LIKE MANY WRITERS, I find the idea of re-reading my past work torturous. Once I’m done with a piece, I desperately try to usher it out of my memory. Unfortunately, a piece I wrote two years ago for this platform was thrust back into my consciousness when it was reshared on Instagram. Having my old essay resurrected on social media was hard enough; the irony that it interrogates whether social media is flattening culture and taste-making was almost too much to bear.

Reflecting on the piece, it became obvious to me that the homogenisation of culture begged a deeper question about the impact of the work of art on politics. Hours before seeing the post, I was at Osoi in Brunswick for my friend Lucas’ weekly DJ set. Every Sunday, his project Mushroomsamba brings together a crowd of his friends to take communion in the form of matcha and his new mixes. I make the pilgrimage when I’m looking for a revelation. That particular day, I was doling out Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘The Culture Industry’ as if it were required reading – a sardonic cherry on top of the entire experience.  

Adorno and Horkheimer coined the term ‘culture industry’ to describe the standardisation and mass production of cultural goods under capitalism. They argued that art had become an industrial product that pacified and homogenised an audience who were consumers first and people second. Later, Adorno clarified his disdain for the term ‘mass culture’ because it implied that culture and its goods appeared organically from the masses rather than being manufactured for them and, in turn, shaping the nature of their consumption. To support his argument, Adorno pointed to the fallacies of genre films in Hollywood (an example that bites even more strongly today). We can all recognise the familiar beats of a superhero film – the same interchangeable stories designed as units within a system (sequels, prequels and spin-offs alike), the same narrative arc, the same visual style, the same emotional payoff.  

Adorno argues that products of the culture industry can be consumed in a state of distraction because we already know the substance of the work through its style; this state of d​​istraction keeps the masses passively consuming rather than critically thinking. If Adorno were resurrected from the grave, showing him my ‘For you’ page would be a sure-fire way to send him back. Amid the endless stream of content, we have relinquished all agency over what we consume and simply let it be served to us. When I scroll through reels on Instagram beside my partner (who doesn’t use social media), he often asks how I can decide what’s worth watching so quickly. The answer is that I’ve internalised beats of short-form content – a person crying in their car, ‘what I eat in a day’, ‘fit checks’ – I understand the substance of a video within its style. According to Adorno, my ability to recognise these standardised structures, even in a state of distraction, does not equip me to emancipate myself from. Homogenised content procures a homogenised response before I am nudged to scroll on to the next exciting thing.

On social media, we often discover art in fragments – a clip from a movie, a poem chopped up over a carousel, a close-up of the details of a painting. The all-seeing eye of the algorithm has become the informal curator of our aesthetic experience. Before we created a digital world, our encounters with art were often curated by magazine editors, critics and artists themselves. My original piece addresses the evolution of taste curation and disputes the easy assessment that things were better pre-internet. What is indisputable is that the way we most commonly encounter art has shifted to algorithmic, brain-rotting content farms; from albums meticulously curated by artists to our own curated playlists. By being chronically online, we seem to have accepted the distracted fugue of our individual and collective experience of art. But what trends have emerged from this and who, or what, bears the cost? 

​​​The curatorial function of Instagram operates in a cycle that begins with the algorithm shilling out content for you to interact with before you subsequently curate your own profile and identity around it ad nauseam. New York-based illustrator Rama Duwaji’s monthly carousel of images that ‘made her want to make art’ exemplifies this cycle. Her sphere of influence has significantly widened since her husband’s election as New York City Mayor, and she uses this to platform artists who are creating remarkable things. Often, Duwaji’s chosen works have little to no thematic throughline or context, but her followers still engage by liking, commenting, sharing and saving her posts. Even in our physical spaces, the phone has become the pallid means of artistic engagement and performance, from the ultra gauche (selfies with the Mona Lisa) to the faux sophisticated (moodily lit ‘candid’ shots). Neither of these approaches is a substantive way of engaging with an artwork itself, but is rather a way to show your followers something about you to varying degrees of seriousness (stories, which disappear, feel less consequential – grid posts, which remain, are more so). In doing this, you are staking a claim over the work and making it your own. The risks of doing this are obvious. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it: ‘taste classifies and it classifies the classifier.’ Whether you like it or not, there’s no real way of engaging with art on social media without quietly situating yourself within a hierarchy of cultural competence. The dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow becomes the dichotomy between garish and classy, which ultimately begets the cultured and the philistine.  

​​​On Instagram, art becomes spectacle. In response to a photo I had posted, a friend commented, ‘that’s so aesthetic’. This doesn’t evaluate anything about the content of the image. It simply tags it as visually consistent. I find myself pandering to aesthetics when sharing my written work online; I superimpose excerpts of my essay over beautiful images, partly because it’s more engaging but also because it fits into whatever aesthetic framework I’m curating on my grid. This speaks precisely to the incompatibility of social media and the artwork; the latter demands that the viewer abandons their ego, while the former encourages them to nurture it. It’s the attempt to bridge this gap, to make art appealing to people’s visions of themselves, that makes our collective artistic experience less meaningful. 

Scrolling is often devoid of intention; the sheer volume of content available and the vacuousness of liking or sharing a post helps facilitate this aimlessness. Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has diagnosed this shift in art culture from a focus on the traditional aesthetic ideals of the sublime and the meaningful to a much mellower category: the ‘interesting’. The ‘interesting’ is a weak but mobile aesthetic judgement that encourages widespread circulation rather than careful attention. The industrial production of culture no longer needs to be imposed from above but laterally through interactions on social media. At an individual level, our online activity helps shape our digital persona and cultural landscape. But for the money-hungry algorithm, our activity is a vehicle to harvest data and disseminate advertisements to our closest circles. Once this happens at scale, people are sold products that help them align their real lives with the ones they’ve crafted for themselves online.  

When our primary mode of engagement with art is one that privileges commerce and aesthetic spectacle, our critical capacity begins to wither. The greatest risk this poses is subduing our reactions to the political injustices that are happening to us and around the world. We no longer have to sit with discomfort. We can scroll on, purchase something that’s been advertised to us, search for another distraction to dull the discomfort and pass the time. As AI imbeds itself into this process and the need to think erodes, we are barrelling straight into the latest iteration of capitalism. We’re now at a crossroads where our online lives are becoming less sustainable. While writing this piece, I maintained a meek hope that confronting the trials and tribulations of engaging with art and culture online would emancipate me from them. My return to Instagram disproved that quickly. Social media has endogenised its own criticisms: people make content about how to stop doomscrolling or why social media has made everyone afraid of being cringe. The culture industry has no trouble internalising criticism and rebellion. The fact that the essay I wrote two years ago resurfaced on Instagram might itself be a small example of this contradiction. What was an attempt to think through the conditions of taste became another artefact to be circulated.  

SO, WHAT NOW? No solution is perfect. Personally, I’ve been trialling a few things: sticking to my social media time limit, not watching any short-form content and participating in the New York Times’ monthly ten-minute challenge. An increasingly popular solution is to engage in an analogue lifestyle: logging off social media, unsubscribing from streaming services and taking up ‘offline’ hobbies (like scrapbooking or hiking). This is a sincere and radical response to our current condition. It reintroduces friction and material constraints to the way we interact with art, forcing us to slow down and seek out art and creativity as opposed to having it served to us. 

What worries me most about the analogue lifestyle is the question of who gets to log off. The final dose of irony that I experienced in writing this piece was delivered to me in this video essay arguing that those who can afford to engage in real-life activities and coveted third spaces will be the new elite. I’ve written most of this essay at cafes (drinking six-dollar long blacks) and my bouldering gym (where membership costs thirty-nine dollars per week). This has led to meaningful conversations with strangers and friends alike, but those without day jobs who bankroll similar lifestyles will have no other option but to search for it online. And, of course, the analogue can also be aestheticised. My Instagram has recently been serving me ads for apps to tackle my social media addiction and content from influencers with vast physical media collections. 

So, really, what now!? The truth is that I dislike re-reading my own work because it feels ridiculous to believe it could compete with social media. What has carried me along is the process of writing the essay itself. The artistic process is antithetical to the attention economy; it’s a devotion to the meaningful, a relinquishing of the ego and an unseating of money at the top of our value hierarchy. I now believe that what underlies my process is the hope that my audience will do the same.  

If we want a rich artistic landscape, we must consider attention not as something passive to be captured but rather an intentional act of devotion. Art is for everyone, so ask yourself, what can it be for you? Sit with a work for longer than necessary. Resist the instinct to document everything. Let a work move you before you move on. Slow down. Together, these small acts will accumulate into resistance. And if we’re lucky, we’ll find ourselves weeping at the end of a film or dancing at Mushroomsamba, our souls aglow with the concentrated brilliance of an electric heart. 

_{^{Image credit: Markus Spiske via Unsplash}}