All entries for October 2013

Producing Tastes

This week I had that slightly bewildering/fearful experience for an academic of touching the zeitgeist/ having the rug stolen from under me. Preparing a talk which I had tentatively entitled ‘Producing tastes’ for a couple of presentations this month, I heard some of the issues I was thinking about being addressed in Grayson Perry’s first Reith Lecture – Democracy Has Bad Taste. My talk is part of a developing writing project on aspects or dimensions of cultural taste and it tries to outline some of the institutional, ‘industrial’ and social processes through which tastes get formed– processes which, like all the most fundamental parts of infrastructure, seem to be obvious and eternal but actually are the products of various histories and struggles. Grayson Perry had a couple of evocative phrases to describe this process – one of which, ‘the lovely consensus’ of people in various positions of power who validate art - I might well appropriate. He is a lively contributor to these debates in the UK - as demonstrated by his authoritative and thoughtful documentary on taste and class last year. Subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, playful and subversive he revels in what he describes as a teasing insider/outsider status which allows him to critique an academic elite, an artworld establishment, celebrities and political correctness as if, as a cross-dressing, Turner prize-winning, CBE-holding, Royal Academy-exhibiting, Reith lecture-giving, Visiting Professor he doesn’t have at least a trace of himself in all these categories.

The talk was always entertaining – but never, I think quite nailed its object. Grayson began by downplaying the prospect of easy answers – but the question of why democracy might inevitably or always produce bad taste wasn’t addressed as much as the less controversial notion that the value of art does not rest in either monetary exchange or bums on seats. Quality was important but it was located somewhere else. Precisely where, understandably for a question which has vexed thinkers for centuries, wasn’t really clear. In place of an answer, though, there was a familiar ambivalence to the notion of the popular. It was evoked as a kind of safety net against pretension on the one hand but also identified as a dubious source of authoritative aesthetic judgment on the other. Perhaps one might expect that kind of ambivalence from a room at the Tate, full of artworld insiders, enjoying being gently mocked by one of their own. Overall the talk, and the questions that followed had what the anthropologists might call a rather liminal, carnivalesque air – a space in which a (validated) clown or fool can poke fun at power for a bit before the rules kick in again, refreshed and renewed.

For me the best moment was when the writer and journalist Miranda Sawyer asked a question about the anger that people unfamiliar with contemporary art might experience in contemporary art galleries– even those who are comfortable with other forms of culture, such as pop music. Part of this anger stems, she suggests, from the feeling that they are being ‘tricked’. This reminded me of a passage from the influential sociological critique of the foundations of taste, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction in which he describes the ‘exclusion’ felt by what he identified as the working class audience, confronted by modern art. It is admitting they don’t understand it that betrays this exclusion, for Bourdieu. The bourgeois audience might not understand either – and indeed David Halle’s study of New York art collectors indicates that wealthy collectors of abstract art were as likely to buy things because they went with the curtains rather than because of any judgment about what pieces meant. What the art-insider-audience knows, though, through their accumulated family and educational experiences, is that the rules of the game require them to remain reverently silent and move on to the next piece.

Debates within these kinds of institutions and establishments are probably never going to be able to be genuinely radical about the assumptions upon which they rest. I’ll listen with interest to see if Grayson can pull it off over the coming weeks. It might be that an important first step in a move to ‘democratise’ questions of taste is for the ‘artworld’ to stop talking about art as something separate or special from everyday aesthetic practices, which are also infused with tacit judgments of what is good, beautiful or valuable. If the director of the Tate genuinely does, as Grayson intimates, collect Cliff Richard memorabilia, I for one would applaud him. Admitting it might also make the many other people who do that, or its equivalent, feel more welcome in the gallery.

You can follow my research at academia.edu, or through my author page in Warwick’s WRAP repository.

David Wright : 16 Oct 2013 17:23 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Studies; Participation; Popular Culture Taste; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Memes, spam, nodes and moods: Dr Tony D. Sampson on creating super–clusters of attention

The GMC course welcomed visiting researcher – Dr Tony D. Sampson, Reader in Digital Culture at the University of East London, co-editor with Jussi Parikka of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009) and author of a new book Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012). Our postgraduates got to grips with some new and challenging critical thinking around neuro-culture, attentional marketing, global protest and crowds, contagion on and offline, ‘pass on power’ and the vulnerabilities built into robust networks. Sampson was adept at drawing together a wide and inter-disciplinary range of theories and methodological thinking to create a new framework for tackling the ways in which the social is made and assembled in our increasingly attention-capturing economies. From Tarde, Bergson and Baran to Deleuze, Foucault and Stiegler, Sampson took us on a journey through difficult terrain to show us how propositions such as ‘nudge’ theory, geographies of mood, meme marketing and happenstance viralities emerge and gain ground both in terms of business strategies and political discourse. Our postgraduates come from 19 different countries and bring with them a wealth of experience of working and living in communications and media landscapes, ecologies and environments that are increasingly connected to each other. Sampson was able to explore succinctly the centralised, decentralised and distributed networks of communication (Baran) that afford (or not) connectivity, allowing us to reflect upon our local experiences.

Fundamentally, Sampson asked us to understand the social as never given but always being made and this allowed us to reflect upon our roles, agency and activities in that making of the social. At the same time, Sampson highlighted the different ways in which hierarchies of networks are produced: super clusters and super nodes of attention that produce aristocratic networks that may look more like a decentralized network than the distributed vision that cyberculture theory may have promised us in the 1990s. Oprah Winfrey was a good example of a super node! The GMC postgraduates come from a variety of different experiences of communications histories and practices that do not always follow these patterns of development, so it will be interesting to see what they find applicable in their own local contexts.

Sampson’s presentation of his new thinking allowed us the time to unpack his ideas on virality and digital contagion which was useful for engaging in the areas we are studying: spreadability of media, the politics of fear and anxiety around online culture, the attention economies many of our students have been, are, or will be employed within, and our own desire to tackle inequalities through new communication paradigms. Our students were interested in Sampson’s take on web analytics, how the arts and sciences can work together on these issues, and whether we should continue to fight for a distributed network. There were lots of references to Nigel Thrift’s work in the session and the students learned a good deal about the relationship between media, emotion, affect and the biological. We all went away wondering whether we were sleep-walking our way through the spreadability of media content or whether we were awake and alert to what Sampson defined as the ‘mechanisms of capture.’ For more on Dr Tony D. Sampson’s work then visit his blog.

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 15 Oct 2013 20:19 |  Tags: Contagion Culture Digital Global Media Spam Virality |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Global Media and Communication 2.0

The new term started for students on our GMC course with a talk from a visiting researcher - Dr. William Merrin, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Cultural Studies at the University of Swansea. William’s talk on Media Studies 2.0 threw our newly arrived students into the deep end of debates they will be wrestling with over the coming weeks and months – about the profound social, political and cultural issues underpinning the ever-changing media and technological landscape and, as interestingly, about the role of Media Studies as an academic discipline which doesn’t just reflect on these issues, but has been, throughout its history, active – and even complicit- in shaping them.

William’s whizz through the history of the development of media technologies emphasised that the contemporary mediaworld had been shaped by the coalescing of two different stories of innovation – one focussed around technologies of broadcasting and one around computing. These developments were not just a consequence of brilliant inventors providing technological solutions to practical problems – they were also bound up with cultural processes and assumptions about the best ways to communicate and the best ways to manage information in complex societies. It is the convergence of these stories in the late 20^th/early 21^st century which marks the distinctiveness of this period, as the computing side of the story squeezes out the broadcasting side. Whilst TV, radio, film and print– the dominant media in Media Studies 1.0 might look and sound like they did before – to audiences (or users as William suggests they might better be called) and to academics in this field - they are now, almost exclusively, produced and circulated through digital code.

This accelerated convergence has a number of paradoxes within it. On the one hand it appears to bring enormous opportunities for more access to the technologies of media production, which escape the traditional relationships between communication, order and power (William showed us a YouTube video made by his 10 year old son, explicitly against his parental wishes). These are means of mental and symbolic production not available to the audiences of recent history. On the other hand, the audience of the past could be anonymous if it wished. The users of the present, by contrast, leave their digital traces for commercial and state interests to feed on –so that even in benign liberal democracies like the UK our Facebook likes become a commercial resource over which we or indeed our elected representatives have limited control and your Twitter feed might land you in jail.

The professional expertise of scholars in Media Studies has been bound up with texts, representation and audiences. In Media Studies 2.0 these might not be where the urgency of debates are, in comparison to knowledge about regulatory frameworks or access to the means to understand and re-work code (to hack, in other words). For those in the arts and humanities more generally, interested in the consequences of the digital, these are important challenges, which raise questions about our focus and priorities and about the kinds of skills students – and indeed teachers – might need to live and work in this emerging media infrastructure in ways which might help shape it for the future.

It was a provocative presentation, and William was good enough to share chapters from his forthcoming book with us. He also shows an enviable commitment to how Media Studies 2.0 might challenge traditional models of gatekeeping and authorial academic authority by blogging them here.

For us in CCPS this year also represents Global Media and Communication 2.0. Our founding director Jonathan Vickery is concentrating on developing a new MA program on Arts, Enterprise and Development and Joanne Garde-Hansen has taken over as our Course Director this year. I’ll record my thanks to Jonathan for his work in setting up and managing the programme for the last two years and look forward to working with Jo. I hope that, on GMC this year, as teachers and students, we can try and rise to William’s challenge.

David Wright : 03 Oct 2013 11:42 |  Tags: Digital Media Media; Research Studies; Technology; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem