“Do you want the real definition of success? The best definition of success is time — the time to do your work.” Jerry Saltz 1
In the movie The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017), there is a scene where the protagonist Christian, the director of the Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art, discusses with an advertising company the promotion strategy for the museum’s next exhibition with the homonymous title “The Square”. The executive of the agency noticing Christian’s concerns he advises him to show confidence in the skills of his two young associates (fig.1,2), because “they have been brought up in the arena of high speed”. The meeting ends with the two millenials of the creative team saying: “Let’s just hope that on the day that the commercial will be released, there will be no terrorist attack”.
Swedish director Ruben Östlund turns the arrows of his irony against the world of contemporary art, but he also parodies in his film the media and the way journalism works today. I believe we all have noticed that in the digital age we live in, communication and news-telling has changed dramatically: a story is no longer measured by its validity and reliability; its success depends on the number of “likes” and “shares”. In order to keep up with the competition, publishers need to grab the the attention of the their audience. In order to achieve this, they sacrifice with great ease the quality of the news. Thus, true journalism has been replaced by content creation.
There is something else we should take into consideration: the space of the published articles in news-sites have grown disproportionately compared to the traditional front pages of the newspapers. If you scroll down to the homepage of a news coorporation you will see countless news items, classified into many different categories. In order to fill all these “boxes” with content, some people have to work hard day and night. Therefore journalists’ working time is significantly reduced. When an event occurs, it should be covered immediately by the media, leaving no room for substantial investigation and reporting.
In the age of non-stop communication and fast-information, the media machine is becoming greedy: you have to constantly “feed” it with new data. The journalist is transformed into a factory outlet; a worker that constantly places news on the production line. So, staff writers have long ago left the look of the intellectual: Adapting to the technological developments, they have to judge quickly, type fast, report on the go, and create news at a dizzying pace.
Acceleration is now the thing. But how fast is the human brain? Is it a matter of generation? If you were born “in the arena of high speed”, do you perform better?
What happens to the recipient?
More problems seem to appear in our digital culture. Due to the extensive flow of images and data, there is a discontinuity in human perception. A person now finds it very difficult to concentrate; he or she scans everything with the eye. New media have been linked to progress, but to what extent do we advance as human beings when we give up reading?
At the end of the film, the two young people of the advertising company create a TV commercial that shows a homeless girl crying loudly in the “Square” (the framework of art), and then explodes like a jihadist (fig. 3 ). The video goes viral, but the museum director is forced to resign as he is criticised largely by the press.
It is now clear that communication takes place in terms of aesthetics; everything turns into a spectacle. The subjects of news always revolves around fires, accidents, disasters. The following questions arise: Why should one be always prepared for emergencies?
We have reached a time when we the humans are in a state of constant shock: bombarded with stimuli, we live a tech panic. French philosopher Paul Virilio likens information-overload to a modern form of terrorism. When the citizens are in diffusion, at the mercy of the communication chaos, their relationship with reality is no longer balanced. Therefore, the issue here is not the problems of communication, but a political matter. Virilio, who died in 2019, emphasises about this phenomenon in his book “Pure War”: “That is why I say that we will either cooperate with this situation or we will resist. The problem with cooperation is that you do not know that you are cooperating, while when you resist you know it. “Resistance means choice.”
The above text was based on an academic study prepared during the postgraduate program "Digital Art Forms" of the School of Fine Arts (2018-2020). The complete bibliography is listed in the my essays submitted to the Greek university. Specifically: 1. "Time and Speed in the Media" ("Theory and Aesthetics of the Media I", professor Dionysis Kavvathas, A' Semester, 2018-2019), 2. "Communication and Dispersion" ("Theory and Aesthetics of Media III, Dionysis Kavvathas, 3rd Semester, 2019-2020) 3. "The Turtle: The birth of a new apparatus" ("Interaction and Physical Computing II, teacher Floros Angelos, 2nd Semester, 2019) 4." Television of Diaspora TV "(" Interaction and Physical Computing III ", Floros Angelos, 2019-2020).
- “How to Be an Artist”, Vulture, Nov. 27, 2018 https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/jerry-saltz-how-to-be-an-artist.html
Last updated on 22/10/2024
