iThink
Cultural oversaturation
IS OUR CULTURE BECOMING OVERSATURATED? HENRY BISHOP (UPPER SIXTH) Capital “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies […] of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”
Intense aesthetic appreciation has never been so chimerical. Extinct are those moments in which we are truly taken aback by art, music or literature – a gripping sense of amazement has been usurped by “that’s nice”. The commodification of culture has much blame for this – if you can’t make money from shoving people in front of it, then what value does it have? As the archetype of this, which is more appealing to a film studio, the divergent film from an unproven, eclectic new filmmaker, or the reiterations and spin-offs of the same “property” which have burrowed their way into popular agreeableness? The observation of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto that:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is expressing itself in increasingly novel and insidious ways. We are all instantiations of Mark Fisher’s neologistic concept of the “consumer-spectator”, having artistic products/output (the language of capitalist production has invaded its next territory) placed before us, for our monetary approval. These products have to compete with each other (neoliberal logic in a realm previously untainted) in a technologically driven attention lottery to be delivered en masse on the shovels of platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the new instigators of fleeting cultural trends.
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2022
