream is to a large extent a managed space. It is not news to you that the producers and distributors of mass entertainment have their own aims, which may include but certainly are not limited to showing people a good time. (Entertainment, under modern conditions, operates at such a scale, economically and culturally, that pure altruism isn’t really thinkable. Power attaches. The people who are involved in the production of modern entertainment product enjoy considerable power. Would you let that power go unused?)
For this reason, to opine that one of the functions of mass entertainment might be to distract a populace from asking hard questions that might lead to real dissent is not the observation of a paranoid. Similarly, to suggest that the powerful who produce entertainment sometimes use it as a means of ingratiating themselves to the masses–whatever else can the Super Bowl halftime show be for?–is not being unduly suspicious. But this is not news to you. You weren’t born yesterday. You understand that when entertainment producers claim they’re just giving us what we want, they are depending to some degree on the public’s ignorance of more satisfying alternatives–which limits to knowledge, of course, the producers have themselves arranged, since investing in known rather than unknown quantities decreases their own exposure to risk. You get that. No one has to tell you that, rather than fostering experiment, the profit motive that drives the marketplace often limits the range of invention. You’ve been onto the game for a long time now.
Through entertainment product, profit-seeking individuals try to contain the space of the mainstream and pre-determine the direction of its flow. It is the dark side of modern leisure. At the same time, negativistic Marxian takes on conjuring and controlling desire aren’t the only possible reads. Is modern marketing ‘the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history” [“The Age of Hyper-Commercialism,” Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media] or the artistic expression of a capitalist economy? Art historian Dave Hickey has observed that, after the Second World War, American industry “found itself facing the challenge that has confronted every artist since Watteau, that of a finite, demanding market for a necessarily overabundant supply of speculative products.” Thus: “…rather than producing and marketing infinitely replicable objects that adequately served unchanging needs, American commerce began creating finite sets of objects that embodied ideology for a finite audience at a particular moment–objects that created desire rather than fulfilling needs. This is nothing more or less than an art market.” Hickey asserts that today the whole of American commerce performs as an art economy, with no strong distinction to be found between art production and the basic capitalist strategy of the post-war economy.
Who’s right? Fortunately, it isn’t left to interpreters to decide the matter. New, objective developments have broken the old controls over the mainstream, and in the process dissolved some of the old arguments. Digital technology spearheads a strong challenge to the modernist tradition of a centralized control of leisure. You and your pals the camcorder, the microphone, and the Internet comprise a genuine alternative to media control.
The Post-Colonial
How little of any of this you actually selected. A spectator can avoid certain movies, but not The Movies. You have been part of a captive audience all your life. Love it or leave it. But even if “they” permitted you to leave, there is no place to go. They own the airports. They own the telephones. They have seen to it that the pictures are everywhere…. You are nudged toward the conclusion that the movies have been provided for your benefit. The invisible producers–“They,” the Atomic Rulers of the World–love you, all of you: your rods and cones, your pulse and neurons, every hyper-receptive inch of you. The way they explore your nervous system is an act of tenderness. They want you to be pleased. It would be terrible to think otherwise….
–Geoffrey O’Brien, in The Phantom Empire
Our parents and grandparents sat in the dark and gazed at screens onto which light was projected through transparent celluloid attached by sprockets to a wheel revolving at a speed calculated to generate the illusion of movement. The insight they derived from that mechanical experience–“Life is like a movie, a movie is like life”–was, of course, one proposed by cinema itself. Still, it took. There was, it seemed to many, something to the idea. Cinema subsequently became a powerful analog adopted by the twentieth-century mind to explain the experience of Being Alive, Now. Cinema’s components–spectacle, narrative, star–transferred to the whole of the mainstream culture and came to organize it. Motion pictures colonized the mind of the industrialized world.
Of course, the idea of cinema, its analogic capacities, competed against the medium’s socioeconomic reality; with all its “stars,” cinema was still an earthly form. Film historian David Thomson argues that by 1947 the real significance of cinema–as a business art that understood and met its sociocultural contract with the mass audience–had ended. The Paramount case of ’47, and the subsequent court ruling that forced the studios to divest themselves of theaters, broke the studios’ vertical control of the industry, and thereby altered the economics of movie-making. Around the same time, viewing habits changed, with the introduction of television. A competing medium whose frank commercial angle limited its analog potential for intellectuals but conquered most industrialized societies anyway, television further diminished cinema’s status. That story is well known and need not be told here.
No analog is forever compelling or forever true. Analogs succeed one another in their usefulness to us. Thomson argues that “the movies,” as a specific historical phenomenon, functioned as a useful and necessary device for getting people accustomed to modernism. The audience saw others of their kind on screen in conditions that combined verisimilitude–the look of life–with a dreamlike quality and a scale that transcended reality’s limitations, which experience corresponded with the news recently delivered by Freud of the complex unseen inner life and by Einstein of the complex outer life. That work was finite, though, only a phase in our development. Like earlier forms–before the movies, the novel had claimed the title of Most Compelling; before the novel, it had been…what?: lyric poetry? religious paintings?–the cinema analog too was destined to be superseded by another. As Hollywood became more and more about the money that films could generate and less and less about cinema’s social contract with the audience–as movies became, in other words, more a product created in something akin to bad faith–the importance of cinema as a cultural and psychological force declined. Even while there remained isolated, important films, the audience felt increasingly free to treat the movie phase of modernism as having a start and a finish.
But was the end of cinema’s analog value due to a “failure” or to a spectacular success? As O’Brien describes it, “…they strove to turn their lives into moving pictures, their wars into moving pictures, their governments into moving pictures… The captive audience (no one talked much about their enthusiasm any more) had moved ever closer toward perceiving the world as an immense nickelodeon, an enclosed area delimited by walls of screens–movie screens, television screens, computer screens–on which the action never stops…” In other words, cinema’s analogic power came to an end because its work was done. Moving pictures had succeeded in colonizing the mind of the world. They’d changed the way people thought about their experience external to movies. The virus had infected the world’s imagination. But: heaps of videocassettes in a videotheque? So many images? So many images that, actually, the images themselves had come not to matter, despite the fact that they’d been created in the language of the dominant analog of the time? Really, could anyone ask for better evidence of a post-colonial phase? More, supporting evidence: the recycling of story lines, the recycling of imagery. Question: Why does any movie today have a car chase in it? Answer: Because movies have car chases. Self-cannibalization is a sign of decay, of bankruptcy. “The only game,” as O’Brien put it, “was to guess in what sequence the ingredients would emerge this time….”
A technology that had succeeded in molding our perception of life is superseded by another technology: that’s an old story, a regular event in history. And when the superseded analog happens to have been a dominant mass entertainment medium, like film? What then? If the phrase “like a movie” no longer describes life quite so truly as once it seemed to, what is life now “like” instead?–a computer file? the World Wide Web? a cellphone? an Ipod?
Probably it isn’t like any of those things. We may not have discovered the right analog for our current consciousness yet, the one that corresponds to this age. Of course, another, fresher and more disorienting possibility is that the very idea of a grand mediumistic metaphor for life, performing in the way that movies had performed, is passé, dated–“modernist.” We might have entered a “post-analog” condition. We can’t rule that out. Ought we to look upon this potential post-analog state as an “absence” or is it better understood as an opportunity to move on to another phase of being human? And if are moving on, what is to be the fate of all those ideas that attached during the long period of cinema’s dominance: scenario, acting, “star,” relation of camera to event, etc? Are they left dangling, just so much unfinished business? Understand that I’m not concerned about their fate within the movie industry so much as I am all those manifestations of cinema-influenced concepts, external to the film industry, that went into organizing our experience of the mainstream culture. Where do all those filmocentric ideas GO? What becomes of them? What are we to do with them NOW?
“Post-colonial” doesn’t mean that the system which colonized us has disappeared. The British were out of the Sudan by 1956, but traces of their presence exist to this day. Similarly, the cinema model is still hugely present as an organizing force–penetrated deep into the infrastructure of reality, the infrastructure of consciousness, how it is that we recognize ourselves and the world…. A system was set up, and the system continues, even as it is perceived to be something whose authentic life is from another era. The cinema analog is implanted in the collective memory which it had itself done so much to construct. History has become fused with the footage of history. All of us know that. Even so, technological change–the digital thing–has delivered the collective memory into a period of vulnerability, of instability.
So far as this essay is concerned we’re only interested in what opportunities this development might afford the independent imagination. The pleasure that we take from the video clips that appear on, say, YouTube–often they are fragments; often they lack any narrative other than that of crude sequencing; they range from highly professional to being entirely without virtuosity of any sort, even without skill, poorly lit, bad audio–demonstrates that everything which cinema in its colonizing phase had FORCED US TO DEAL WITH (star, genre, story arc, narrative payoff, craftsmanship, what have you) can be jettisoned or abandoned and the resulting window of synthetic time successfully deliver the entertainment vibe nevertheless. Fragments, it turns out, are enough, now. Already exposed to more than a sufficient amount of Footage to understand what Footage is all about, we are adept at sensing what a fragment indicates of the sensibility of the maker and how the medium is being positioned by him… Just why this should be the case is vastly less important than the blunt fact that it is the case–which development indicates, I don’t feel that I’m going out on a limb in arguing, a genuine evolutionary moment in our recognition of what the human experience of Being Entertained feels like and ought to feel like. That evolution may or may not be a momentous development. To people who have it in mind to entertain or to be entertained, though, it is certainly necessary information.
Set aside any ideas about valuation. Do we really need to have the discussion about whether Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries aspires to tell us more about the human condition than some throwaway minute-long YouTube clip featuring (to arbitrarily choose one example) your wedding party performing the dance from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video? Of course we don’t. Valuation isn’t the point. The point is something very different. The point is the surprise, the very pleasant surprise, that an inane two-minute YouTube clip of your wedding party’s Thriller dance does satisfy some raw condition of entertainment.
That it manages to do so without also making us feel like idiots while we’re watching a wedding party’s Thriller dance is, though, due to features external to the clip itself. It is due in part to your vast backlog of experience watching Footage, and in part to the sophistication of the platform that presents the clip. After all, when you watch one of those video clips you’re not just watching the clip, you’re also making contact with the platform–in this case, YouTube–just as, when you listen to the radio, you’re not just hearing music but making contact with Radio.
Platforming
A platform is a context, medium, or venue for the presentation of people, events, objects, or information. An art gallery is a platform, as is a radio show, as is a TV variety show, as is a magazine, as is a certain kind of website (YouTube, Flickr, My Space…).
The one who innovates the platform and works actively with it as a medium for the presentation of others is a “platformist.” The platformist is a kind of artist–an artist at presenting others. This presentation of others, of all the world’s variety–whether it’s people or objects–is the territory of the producer, the impresario and the collector.
Platforming as a conscious pursuit is a fairly recent development in our evolution. We look to P.T. Barnum for its roots.
Barnum
Phineas Taylor Barnum was a serial inventor of venues and strategies for the public presentation of people, events, objects, or information. Platforms were Barnum’s medium.
Barnum’s first foray into platforming occurred in the 1830s with his purchase of one Joice Heth, an elderly black woman who claimed to be the infant George Washington’s nursemaid. Sensing the theatrical value of her claims whilst suspending judgment about their veracity (he could neither prove nor disprove them), Barnum paid three thousand dollars for Heth and promoted her in what proved to be an exceedingly successful road show. His next big discovery was midget “General” Tom Thumb. Midgets and dwarves had enjoyed a long history at court but Tom Thumb of Connecticut added an American angle. He was independent, educated, a wit–and, for Barnum, another success: the General was even received by the English queen, Victoria. Following Tom Thumb, Barnum scored another success with singer Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale,” brought over from Europe and toured before American audiences to near-riots of acclaim. And for decades, on went Barnum’s presentations.
An old black woman whose place in history could neither be proved nor disproved, a pint-sized bon vivant, a Swedish songstress celebrated, in part, for her lack of artifice–what did these and other “acts” have in common? Why, P.T. Barnum, of course. Impresario Barnum was the reliable constant in the ever-changing show he offered his fellow Americans. He effectively made his taste a validating context: audiences never paid to see Barnum himself but to see what Barnum had found, or discovered, or just thought worth their while…. Eventually, his reputation became such that people bought tickets because a certain performer, he or she or it (Jumbo the elephant comes to mind), was being presented by Barnum. They trusted him to put on a good show, and he delivered. An eye for talent? Sure, but Barnum’s impresario instincts were far more sophisticated than that. He saw that talent wasn’t essential to an act’s potential success. Properly presented, the natural–people just being themselves, provided they were the right people–could be just as good a draw as a unique or rare ability. And why? The species had an innate curiosity about itself; people were interested in other people. This insight of Barnum’s, a simple idea but profound when implemented, argued on behalf of the fullest possible variety of human experience (there’s a direct line from P.T. Barnum to Jerry Springer, and another, equally direct, to the “reality television” phenomenon). And, ever desiring to be of service, he complied. The rationale for his eclectic selections became part of the audience’s experience of his shows, of course, their subtext. Wittingly or not, his audiences shelled out for contact with or exposure to an abstraction: Barnum’s enterprise.
It all added up to a powerful presentational aesthetic that was transparent, modern–and distinctly American. By democratizing the stage, Barnum put his own imprint on what Leo Braudy identifies as “the central American question of how to bring together the varying individualities of the American people into something resembling a coherent nation.” [Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, p. ] The egalitarian DNA that had been encoded in the U.S. Constitution, and which in turn the Constitution encoded into the culture, seeks and finds implementation through the American platformist. Benjamin Franklin, with his invention of the public library, is one example. P.T. Barnum is another. But it didn’t just satisfy American conditions. It was a bigger idea than even that. Barnum had innovated a rationale for putting life itself on stage.
Warhol
During the phase of nation building which necessarily occupied the imagination, energies, and resources of the United States during its first two hundred years, the ongoing dialogue between the platforming impulse and America’s egalitarian obsessions received special emphasis. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and over the course of the twentieth, ambitious and innovative platformists would contribute the creation of the telephone, the movie studio, radio and TV networks, finally culminating in a World Wide Web which transcended national boundaries entirely. Always, the most fundamental, lasting platforms allowed the display of a mind-boggling amount and variety of human ability; at the same time, they centered tremendous power among the individuals who owned and operated them. In an era of media empires and communication moguls, vast platforms, chiefly based, as it happened, on electronics and chemicals, were controlled by a few. (Some, such as William Randolph Hearst and William Paley, were individuals who, like Barnum, were closely identified with their platforms, while other ownership arrangements were more corporate and anonymous.)
The platforming impulse–innovating a system or venue that is designed to present–was evidence of the machine’s deep penetration of the human psyche. (Barnum’s active years coincide with the first wave of the Industrial Revolution in the United States.) For it represented the emergence of the Systems Man. A pragmatic creature, Systems Man challenged the romantic idea of the artist. Although the modern communication era did retain the place where the artist stood, the old model of the existential poet of individuality, that overly-ornate creature, now faced territorial competition from a more streamlined and impersonal sort of communication specialist. In place of an ongoing exploration of individual subjectivity, the visionaries of the telecommunication, broadcasting, and computer industries would find expression in promotion, distribution, and real social power. Welding platforming instincts to muscular and efficient corporate frameworks, they became all the “artist” the expanding business culture would require. And from a certain perspective, this was not incorrect. The work which this state-of-the-art communication professional engaged in was arguably more modern, impactful, and far-seeing than that of any traditional, art-context-based artist; greater numbers of people were required to adapt to the former’s perception, certainly.
The first person to thematize the essential nation-building activity of platform-creation, and to embody it, was Andy Warhol. He was more than another Systems Man, because he took being a Systems Man as his subject. He also recognized the complex human dynamic at the center of the platformist’s personal location–specifically, the simultaneous passivity and power of The One Who Presents–and proceeded to push the dynamic hard, aggressively forging a profound confusion of Presenter and Presented.
Whereas Barnum put ancient Joice Heth on stages from Boston to Charleston, Warhol filmed 1960s socialite/”It” girl Baby Jane Holzer with a Bolex for the duration of a single three-minute 16mm film reel, then projected it. Though he shares Barnum’s democratic, collection-and-presentation obsession he aggressively modernizes it by shifting it onto recordable, reproducible media. The leap is enormous, and its implications radiate outward in every direction. And this transpositional strategy is hardly limited to the Screen Test reels; Warhol’s other early movies echo Barnum, too. The Screen Tests (someone just looking into, and being looked at by, a lens), and films like Sleep, Kiss, and Eat (film records of, respectively, sleeping, kissing, eating) present basic human acts as subjects worthy of an audience’s time and consideration. Exploring recordable media’s capacity to collapse stage time and literal time, and presenting performance in an everyday manner while elevating the everyday to the level of a performance, Warhol pioneers a strategic naturalism. Never a fantasist, ever a re-presenter of the actual, Warhol inhabits a “world in which…it is never necessary to invent,” commented Stephen Koch.
Thus, as Barnum had, Warhol established a context for the presentation of things that already exist. None of it needed to be presented again. It was already real; showing it again didn’t make it more real. Therefore something about the act of presenting it again was, had to be, a form of theater, a sort of joke on the real. Everything that Warhol’s Factory did–its films; its fabrication of film “superstars;” its re-presenting in objects and paintings the potent images circulating through and via mass media and consumer society; its magazine, Interview–worked some angle on this, essentially comic insight.
Warhol wasn’t just interested in being a successful, independent platformist. He was interested in platforming–activity, social transaction, condition of mind. He extended and modernized Barnum’s model of public presence by thematizing it. The Factory was an American thing, a new world, a small colony like the Fourierists or the Owenists or the Mormons. Jonas Mekas: “Warhol is like America…. [T]he essentials (“the Revolution”) come from Warhol, and the particulars, the materials, the people come from everywhere and they are molded and held together by a central spirit, Andy Warhol….” Not only was it a new world, it was a new world whose content was, really, itself. Consistently aligning his psychology and his aesthetic sensibility with the machinery and media by which he engineered his presentation strategies, namely the absolute neutrality of the camera or tape-recorder, Warhol transformed himself into an emblem of his presentational strategy. He sought to become, and succeeded in becoming, a figure who never judged and endlessly presented–and endlessly permitted, too, for to withhold judgment is to permit. The world had never seen anyone choose to turn himself into an emblem of the machine’s penetration of human experience. No wonder he made people nervous. For a great many people Andy’s game was, and still is, a little too modern.
The showman is part of the show. Barnum knew it, and applied the knowledge. Warhol knew it, too, and obsessively foregrounded the platformist’s process–observing, selecting, the technologies of presenting–as part of the comedy. In P.T. Barnum’s day the confusion of background and foreground had been powerful yet still implicit, a subtext; Andy Warhol, by contrast, used it actively and aggressively–he concretized the confusion, made it the point. Distilling the abstractions of passivity and power implicit in the platformist’s work, he laid bare yet more pure abstraction: the abstraction of “people,” the abstraction of “presenting.” The fame Warhol quickly achieved allowed him to pursue “the glamorous peace of existing only in the eye of the beholder.” [Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, p. ]. He willingly, eagerly vanishes into his public self. Culturally omnipresent and at the same time unknowable–more high comedy–Warhol ascends to a quintessence of celebrity, the purest symbol yet of the modern public life initiated by Barnum in the 1800s.
Warhol establishes some of the essentials of modern platforming: media, with the possibility of a personal or conceptual angle–platforming thematized.2
Windows of Synthetic Time
Let’s look more closely at modern media’s relation to platforming. What are the core materials utilized? Structurally speaking, three are two: time and space.
Time is the more essential. In fact the story of modern media, after the telephone, is the story of the shift of emphasis from space to time. What do I mean by this? Barnum worked in real space–real performers presented on a real stage, real objects presented in real vitrines, and all of it occupying the same space you occupied. Now consider a TV or a radio. The hardware–tiny little machines–exists in real space too but without fundamentally altering real space. TV and radio do fundamentally alter the experience of time, however. Time-based media–TV, film, radio–absorb time. They absorb the time you give them. That time is then gone forever.
Modern communications media exist to create synthetic time and to establish a substructure of synthetic time within real time. What’s synthetic time? Think of a pop song. The notes are arranged within a frame of time recorded on a stable medium. Every time you play that record, the arrangement of notes fixed in synthetic time will be the same. Every recorded song, every movie, every TV show, is based on this idea of synthetic time. Many things can happen within a window of synthetic time. Musical notes and images can be arranged an infinite variety of ways.
Synthetic time complicates both the individual’s experience of time and the community’s relation to time. This, because however small the window of time utilized by a particular communication unit–a half-hour TV sitcom, a three-minute pop song–its need for time is bottomless. Without time from you, it is nothing. But with each spin of that three-minute pop song, three minutes of your time are diverted into a) that pop song and b) the synthetic time upon which that pop song depends. Individual time, community time, an entire society’s time is absorbed by/escapes into a communication product.
Time, then, far more than space, stands as the core material of twentieth century communication. Is there no corresponding and equally ambitious re-organization of our experience of space? Of course: if you and I are watching the same TV show at the same time while living in different cities, hasn’t space been caused to collapse, in a way? How can that not be considered radical? It is radical. And yet: consider the actions involved here, note the verbs: media conquer, compress, and collapse space, while media expand the ways in which time might be spent. Modern communications media negate space and expand time. The latter, positive force is the more powerful, because it contains the most possibility. If it’s indeed so that, as Robert Toll observes, “once a major entertainment medium became popular, it never disappeared, though innovations often forced major changes in the content, format, and audience of existing entertainment machines,” the reason these communication technologies thrived was because they extended some core sensory experience–vision or sound or both–via a synthetic frame of time. A recording is not only capable of supporting frames of synthetic time, its capacity for doing so is the reason why that particular medium survived.
YouTube etc.
The story of twentieth-century communication is fundamentally expressed, then, as a story of synthetic time.
And the story has a pattern. First, a new communication technology–phonograph album, movie, radio, TV–is invented that establishes a new, unfamiliar condition of artificial time. Next, the condition of artificial time established by that communication technology gets divided up into specialized units (genres, shows, stations, channels intended for specific demographic groups at specific times of day). A third phase, resulting from a further evolution of communication hardware (audiotape recorder, VCR recorder, DVD burner), increases the consumer’s control over and production of artificial time. As the consumer gains more control over artificial time he becomes less passive, which in turn situates him in a more complex consumer/producer role.
The above pattern played out in communication technologies from about 1890 to 1990. The Internet, which began as an information-sharing technology–a spatial emphasis if ever there was one–changed that pattern. Able to platform all of the previous incarnations of synthetic time, the Internet establishes another template.
While the Internet speeds up the rate of dissemination of video/movies and audio, and disperses them across a wider field, the forms themselves remain the basic occasions for synthetic time production that they had been fifty, sixty, seventy, eight years ago. That aspect of communication culture is stable– which, taking the long view, means that the core experience of “entertainment” in the modern era (namely, various ways to fill regularized units of synthetic time) has not been fundamentally altered by the Internet. Thus, when I as an independent imagination engage media to generate synthetic time for the purpose of building an audience for some experience built on a foundation of synthetic time, I am made to confront the same questions addressed in their own, respective eras by D.W. Griffith, Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge, the Colgate Comedy Hour, Andy Warhol, and The Sopranos. What do I put into the frame of synthetic time to gain and hold an audience? What can I make work as entertainment within a frame of synthetic time?
YouTube
If I seem to be posing the question in an almost perversely basic, wide open way, it is because the digital revolution has handed us a situation that, for the first time in a very long time, is just that wide open.
In terms of time-based media, two main factors are shaping the High Entertainment sensibility. The first and most profound is the idea that we can now operate as genuinely independent imaginations unbeholden to either the art or the entertainment production systems–a theme developed throughout this booklet. The second factor–with regard to spans of synthetic time, a far-reaching change in tastes–is more platform-specific.
Forty years ago, when inexpensive video technology was first introduced, the fashion was to turn the camera on and just leave…it…on…to record whatever happened. (Initially, everything looks interesting on a new medium, right?) Also, editing a video was a much more complicated matter in those days, so it was more efficient to use the camera as both the recording and the editing device–something to turn on or off. Artists’ early use of videotape, which coincided with the heydays of conceptual, body, and performance art, was geared, as a result, to a “long-form” aesthetic characterized by repetitiveness, self-indulgence, and boredom; not entertainment but art (and whatever experience could be discovered through art) was the point of these (now mostly forgotten) forays. In strong contrast, today’s websites such as YouTube are propelling video in the opposite direction: toward a radical brevity. YouTube, which went online in February 2005, imposes limits on the file-size of video clips and consequently on their duration. (YouTube first imposed these limits for legal reasons: to avoid hosting excessive use of copyrighted film and television material.) While YouTube can accommodate video clips of up to ten minutes in length, it’s much more common to encounter there videos that may be only, say, a minute long at most. Short, sweet, and to the point is the rule now.
The effect that an emphasis on brevity is having on the independent imagination shouldn’t be underestimated, for in establishing a context that naturalizes the production of short videos YouTube and similar websites indirectly ask us to consider what is entertaining. Now that the imagination need no longer fill those regularized units of time (the ninety-minute feature film, the half-hour sitcom) that had defined media’s modernist phase, it turns out that the narrative tissue that had gone into “story-telling” no longer seems necessary. In other words, YouTube, as a platform, makes sense of showing a car chase without also bothering with the reason for the car chase. The old, regimented time-formats were always an artifice, of course; abandoning that artifice fosters experiments that relax or dissolve the genres it had served. A look at YouTube’s “tagging” search-system, which puts things in many buckets at once (an example from one clip, again arbitrarily selected: “lego animation bowling guitar competition”) clearly signals a move away from the old constraints of genre–Drama, Thriller, Comedy, Mystery. The idea of categorizing narratives as the video store had is giving way to another taxonomic system that is at once much broader, more focused, and more complex.
The social aspects of YouTube and similar sites are important too, of course. That the content is user-generated, authored by millions and decentralized, shouldn’t be given short shrift. There’s no curating on YouTube, other than to monitor excessive violence, explicit sex, and copyright infringement. Also, by fashioning an entirely different distribution system than the old, one-way, producer-to-consumer entertainment system, YouTube and like sites have fostered a communication aesthetic based on sharing rather than profit-making. “Broadcast Yourself”–YouTube’s credo–encourages everyone who can get their hands on a video camera to participate. This democratization of mass communication production broadens the definition of the mainstream by making it far more inclusive. That said, whether you’re creating videos in Bombay, Brooklyn, or Bogota, you’ve still got to deal with that ten-minute time-limit. As concerns an evolution in entertainment, the change in duration remains the engine.
When you’re watching a clip on YouTube, you’re making contact with all this. And all this, as much as the clip itself, is what holds our attention, satisfies, and entertains.
YouTube allows the independent imagination to re-configure entertainment at a small, easily managed scale. What’s discovered through these experiments will eventually be applied to entertainments of longer duration.
Self-Presentation
The destabilization ushered in by the digital revolution doesn’t only apply to strategies for presenting others–to new platforms. It also creates opportunities for new strategies of self-presentation.
In media culture, two models of heightened self–“star” and “persona”– consistently play out. The concept of the “star” isn’t very old–150 years at most, since the time of Barnum and his creation of modern stardom. The idea of “persona” is thousands of years old.
Both models showcase a performed version of self-hood. Nevertheless, there’s a significant distinction between star and persona. A star’s traits are perceived to be genuine extensions of that person. Julia Roberts the star really is Julia Roberts the person, we think. A star is the whole person–a person blessed with “star quality.” A persona, by contrast, is accepted to be more frankly a construction, an artifice, an invention, an idea on its own terms. Persona is constructed by identifying specific traits of the individual, isolating those traits, and then heightening, magnifying or amplifying them to gain certain effects. Pee Wee Herman isn’t really Paul Rubens but is instead constructed by Paul Rubens. We don’t mistake Pee Wee for Paul. To enjoy Pee Wee, we don’t need to know who Paul really is. The conception of naturalism that informs the star isn’t a requisite here.
Because the star is thought to actually be that person it’s a much trickier concept than persona.
What is a star? The star is not an historical actor–not Alexander the Great, not Nero, not Benjamin Franklin. A star is far less than they were. A star just embodies an abstraction–a congeries of human qualities, heightened, yes, but without being linked to specific historical actions. A star represents only a style of being. “Stardom,” a contrivance, applies a management attitude toward human nature.
The concept of the star has a direct relation to modern media. To project an amplified and magnified self, you need amplifiers and magnifiers. You need machinery–cameras and recorders. The star as we know it is therefore a by-product of the machine age.
A star is a star within a frame of media, and within the industry surrounding and supporting that media. “A star of stage and screen,” “a rock star”, “a star athlete”–there is no such thing as a star without a system. A star is always the star of some cultural system. Star and system are absolutely symbiotic.
Stardom has both production and consumption functions. Culture industries (movies, TV, art, literature, music) need “stars” in order to stabilize the market, predict sales numbers, and reduce risk. Consumers approach the matter with less calculation, singling out certain individuals who, for whatever reason, represent desirable, glamorous or innovative human coordinates. Culture industries are adept at manipulating this response, and (to some degree) controlling it in advance. It is a nearly seamless system. Whitney to Britney to Christina to Gwen, the stars change while the star location remains stable. Maintaining that seamlessness requires, though, heavy audience-response management, i.e. environment control; seeing to it that our affections will be transferred from Whitney to Britney to Christina to Gwen takes a great deal of planning! And as we might expect, there’s a direct relationship between the amount of environment control and the inorganic or inauthentic aspects of our culture.
The idea of the star has hardly changed at all since its invention. Why this stasis? Does the concept of the star simply lack elasticity? Or have our imaginations stalled on this one? Really, the sole profound challenge to the established model of stardom was offered by Andy Warhol, who devised an alternative model based on a radically reductive relation between camera and performer, presented and presenter.
Warhol’s concept of the star came from his insight into a certain technology. Fortunately, technology periodically makes cracks in the control mechanism that are not dependent on one genius’s destabilizing vision. Television famously made a crack in the audience control mechanism long enjoyed by the movie industry. The personal computer made a crack in the audience control mechanism long enjoyed by television. And the digital revolution has produced a very large crack in the entire media control mechanism.
Within the context of the digital revolution, wherein the independent imagination can produce and distribute her/his own work without any obligation toward either the art or show business production systems, what place has the “star” model? If a star is always the star of a system, what becomes of the star concept when a system is undefined or non-existent? And if the old concept of the star depended substantially on the power of disproportion–a few people owning cameras and having the power to distribute to everyone else the pictures made by those cameras–how does the concept of the star change in the age of the webcam? Does the dissemination of image-disseminating devices render the concept of the star outmoded?
Here as elsewhere, conditions of instability are to be treated as an opportunity. The old concept of the star–so long with us, so worn thin–is handed a rare chance to evolve, toward something more interesting and illuminating. The sheer impossibility of defending against an independent imagination’s decision to direct his or her own behavior–who he or she is interested and willing to be–renders the “star” one of the most vulnerable parts of the existing entertainment machinery. The star concept can become a portal through which the forces of transparency might infiltrate the mainstream. The idea of the “star” can become a prime site for the formulation of new stances whose honesty might advance a more satisfying kind of entertainment.
Anyone who is inclined to ponder ways to raise the ambitions of entertainment would do well, therefore, to examine the star concept anew. What exactly about the star model is outmoded? What might be useful still? What’s a star for, really? Culturally, how does it perform? What does it deliver to an audience?
To look to anyone from inside the show biz machinery to advance these issues isn’t logical. Show business is a very tough business. Few succeed in it. Would you be willing to risk the standing you’d worked so hard to attain for the sake of a theory? Not likely. Not many would. That’s just human nature. (Of course, it doesn’t help matters any that show business is structured to work against this sort of risk-taking. The lot of even the most successful film and TV actor is to select among roles, not to generate them–a professional situation that dramatically reduces one’s control and puts any aggressively conceptual use of iconicity out of one’s reach. Few, therefore, ever attain the degree of control that might have allowed them to treat the materiality of stardom in the experimental manner this cultural moment affords.)
Stars of the mass entertainment culture are opaque representatives of industry mechanisms. They appear in the mainstream as indicators of their access to the mainstream. The conventional show biz star does not and perhaps cannot reveal or speak to the workings of the system that presents them without putting at risk his or her own position within it; whatever analysis of the show biz system a star may have been required to undertake in order to achieve their stardom thus remains opaque, secret…. Anyone who cannot sign a treaty with the machinery of presentation cannot become or remain a star. But because they must remain an opaque indicator of the mechanism that presents them–a mainstream indicator of access to the mainstream–the star’s function narrows to, really, tragicomic dimensions.
It falls, therefore, to an outsider to that system–the independent imagination unbeholden to system, who has nothing to lose–to climb into the cracks in the existing star model put there by the digital hammer and to undertake the needed experiments.
Some Useful Precedents
Any High Entertainment aspirant who has a taste for self-presentation might consider the innovation of a new star model–perhaps one in which you’d somehow show the system at the same time that the system showed you. As ever, the form would have to be discovered. Helpful precedents can be identified, though.
The Beaver Trilogy was an early entry in the destabilized interplay between art, self, and media that characterizes our era. Begun in 1978 and completed in 1985–and therefore in a sense pre-digital–Trent Harris’s film, in which three treatments of a happenstance encounter are sandwiched into a single work, presents a continuum unique in media history. The Trilogy begins with a documentary treatment of an actual encounter in a Beaver, Utah, parking lot, continues with a fictionalized version of that encounter, then embroiders that fiction further in yet another version (offering in effect a fiction based on a fiction). Each of the three parts proposes and explores a different configuration of self in dynamic relation to media; no one relationship is the “true” one. Harris’s film signals that a conception of self that had formed and held steady during the first stage of the media age, from the invention of cinema through to the 1970s, is on the verge of evolving into another, more complex configuration.
The protagonist of the first segment of the film, Greg, is a real person (the small-town Beaver setting is real too). Greg, on camera, eagerly identifies himself as a guy who does impersonations of show biz figures (John Wayne, Sylvester “Rocky” Stallone). Nearest to the heart of this Rich Little of Beaver, Utah, though, is his impersonation of the Australian singer and pop star Olivia Newton-John. At the same time that he reveals his media-imprinting, Greg is honest, open, guileless–real. An enthusiastic Greg invites the unidentified cameraman to come back and tape his Newton-John impersonation at an upcoming talent show. We subsequently watch Greg’s transformation into Olivia (his make-up is applied by the local mortician!) and his weirdly compelling drag performance of one of Olivia’s darker songs.
To convey the integrity of Greg’s situation, in this first section filmmaker Harris goes with a documentary approach. As a style of filmmaking, documentary involves the least amount of authorial intervention, so it gives the impression of being closer to objective truth, but it is still a style; documentary is just a type of artifice that we associate with authenticity. As The Beaver Trilogy proceeds it will continue to test the differences between an authentic or “art” presentation of self and a “show biz” presentation of self.
Greg had offered his impersonations of actors; in the next section of the film, that relationship gets reversed, with a young actor, an at-the-time-unknown Sean Penn, doing an impersonation of Greg. (This, now fictionalized version of the documentary footage is in the tradition of a “biopic,” with the difference that here the source material is itself already mediated.) Penn mimics Greg’s manner as closely as he’s able. Similarly, certain passages of the documentary footage are re-used in order to establish this new version’s fealty to the original story (and thus the integrity inhering to that story).
But some curious changes in the story’s treatment have leaked in. For one thing, the filmmakers who are presenting Greg’s story are now themselves depicted, becoming characters in the story. Furthermore, they’ve been assigned the stereotypical worldly, cynical, exploitive attitudes that movies and television have taught us to associate with “big-city filmmakers arriving in a small town.” The notion of integrity has shifted, from the earlier “art” model to, now, a show biz model, announced by the filmmakers’ attitude that if something looks good on film then the film’s integrity needs to be protected and preserved whatever the consequences to the human subject; in show biz culture, media’s needs trumps people’s. Additionally, this fictionalized version of the encounter with Greg speculates upon the effects that his public performance as “Olivia” might have had on him personally. Sean Penn’s Greg is seen contemplating, and nearly attempting, suicide. Harris has given us a stereotype, consciously-chosen, of what we think the life of someone “like” Greg “must be like” in a small Western town “like” Beaver.
In the subsequent, third version, the core story is bracketed by even more elaborately imagined pre- and post-performance scenes. Greg, now called Larry (!), is played by actor Crispin Glover, who seems to inhabit the character in a way that wasn’t available to Sean Penn, who had directly mimicked the original Greg. (Was Glover shown either of the first two segments?) The filmmaking in this third, fictionalized section of the Trilogy is spookier, moodier, more sensational, more deeply invested in the artifice of narrative. Now a story is clearly being told, and to tell it, more of the conventions of show biz are introduced: added is a pair of local troublemakers, concerned parents, and a sexy waitress in a diner. Even Larry’s performance on stage has been pumped up, accompanied now by fog wafting off dry ice.
We’re witnessing the real experience of real-life Greg being absorbed, step by step, into filmmaking stereotypes. On first consideration it seems that he’s being made fun of, but in fact it’s the pretensions and assumptions of Hollywood filmmaking that are being shown up and mocked. It is Greg’s commitment to his oddness, and his bravery in presenting it to the world, that constitute the real thing, and Trent Harris knows it.
The Beaver Trilogy gave indication that templates long utilized in conventional approaches to filmmaking were no longer sufficient to frame the media-saturated sense of self. Beaver Trilogy focused on a man. When it comes to understanding role-playing, though, women are often more advanced. Years before Trilogy, a woman who was actually formed by those templates and who lived through media played another kind of sophisticated shell-game with authenticity.
“I do in life exactly what I do when I act. I go through this extroverted, exhibitionistic period — talking like the character, and so on — as an experiment.”
–Jane Fonda [quoted in Jane Fonda: All-American Anti-Heroine, Gary Herman/David Downing]
Cindy Sherman was still a child when Jane Fonda began exploring her own novel take on the coordinates of self-presentation in a media-saturated culture. Fonda had an insight into the power secreted within the ostensible passivity of the Gazed Upon–did it spring from having cameras regularly trained on her as Hollywood royalty, daughter of actor Henry?–and she then proceeded to organize her life around that insight in a way that broke new ground.
The record of her progress unfolds in a series of photographs taken over many years. (The photographs were not themselves the project but, rather, trace the contour of the project.) None of the photos were taken by her. Some were production stills from movies, some were publicity shots or press photos, others were photo-journalistic documents that appeared in newspapers. Arranged chronologically these images describe a consciousness flowering through a succession of roles.
Jane makes her entrance in the late 1950s as Hollywood Ingénue, fresh-faced find of the movie studios. From there it’s an easy segue to publicity stills that promote Starlet Jane—a Young Working Actress learning her craft but still doing what she is told. Next get an eyeful of Jane working another traditional Hollywood role–Sex Kitten–selling it on the beach, nude, come hither, self-possessed. Va-va-va-voom! Zap! it’s Avant Garde Jane in her Euro phase as Barbarella, campy sci-fi adventuress, wife of French director Roger Vadim, open to experiment. Returned to American shores, she’s Activist Jane, at a rally with new husband Tom Hayden. Booooo–it’s the reviled Hanoi Jane, visiting the Viet Cong to see the enemy for herself. Lights, camera, action: it’s Movie Star Jane, (just as extremist, really, though it reads as a retreat), in ’70s hits like Klute, The China Syndrome, The Electric Horseman, and Nine to Five. Feel the burn! It’s Jane the Workout Queen! Marriage to CNN founder and billionaire Ted Turner, lands her another role: Mogul’s Wife.
Hanoi Jane, Mogul’s Wife… Each phase is in quotes. Can she have meant any of them? Did she mean them all? The sets keep changing. Supporting players come and go. Because the subject of the photographs is a famous actress, historical situations and social trends read as theaters–all the world’s a stage, right? Jane, inviting herself into history, absorbs history, makes it hers. Confident that she has your attention, she brings you along on her personal life-adventure. (Imagine the scale of ego involved.) Cindy Sherman would later gain fame for concocting a series of photographic images of female role-playing. But Fonda, while perhaps less clever, was far more radical than Sherman who, bewigged and costumed, carried out her work within the safety of her studio. Switching lifestyle like a change in hairstyle, Fonda did it out there in the world, confident that the cameras would follow.
Transferring a process of image construction to situations and histories that had no direct or consistent relation to commerce or film production, Fonda applied it directly to her life. Jane the subject progressively became Jane the author as well, directing herself through a series of roles.
“Jane Fonda” became not just a role but a medium too. The roles changed while the role playing, the authorial self choosing roles, the self-mythologizing, and the process of becoming, remained consistent. What resulted was akin to performance art, set against the backdrop of mass culture and continued over many years. All content–privilege, revolution, beauty–became indexed to the performance. Though she wasn’t associated with the art context, Jane Fonda made sophisticated conceptual use of image production and image function.
Is it necessary to be a bona fide star to use the materiality of stardom in an interesting way? It is not. Consider Angelyne, a Hollywood icon who has never appeared in any Hollywood product. Angelyne’s medium of choice is the billboard–most usually one looming above Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, on which she has periodically appeared since the early 1980s in all her self-promoting pink and blonde Tinseltown glory. The self-invented Angelyne is a product, to be sure, but what is for sale is only an image and a concept, the name of which seamlessly blends the angelic and the synthetic. Angelyne succeeds in rerouting traditional show biz promotion into a kind of public art. Another witty take on stardom was concocted in the late 1980s by Adrian Danatt, a British art writer who, briefly donning an impresario’s top hat, offered the world a mysterious and (it eventually became known) entirely fake art collective dubbed The Three. A trio of female models, who supposedly met on a catwalk in Tokyo but actually were hired by Danatt in a casting call, The Three produced nothing but the attention paid them. Moody publicity photographs of The Three, their occasional appearances at art openings, and media coverage of these comprised their work. “The idea,” Danatt explained, “[was] to try to create a perfect media loop in which it’s just constantly revolving around absolutely nothing.”
Fonda, Angelyne, and Danatt worked interesting angles on celebrity, that oh so modern phenomenon which is everywhere shoved at us yet manages to elicit from us only a collective sigh of toleration. For what is the celebrity, really, but a vehicle through which mass media conveys its power and ubiquity? Celebrities are willing dupes of that power–“morally neutral,” Daniel Boorstin called them–and as such they represent a decadence. They accomplish next to nothing in the world of human affairs yet, because they’ve gained entree to our society’s silly but exclusive VIP lounge, the media culture, expect always to be noticed nevertheless. How to make celebrity interesting? That’s the question confronting the budding High Entertainer who chooses to take the subject on. It won’t be easy: only a few stars (Fonda, Madonna, Michael Jackson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Warhol) found ways to use their media access to conceptual, as opposed to a purely commercial, effect. Is there some way to use the space occupied by the celebrity in a more satisfying way?
Some of us have been interested in Paris Hilton for the very reason that she appears to have no other content than the mechanisms of celebrity. Standing before us minus the distractions of apparent talent or ability, she, like Angelyne, is a concept, of her or someone like her. Other than occasionally mewing “That’s hot!” (her own variant on bland Warholian endorsement), the woman has nothing to say, and yet for some time now she has succeeded in moving from media space to media space to media space, web to print to broadcast. Her “content” is her presence in that space, her access to it, her movement from one medium to another. Movement across the surface of the system that presents her is the only “meaning” Paris Hilton offers. Approve of it or don’t, but hers is a very pure position. That she’s from the upper class is crucial to her contentlessness. An heiress needn’t engage the conventional middle-class success narrative. Neither does she seek change nor progress of any sort, as a middle-class person might feel compelled to do. Thus, not only “morally neutral” but refreshingly devoid of the needs associated with most who aspire to a place in media culture, the urge to comment muted, she is able to stand–more accurately, pose–in the foreground as a purer representative of the background. As a result, Hilton functions as a prism through which we observe the disturbing realities of our media system at work.
Whether Hilton is conscious of the concept she embodies isn’t clear. Her inarticulateness frustrates our notions of authorship, and yet the woman is not only making choices but, within the theater that interests her, the correct choices. Clueless she is not, even if the exact amount of her input is unknown. The possibility that the real author of these choices might instead be some manager, talent agent or other behind-the-scenes Svengali is classic show biz opacity, perpetrated a thousand times before. Young Paris may or may not be in charge, may or may not be an artist of the mass media, but isn’t ambiguity of that sort the currency of show biz?
If context isn’t all it certainly determines much: Hilton is considered a joke while her nearest counterpart in the art world, Maurizio Catellan, is looked upon as a genius. A huge difference between these two does have to be noted up front, of course: Catellan consistently makes terrific objects that signal his highly sophisticated strategy. He actually does something, in other words. As befits one who’s working in the art context, Catellan’s intentionality is much more pronounced, much more part of his subject matter–and unquestionably it’s vastly more satisfying to think about a brilliant comedian who is strongly present as the author of his decisions than it is a mere celebrity who may not be. That said, Catellan’s “content” too is similarly the movement across the surface that presents him–in this case, the globalized network of galleries, museums, and biennials. He treats the art system as a system–a platform–across which he merrily skips. “As [he] never tires of repeating,” the art critic Giorgio Verzotti tells us, “profundity should not be sought because it is not achievable, because it does not exist. However there is a great possibility for expansion over this surface.” (Might Hilton, as she dresses for yet another evening on the town, secretly share his outlook?) Catellan’s strategy flattens out the system that presents him. By reducing its meaning to a single dimension–its display function–he puts the powerful system that presents him on display.
By now the attentive reader will have noticed a pattern. Cindy Sherman represents one kind of sophistication about image-production and role-playing, Jane Fonda another. Paris Hilton can be read as having made a contribution to future work of a sort that Maurizio Catellan does in a more explicit and directed manner. Ideas useful to the High Entertainer are to be discovered in both contexts. Can we say that entertainers Fonda and Hilton lack all intentionality simply because they don’t foreground it in the manner of artists Sherman and Catellan? No. Occasionally an “entertainer” will even get to the good idea first! Art and show business are organized around differing cores of transparency and opacity, and the star model will perform differently within each context. The High Entertainer understands this and takes what he needs.
Apropos a new, more useful formulation of the star, what do the experiences of Jane and Angelyne, Paris and Maurizio, tell us? They tell us, for one thing, that if you’re “full of content”–be it critique, analysis, personal neurosis, or any content other than your existential location within a system–you reduce the likelihood that the system will “fill” you with its own content. Include too much personal information and you block the system information from coming through.
Notice too that Fonda and company level no overt criticism at the cultural industries that present them.v Fonda was an advocate for social change, not a vocal critic of the movie industry. Hilton offers no critique at all. (Critique isn’t “hot,” apparently.) Catellan dances across a surface that he’s well aware is corrupted by money and power arrangements, but, an honest man, he never pretends there’s no mud on his own shoes. He’s complicit. Star and system, system and star–there is no such thing as a star entirely independent of system yet all three of these figures have managed to hit upon coordinates that can not be controlled or contained. Their success in doing so demonstrates that we need not resort to criticality to advance a new star model.
Memo From the Star Lab
1) Imagine what a system, context, or culture needs.
2) Be that thing, either through real actions or by creation of a persona.
Discipline Problem
High Entertainment shouldn’t be taken as only working changes on entertainment. The destabilizing forces unleashed by digitization also challenge the habits of mind of artists.
The model of art in which contemporary artists have, for a long time now, been trained–as a system for organizing imaginative output, by now so widely accepted as to be beyond question and, thus, academicized–goes something like this. First, the artist creates a given work. Let’s call it Work A. In time, Work A is followed by a Work B which in some respect pursues the implications of or otherwise responds to Work A. Work C then follows up on the implications of Work B, and so on into the future. The progression, which is designed to identify, make legible, and develop a body of meaning over time, might be written as A > (A)B> (A)(B)C…. By means of this progression the artist works up their fascinations into a sustained lather. That sustained lather is their art.3
It’s a perfectly good model. High Entertainment has no quarrel with it. Yet the model that’s active in High Entertainment happens not to hew to it. In High Entertainment, the independent imagination has no obligation to pursue the implications of any given work in a next and subsequent work–or, for that matter, ever. High Entertainment isn’t “working on” anything–anything, that is, other than delivering pleasure to an audience. It does not proceed according to a scientistic or investigatory model. In High Entertainment there is no imaginary problem, and thus no imaginary solution to it.
Sustaining the lather requires discipline. In fact art is discipline; it’s the saying No to almost everything in order to more emphatically say Yes to a very few things. High Entertainment doesn’t participate in that tradition. High Entertainment doesn’t require the maker to do the same thing twice, or to find and develop any link at all between Work A, Work B, and Work C. High Entertainment doesn’t finally reside in a fascination with form, and so has no responsibility to form. It is (in this sense at least) wildly, disturbingly undisciplined and brazenly ahistoricist. (Caveat emptor: Any reader who feels that High Entertainment is the right approach for them should be forewarned that the rejection of artistic discipline, perhaps more than any other quality of H.E., will be looked on with maximum disfavor by the art context. If it’s an art career you’re seeking, it might be wise, therefore, to consider creating your High Entertainment under a pseudonym.)
High Entertainment has, then, a discipline problem. So far as I’ve observed, though, just as much bad or unnecessary or tired work as good has resulted from the habit of privileging artistic discipline. Which observation suggests to me, and may suggest to you too, that an independent imagination has just as good a chance of making good work by abandoning altogether the discipline celebrated by the art system.4
Viva Experimentalism
Art is comparatively unbound by conventions of method and of result. Artists are forever experimenting with what art is. So much so, in fact, that art, in our time, has become identified–to a fault, some could say–with the idea of form-discovery.
High Entertainment applies the principle of form-discovery to the creation of entertainment. Every last one of the conventions and tropes of mainstream entertainment product–genre, plot, story arc, character, acting, the “star,” length, format, the relation between editorial and advertising, everything–may be pried open and subjected to experiments. These experiments might dissolve them. While there’s no rule against using the conventions of entertainment (sometimes they’re entertaining!), they can also be disregarded completely, as if they’d never existed, so long as the new form discovered is entertaining. With regard to method, structure, and content, the independent imagination can do anything he or she chooses, so long as the experiment a) does not rely on a specialized language (since that would be art) and b) it activates in the audience that mysterious twaa-aa-aang of delight.
Us or Everybody?
Any mainstream product, in order to be a mainstream product, must satisfy one condition. It must be accessible, to as many people as may care to access it. The weight of that single criterion is enough to restrict the extent to which any mainstream entertainment product may retreat into or be based upon any specialized language. Mainstream formats, which seek to be understood, accepted–in a word, consumed–by as many people as possible, utilize specific languages (“A TV sitcom is as specific a form as an abstract painting.”) without resorting to specialized languages.
Specialized languages are divisive. They divide the audience into those who know that language and its codes, and those who do not. Since the dawn of the modern era, art has relied extensively on the acquisition of specialized language. You either know the history of art, and consequently why that blue mark placed just so on that wall is significant and meaningful, or you do not. Theoretically, anyone who is interested to can learn the specialized language of art. But it must be learned. Art in our time has posited itself as a form of research. That’s yielded many interesting things, to be sure, but a research model isn’t the only way to discover experiences that human beings will value.
High Entertainment eschews the use of a specialized language. The audience needs no specialized language to understand what it is experiencing. High Entertainment revels in the challenge of being understandable to everyone.
Meaning Is Just Fine, In Its Place
By abandoning the artistic model of discipline (in its way a courageous act, incidentally), High Entertainment de-activates an important tool of meaning-making. But does sacrificing art’s singular capacity to frame and sustain unique existential narratives subsequently reduce High Entertainment to a condition of outright “meaninglessness” as well? When “meaning” is not directly the point or the focus of a thing, is that thing then “meaningless”?
Young or developing artists, who are in the thick of the anxious business of carving their lives into time and space, are especially sensitive to the presence of meaning. They require and demand it. Once you’ve done some of that existential self-definition work, though, meaning has a funny way of becoming less important–or at least less insistent and central. Life, which is rather bigger than meaning, teaches that meaning has its limits, that it isn’t the be-all and end-all, that meaning is just fine, in its place.
Imaginative work that is less emphatic about meaning is not, then, necessarily wrong, inappropriate, or bad. Of course it’s too early to ascertain the exact relation of High Entertainment to the production of meaning, or how it may go about that task differently; a new category of imaginative work that doesn’t behave according to the rules of either art or conventional entertainment product must be allowed to live and breathe in order to establish why we ought to value it. I don’t know how High Entertainment will configure meaning. I do know, though, that if we have to be able to identify meaning in order for something to be meaningful, as a species we’re in deep trouble, imagination-wise.
Adulthood Revived?
A large percentage of the adults who work within the entertainment industry toil at inventing products that can be consumed by people younger than 18.
May I say what I really mean here? Thank you.
Our popular culture is principally dedicated to finding ways to take money from children. Easy to fool, children are the most vulnerable demographic in all of consumerland.
Correspondingly, as a person ages they’ll find fewer popular entertainment products that are designed to recognize and celebrate such subtleties as the adult mind is capable of apprehending.
It’s possible that High Entertainment, which is more than open to being in the subtleties business, may be more the cup of tea of mature sensibilities.
Opacity and Transparency
The entertainment culture promulgates opacity. The entertainment industry does not want you to know “how it’s done.” It does not want to reveal its secrets. It prefers that you have no other role than that of consumer. It is, and wants to be, opaque. It is aligned with and invested in the forces of illusion. The digital revolution, which has placed mainstream media formats into the hands of the masses, therefore stands as a direct threat to some very lucrative traditions.
Art in the modern era has been a vastly more transparent enterprise. Art in the modern era has consistently been willing to reveal and to put on display, as part of the show, much of the system that presents it, and, by so doing, to stimulate and direct its own evolution. This “transparency principle” is derived from a surprising source: P.T. Barnum. Barnum, the greatest showman of the nineteenth century, understood that the audience is just as entertained by knowing how a trick is done–its conceptual dimension, in other words–as by the trick itself. This insight, aggressively and inventively applied over the course of his long career, establishes P.T. Barnum as America’s first conceptual artist. In view of this claim it makes sense that the art world, not the entertainment industry, should have made the most active use of Barnum’s discovery.
High Entertainment, intent on adapting certain of art’s ambitions to the mainstream formats of media, is free to make greater use of transparency than does conventional entertainment product. It’s not required to do so but, because it is made and distributed by independent imaginations who have no obligation to the mass entertainment state, nothing prevents it from doing so. As did master showman Barnum, the High Entertainer acknowledges that truth-telling, engaged in the course of displaying the system, can itself be entertaining. The entertainment context–show biz–continues to work hard to maintain and protect the lucrative opacity of its conventions, of course. But the opacity that characterizes conventional entertainment product may be dissolved in High Entertainment. This need not involve a deconstruction per se but rather the conception and enactment of new, less suffocatingly dishonest positions.
Freedom From System
High Entertainment is neither art nor conventional entertainment. Because the digital revolution has enabled independent imaginations to choose and control their own communication platforms (DVD or download), a class of concept-oriented, image-based subtleties that had previously been assigned to the art context, the art system, the art world, now may reach the public by other means. To a High Entertainer the art system is superfluous. Add to this the fact that today’s technology-wielding independent imagination may work in the media favored by the mainstream culture without any obligation to produce in the manner sponsored by the media state, and it becomes clear that a stunning degree of freedom from system has just landed in the lap of the modern person.
Just now, at the beginning of this new era, that kind of freedom is a weak muscle–real, but so absolute and novel that one hardly knows (High Entertainment? What the hell is that?) where to begin. But it will become stronger with exercise.
Politics
“A lackey of the corporate state,” “an opiate drugging the masses”–these are among the accusations regularly leveled at entertainment. From a certain perspective all the unflattering characterizations are accurate; popular entertainment in the age of mass media has indeed become a tool wielded by the powerful with at least the aim (the success varies) of distracting the masses from applying their energies to mounting any concentrated and sustained challenge to the status quo. It will not be news to you that those who own and operate the media state aspire–conspire, too–to control and influence the public mind, partly by feeding us certain kinds of information constantly, and partly by denying us alternatives to that diet. Any conscious adult has to find this an insulting and scary situation.
Come the revolution. Meanwhile, the empire of the corporate remains with us. We accommodate it not only because we’ve convinced ourselves we must (talk about effective propagandizing!) but also because aspects of it work to our advantage. Who wants to manufacture their own toothpaste? You? Moreover, and looking past the practical, certain attributes of the business civilization’s communication wing–a.k.a. the media state–have been known to flat-out delight. The Beatles, to draw an example from the hat. The Beatles made life lustrous for just about everybody. And if we accept that The Beatles have worked to the general advantage of human beings, then don’t we also have to recognize that, objectively considered, any society (it happens to be our own) that’s consistently able to come up with Beatles- or near-Beatles-level phenomena (as ours is) must also be getting something, some very basic need of the citizenry, consistently right?
I think we do. And if that’s the case, if the pleasures that our popular culture intermittently deliver are signs that this society is getting something right, then there must be more to entertainment, lackey of the corporate state that it is, than only its damnable opiating function. Entertainment may have become a tool designed to confuse and distract the masses but surely it isn’t only that. (A vibration basic to human experience, entertainment, let’s not forget, predates just about anything you could name. Corporate empires and their dispiriting shenanigans are, actually, quite late to the game in question.)
Politically speaking, shame doesn’t automatically inhere to entertainment, then. Which assertion, I’m aware, conflicts with a notion of progressivism favored in recent decades by intellectuals and the artistic avant garde. Post-war artists and writers have consistently been among those lobbing sophisticated critiques at the media state. Here I hasten to say that we have benefited from their efforts, unquestionably. Even if the attacks they’ve mounted haven’t succeeded either in reducing the will of the media state one iota or thwarting the exercise of its power, they have taught many of us how to identify propaganda in its subtlest forms and maintain a healthy distance from its effects. They’ve liberated many of us from the state’s control–surely their aim in the first place, at least in part. From the perspective afforded us by the digital revolution, however, it’s hard not to feel that their vigor of their opposition must have been fueled, somewhat, by a frustration at having been denied access to the powerful, seductive, bedazzling communication technologies of our time. (Artists and writers are in the communication business as well, after all.) When something has a grip on you but you’re not allowed near it, fascination can twist into resentment.
But if it’s really progress you’re looking to bring about, there’s more than one way to flay that feline. Happily, the High Entertainer–born further along in the evolution of technology, more media-empowered–needn’t define progressivism in the same frustrated, oppositional terms of his or her artistic forebears. The media state underwritten by business civilization may be with us from here on out but the digital revolution has modernized and, in the course of modernizing, altered the independent imagination’s relation to state power. New opportunities make for new politics; the fact that you and I can now communicate in and distribute mainstream formats without any obligation to the existing media system means we neither have to sign up with nor do battle against that system’s corporate overseers. The independent imagination is now less beholden to any ideology. If we don’t need to enlist in the opacities, distractions, and lies that characterize corporate media to proceed with our work, neither is criticality of corporate media the thinking person’s only respectable alternative. Media-enabled, the High Entertainer needn’t–actually, can’t–divide the situation so neatly as us and them, insider and outsider.
In this sense, the digital revolution has cleared a space for innocence to take hold, a new beginning, a fresh start. The High Entertainer has been given an opportunity to work from that historical rarity, the clean slate. What might mass entertainment freed from corporate ownership look and sound like, actually? When you don’t have to serve power in order to communicate in the means previously controlled by the corporate state, how exactly will you use your independence? How safe will you play it? How imaginative will you be? Free of the strictures of system, what form does communication take? The independent imagination’s relation to power becomes, clearly, something to be defined anew….
Informed by these factors, the cultural niche I’ve been calling High Entertainment is in a position to sponsor a transfusion of ethics into the entertainment we consume. Less obligated to rely on the bullshit of show biz, it is free to talk about the world in another way. Whether reality will fulfill the promise of theory is open to question. Many of us would welcome a new, ethically-charged, more honest sort of entertainment. Let’s be careful here, though. Let’s not hope for too much. This isn’t a crusade, it’s an opportunity. High Entertainment may deliver on it only by introducing a better–here translated as more entertaining–class of lies. But even that will be an improvement.
Post-Art
Why do I argue for a High Entertainment? To counter the brain drain, and because history has arranged for this cultural moment to come into existence; what I’ve been describing really is taking place. So far as embracing full-on the opportunity this moment represents, though, this I do for reasons of my own.
When I began as an artist, twenty years ago, making artworks and exhibiting them in galleries and, in time, museums, art was to me a wonderful way of exploring both the world and what a person could be in the world. Through art I applied myself to the world and discovered my sensibility.
That sensibility (it turned out) had from the start big dollops of entertainment culture in it (obvious from the title of my first solo exhibition–The David Robbins Show.) Too big, perhaps: the art context, as steeped as I was in it, was always an uncomfortable fit. Regardless, I soldiered on, during my years in the role of “artist” I making some interesting things and, I think, some interesting discoveries too, for myself and hopefully for others.
All the time, though, my sensibility pointed toward and yearned for an imaginative Elsewhere. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the narrowness of art as a formulation of the imagination. This will sound preposterous to many people, I’m aware, given that art offers and represents extraordinary behavioral freedoms, but in “making art” I found an ultimately enslaving formulation. How so? In art, you can do, yes, anything you want so long as you’re willing to have it end up as art. That isn’t real imaginative freedom, in my view. Inquisitiveness of mind will carry you past art, and apparently I love inquisitiveness of mind more than I love art. In the final analysis I prefer not to be a slave to any proposition that isn’t of my own creation–even to propositions, such as art, that have resulted in a lot of wonderful things. (I don’t expect to convince any artists of my argument, of course. Art in the modern era is a faith-based exercise, a surrogate church: you believe in it or you don’t. Ultimately, I found, I’m simply not a believer. Anyone who is a believer will not understand my discomfort, but that will have to be their problem. Indeed, when it comes to faith, that’s always the catch: there’s no room for doubt.)
Unwilling to be who art–and the art system–asked me to be, I let my imagination gradually evolve away from its earlier emphasis on deriving adventure from intensive explorations of the visual and material realm. Eventually, my personal trajectory intersected with the digital revolution, which, god bless it, provided a way out of identifying my production as “art” without also having to give up the abilities and sensibility I’d developed through being an artist.
This cultural moment holds special promise, then, for anyone like me who, rather than introducing things–materials, subject matter, concepts–into the art context (a strategy that seems to me to have been the work of modernism, and a habit of imagination left over from modernism), prefers the challenge of pushing certain ambitions for the culture and certain attitudes heretofore associated with the art context in the direction of the mainstream. My ambition isn’t to get video art shown on a television program or channel. My ambition isn’t to write into my screenplay a character who’s an artist. My ambition is to make “television shows” or “movies” for popular consumption–and, equally, to find out what those will look and sound like. I may succeed or I may fail at this “High Entertainment” business but, whatever the outcome, as a challenge it now strikes me as more interesting than making more Art–and more appropriate too, given my sensibility. Fortunately, the mainstream culture has evolved to a point where it’s on the cusp of accommodating entertainment made by people whose thinking has been shaped in the art context; that gap too has narrowed.
High Entertainment is for me, then, a post-art condition of mind; I worked through my art fascination and arrived at something that’s clearly informed by art training and art thinking but doesn’t play by art’s rules. What I make from here on out may yet be interpreted as art–it’s still personal, invented communication, after all–but if so that interpretation will be supplied by the audience, not by its maker.
For some of you, an idea such as High Entertainment will represent the right path. You get it. (The kids, with their cameras and their microphones, get it, I can tell you.) You may not be ready yet to accommodate or pursue its promise, you may have to work through your fascination with art and its possibilities before you can become comfortable with the state of mind and the kind of production that High Entertainment represents, but in your gut you recognize home in what I’ve been describing.
That’s great. Be forewarned, however, that your acceptance of a role vis a vis entertainment may require you to admit something about yourself that you may prefer not to hear. You may discover that, as it turns out, you do not have an artist’s commitment to form, an artist’s identification with media or material, an artist’s obsessions or an artist’s discipline. Everyone isn’t meant to be an artist. And if you aren’t? What are you to do with your perfectly good ideas? Suppress them because they’re not art? Nonsense! Get to work! Understand your difference and articulate its place in the scheme of things.
From the number of galleries and museums dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art, and the quality of work that’s shown in them, art looks to be in pretty good shape. At least there seems no shortage of people adept at fashioning refined, ambitious, well-made, challenging art objects. The intense competition is eliciting strong work. Art’s in good hands. What’s not in great shape is the entertainment culture. And that’s the other reason to embrace the promise of High Entertainment: the condition entertainment’s in.
Glance at the Sunday TV section of any newspaper in any American city: for every Seinfeld, every Six Feet Under, every Sopranos there are twenty degrading, puerile sitcoms, ten grim police dramas featuring twisted killers tracked by wise-cracking crime units, and a dozen crassly Darwinian reality programs. It’s difficult to believe that adults could stand to imagine, write, and shoot the sorry line-up weekly offered. “But TV, with so many channels, must fill so much airtime,” you argue. “Inevitably some of it has to disappoint.” According to that argument mainstream movies, responsible for only two hours of your time, ought to really be delivering the goods, yet your ten-dollar ticket practically guarantees two hours of witless dialogue, teeth-grinding sentimentality, gadgetry, and gore. That complaints about the entertainment business are longstanding doesn’t diminish their relevancy. Let’s cut to the chase: In seeking to reduce risk and, by so doing, guarantee the lavish lifestyles of the people who run it, a once-inventive industry has drifted into a cynical attitude toward its audience that does life no favor. Because it has enjoyed a lock on the mainstream culture for as long as anyone alive can remember, the entertainment industry’s assumptions about what constitutes “entertainment” have gone unchallenged for too long. Those assumptions have been free to rot, and rotting they, at long last, surely are. We’ve all learned to be ironic about the tragic phosphorescence emanating from popular culture. Thanks to the digital revolution we no longer have to be.
The zone now forming between fine art and popular art can be explored in many ways. If this discussion of a High Entertainment has emphasized recorded media at the expense of object production, it’s due to the fact that the power struggle is playing out in recorded media, not objects. Certainly, though, the concept of High Entertainment—i.e, works and artifacts that retain’s fine art’s complex ambitions for the culture while eschewing the specialized language of fine art in favor of mass accessibility–can be manifested in games, toys, fashion, public sculpture, books, hoaxes–indeed in any product that has contact with the public.
Accommodating the notion that one could, in the image business, offer a sophisticated and ambitious sort of production, in nature independent from the existing art and entertainment systems, requires mental discipline. Even if you like the idea of a High Entertainment, in order for it to exist you have first to believe that it can. Some of you will resist this. Without even knowing it, you may be someone who operates on the assumption that all categories of imaginative endeavor have already been identified, and that the best we can do is fit our sensibilities to these known categories. (The ostensibly wild and wooly art world–of all places!–is full of people who hold this view.) But that’s like declaring that all scientific discoveries have already been made. Entire, subtly differentiated categories of imaginative endeavor are still to be invented. High Entertainment, a term that, at the very least, denotes categories confounded, might be among them.
The idea that all categories of imaginative endeavor haven’t already been created and identified is an essential one, but it lives only as a result of belief in it. (Here’s my church.) It takes time to get comfortable with the idea that a High Entertainment might exist. It takes time to get comfortable with not categorizing something as “art” just because it’s more satisfying than run-of-the-mill entertainment. For a new category to take hold, you must let it take hold. This requires mental discipline–the discipline to say no to tradition, the discipline to hold the door open to allow an unknown future to enter the room, the picture, your life, and to take shape. High Entertainment is, just for starters, a mental exercise in structuring the new.
David Robbins
Milwaukee 2007
1In light of this characterization we might reasonably wonder what reward the audience for the mainstream gets out of the arrangement. Yes, they get a steady supply of product, pitched at a competent level of professionalism. They have contact with the entertainment vibration, of course; the mainstream is the interface between the Infrastructure of Fun and the Consumer. And their contact with that product delivers contact with the mainstream, which contact is, for some reason, desirable. Exactly why isn’t clear. What does contact with the mainstream do for the audience? What does that contact deliver to them? “Entertainment” is the means by which an important modern abstraction–the mainstream–stays a part of their life. Members of the audience gain a sense of their time, of course, but a sense of one’s time can be derived from many, alternative sources. Ultimately, it really is a bit of a mystery why the audience doesn’t rebel!
2To thematize platforming it isn’t necessary to go the Warhol route. An excellent example of a more impersonal platform is the Social Event Archive. Begun in 1997 by Milwaukeean Paul Dreucke, the SEA solicits photographs of social events, one photograph per contributor, and now includes more than 700 photographs. The understanding of “social event” is defined by the contributors, who become collaborators in the project. Thus “social event” isn’t only represented pictorially, it’s embedded in the very structure of the project, and expands accordingly.
3Art expresses and reveals the involuntary self, the maker’s deepest psyche, which is beyond his or her control. The romance and virtues of individualism aside, is every psyche one that ought to stand so naked? Not based on my experience. Some involuntary selves aren’t really healthy enough to have a public life; without meaning to, some psyches poison the atmosphere.
What we generally categorize as “entertainment,” a more limited enterprise, generally promotes and stands for a cheerier view of life. Art can be a bummer, after all, and still be quite good art. Yes, entertainment is narrower, but is this more restricted range automatically a bad thing? Mightn’t we acknowledge that, really, for the good of the audience, some people’s psyches ought to be swimming in the shallow end? One can already envision the ad campaign: “Some people shouldn’t go very deep–and with High Entertainment, they don’t have to!”
4For some of you, accepting the idea that “to entertain” is okay will be a terrific challenge. You’ve got “entertaining” ideas, but you think you ought to want to be aligned with the goals of art. Entertaining? Instead of “working on” a real or an imaginary “problem,” rather than working on finding a solution to that problem? It goes against everything you’ve been taught. The academy, which is full of smart people, some of whom come up a bit short in the imagination department, has in our time succeeded in harnessing the imagination to the idea of “the problem.” (It is one of the few clear successes of the academy in our time.) Play, says the academy, should be infused with utility. There’s a lot of good in that idea. A lot of good has come of it, at least. But utility can be defined in many ways. Exposing other people to the uncategorizable: isn’t that a form of human “utility” too? To keep alive human values like wit and charm, at a time when the world seems hell-bent on snuffing out those values, doesn’t that count as “utility”?
Utility, in other words, is alright so long as you don’t also hold that its nature be identified in advance.
5I should also point out that, in the art context, the construction of persona is less absolutely dependent on the camera. Cindy Sherman used the camera to build her image of herself in our minds, but artists are under no special obligation to utilize a camera for this work. In the show biz world you have to gain the attention of the camera in order to be a star; Jane Fonda and Paris Hilton are totally camera-dependent. In the art world, by contrast, you don’t have to gain the attention of a camera to succeed in building a persona in the minds of the audience. Persona-construction can be done by other means, using other media. Persona can be applied more directly to a system without, in fact, any consistent mediation device. Karen Kilimnik managed it. Richard Prince did, I suppose. Martin Kippenberger… The list isn’t short, actually.
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Orphans:
[As the author, the independent imagination in relation to a system may choose to be critical of a system. Only the art context will tolerate this attitude or find it interesting. The show biz context won’t tolerate it at all; criticality threatens to work against opacity, and this is not allowable. If you are critical within the show biz context it will quickly become almost impossible to remain with that context. The art context will allow comparatively more criticality but only so long as that criticality is not perceived as finally threatening to the flow of money. Criticality within the art context stops at the money–where the money has come from, and where the money has gone. It is the same as the nightly news; the anchorman cannot report on the real news of our time since, were he to do so, the corporation which owns his desk and microphone is certain to be implicated.]
[Okay, so first a new technology of some kind is invented. Right off the bat, this triggers a whole set of responses among existing media. The introduction of new technologies causes adaptations or extinctions among existing technologies and existing styles.
Changes in technology force adaptations of existing communication styles while making new communication styles possible. Music that might be too difficult for an individual to play on the home piano was easy to play on the phonograph.
Some styles are more appropriate to certain technologies than others.
Changes in technology in one medium bring about adaptations and changes in technologies and therefore styles in other media. As radio got stronger, record sales went down until the record industry introduced new technologies like the LP.
There’s a consistent history of business missing the boat on technologies and styles, and of incidental discoveries. Radio stations were first created in order to sell the physical radio unit, not in order to advertise other products. Indeed, there was strong opposition to advertising on radio initially, and the station owners themselves were the ones opposing it.]
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The following comments are adapted from a talk delivered on March 26, 2012, at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago.
“Each of us works with our imprinting. Artists especially must identify and understand their imprinting. As an artist your imprinting is going to play out in the freedoms you claim for yourself. If, like many modern children, you have been imprinted with entertainment culture, then it’s likely you will get ideas suitable for movies, TV shows, pop music and the like (along with whatever other kinds of ideas you get — art ideas and such). Regardless of whether or not you use these ideas you must acknowledge and permit yourself full access to your own imagination. It’s a basic right. From the earliest years of my public life I embraced my entertainment-culture imprinting without apology. In the early going, the mid-1980s, the art world was outright hostile to my attitude but because it seemed to me honest and authentic I stuck to my guns. It had an impact on how I position art production, and over the years, through works and writings, this has influenced some other imaginations.
I am interested in re-wiring entertainment to include ambitious or sophisticated takes on material culture, which culture traditionally has been art’s domain, and I am equally interested in expanding our idea of comedy. I’m working on two tracks, then, both of which run parallel to art. I am an artist but I work from more of a cultural location than from an artistic location as that has been defined by the art context. I’m not “making art” so much as I am integrating material culture into a theater which is organized around a wish to entertain. That’s the energy that drives my work. As far as human desires go, a wish to entertain seems to me sufficiently complex to act upon.
An artist such as Roy Lichtenstein made paintings, sculpture, drawings, ceramics, public sculptures etc., but everything he made was intended for a single context: the art context. His contemporary, Andy Warhol, went about things differently. Warhol made paintings and drawings for the art context, but he also made films for theatrical release. His films of the mid-1960s such as The Chelsea Girls and Lonesome Cowboys enjoyed theatrical release in uptown movie theaters. Warhol was an artist who made work for multiple cultural contexts.
The digital revolution has magnified and intensified the possibilities that Warhol was indicating, by making production and distribution of media-formatted work much easier. Today Author A can make paintings and television shows with roughly the same efficiency. Question: If Author A makes paintings and television shows, what is the location of Author A?
This question, and the opportunity it indicates, belongs to our era. The digital revolution has enabled anyone with access to a computer, camera, and microphone to create efficiently using the pop media — TV, film, music — whose distribution had been controlled heretofore by corporations. With revolutionary potential playing out both in the unprecedented ease of production of works which employ the grammar of mass communication and, equally, their distribution, today’s creative imagination can apply an exhilarating degree of real, practical independence toward achieving reach and impact. Digital technologies have liberated us from reliance on the production systems and economies of the entertainment industry at the same time that digital distribution, via the Internet, enable us to bypass the evaluative system of the art context. Able now to say what we want to say in the way that we want to say it and to deliver the result to an audience, directly and unfiltered, we are freed to develop cultural positions and forge personal paths that disregard two long dominant over-determined cultural systems. In their place we create and distribute pop-media work using new, still-forming systems. It now falls to us to take full advantage of this remarkable situation and to be generous with our imaginations. These new production and distribution conditions, since they not only permit but implement and encourage experimentation, are already influencing what’s being made — how it is structured, what it looks like, what it feels like, and what it has to say. Additionally, the relative ease of digital production today bestows a degree of personal creative control of pop media technologies that previously had been restricted to painting, sculpture, and other fine art practices.
Emergent is a new category of creative communication that I have termed high entertainment. High Entertainment synthesizes the best aspects of art and entertainment. We reject art’s reliance on a specialized language but retain art’s experimentation and emphasis on form-discovery — the idea that you discover the form in the process of making the work. We reject entertainment’s complacency but we retain its emphasis on accessibility. So: experimentation and form-discovery combined with accessibility: High Entertainment. It’s a sensibility that applies experimentation to accessible, popular media formats, such as television and movies. The natural home for much of this very new, just emerging work is the Web, because there are no curators. On the web, an indigenous high-entertainment value system is forming organically.
The digital revolution reinforces a cultural location I have taken to calling the independent imagination. While it’s probably true that any self-invented behavioral innovation which foregrounds communication in a personal way ought to be regarded as art regardless of form, medium, method or context, the independent imagination resists self-identifying as an “artist.” The independent imagination strives to treat communication contexts as the artist treats communication media, i.e. when needed. He or she prefers to engage the thought-structures of the visual art context only when doing so is appropriate for a particular goal. The independent imagination returns always to a position of independence. From what? From the model of success that any one system represents, promotes, reinforces, and maintains. The goal is to foreground freedom of action within history rather than within the record of history which is cultivated. maintained, and reinforced by any single communication system. The goal is to give oneself complete access to one’s own imagination.”
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LEARN MORE:
Israel, Alex, “David Robbins talks High Entertainment,” For Your Art.com
