Hopefully this essay by Matthew Gasda doesn't get paywalled before you have a chance to read it. Not that I'd necessarily begrudge them, because this one is quite good.
Gasda is a playwright himself, somewhat avant-garde, so he knows whereof he speaks. Something has gone deeply wrong in the creative fields.
Regimes of biosurveillance, integrated into culture, destroy culture from within. I feel the way about many bookstores that I do about theaters. At least in New York, where I live, they have lost their magic, and are no longer worth lingering in. Covid gave cultural institutions license to act like institutions, to exercise control for the sake of control over whoever comes through the doors, charging more, providing less.
And I think it's worth unpacking exactly where and when things started to slip. So to take another example. McSweeney's Internet Tendency is a site/webzine I always used to enjoy. Filled with leftfield humor pieces and some thoughtful essays, some of which I believe I've linked on this blog. But the last couple of years the tone there has seemed more rigid, obsessed with being right-thinking.
As in so many places, COVID-19 had a deadening effect. But the problem started earlier. I think for a lot of artistic venues and ventures it was a perfect storm of Trump, COVID, and the post-Floyd racial reckoning, all of which exacerbated some kind of malaise that was already in the air. Certainly when Trump hatred went from an eccentric New York hobby―as it had been pretty much since the disco era―to a national mission we all got sucked into some horrible Manhattan vortex.
Beyond that...Well, from my personal perspective, I'm an appreciator of the strange, the quirky, the―to use the term again―avant-garde. And it would be nice to think that other people who appreciate these things, as well as all those who create them, also have an appreciation for the free, spontaneous side of human nature. But it's become ever more clear that artistic folk are quite capable of being conformist, even authoritarian. And when you bring administrators into the picture, well...
It's also bad, I think, to have a "no enemies to the left" policy, since you have no idea what will be considered "left" in five minutes.
2 comments:
That was an excellent article about a little addessed problem we've noticed too. The lockdown changed a lot of things fast, not least the events and places where people had always felt confident in being able to relax and congregate for whatever reason. The combination of modern technology and government orders purposely fanned people's fears about contagion. I'll always believe it was a deliberate effort to see just how much we could be controlled and it was largely successful.
How could we forget seeing the beautiful people at the Met Gala dressed in finery going unmasked while the acolytes stood around wearing match black masks? There have been a number of examples since. At the same time it's true that two years of covid controls seem to have altered a lot of people's habits, largely among the most on-line part of the population. Office workers who got to stay home did far less work and got paid while others didn't have the benefit of collecting salaries without showing up at a job. Those who liked telling others what to do enjoyed a great deal of leeway.
I think that overall you're right that it all began earlier and that the pandemic merely solidified a situation that was well underway. Between safetyism at universities, reverse racism, hatred of 'the other party', and unwarranted fears of climate collapse I'm concerned there's more craziness to come.. especially with so much money to be made.
I do hope I'm wrong.
The modern technology and the government orders seemed to feed on each other. Long before the well-advertised pandemic people got into the habit of taking digital leashes everywhere they went. Eventually their devices told them to not go anywhere, or to avoid certain people. It didn't work on absolutely everyone but a distressing number of people were taken in.
The Met Gala seems to always have been an unsubtle display of wealth and status. The trend in recent years of cranking up the decadence while adding a new element of self-righteousness is either absolutely hilarious or not funny at all, depending on your perspective. On one level I see the appeal of work-from-home. It can also be intrusive. Obviously it doesn't work for every kind of work. And those who have gone remote do sometimes seem determined to lord it over their lessers. A lot of this stems from insecurity over just how easily they could be elimintated.
Getting a university degree is supposed to be the ticket to money and authority. That doesn't always work out, to be sure. But a lot of the people for whom it does work as advertised may be adding to the problem. Which is to say that if you go through a rigid and dehumanizing system and come out on the other side to have power over people in business, medicine, government, etc., you may have also internalized the idea that dehumanizing rules are the best way.
i hope your wrong too. Either way we'll have to muddle through.
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