Posts Tagged ‘experience’
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”*…
Writer and teacher Drew Calvert on the benefits of reading, and more particularly, on the danger of turning fiction into self-help…
… My understanding has always been that people fall in love with books and only become professors or critics in order to spend more time with them. In college, I felt closest to the scholars who shared this basically affective view of literature: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. These teachers treated literature as a higher form of therapy: a training ground for emotions, a study in human virtue. I recall being perhaps inappropriately moved by Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” a commentary on King Lear that helped me think differently about my own relationships. Ditto Murdoch’s “Against Dryness,” in which she argues that novels help us countenance reality and reject “consolation.” Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, was helpful, too, first because he expressed himself in a literary register, and also because he was friendly toward the human imagination—a legacy of his intellectual forebear Donald Winnicott, who claimed that art was a site of healing, a place where one prepares, as Olivia Laing puts it in her book The Lonely City, for “the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.” It’s a nice idea. And it resonates with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (that it purifies the soul) as much as Freud’s idea of transference (that all of our relationships are at least in part fantastical).
Fiction has power, in other words, because, for better or worse, we are all each other’s surrogates and will therefore find compelling archetypes in vivid characters. In a more expansive mood, I might even claim, as Marilynne Robinson does in “Imagination & Community,” that fiction exercises our capacity to love, or that novels contribute to social hope (as Richard Rorty puts it, in a more secular register) or that characters are important sites of readerly compassion, as Zadie Smith argues in her own recent defense of the genre, “Fascinated to Presume.”
My English major was useless, of course. After college, I went to work and learned that nobody reads Iris Murdoch anymore. Instead, they all read self-help and gauzy genre fiction. I worked with intelligent people. They were consultants, psychologists, engineers, economists, and policy wonks. They spoke fondly of charismatic humanities professors, and they often watched videos from The School of Life or other sources of lifelong learning. Wellness apps and podcasts were more popular than novels. One had to be a sport about this cultural defeat, but the odor of cliché was at times overpowering. A book my colleagues couldn’t seem to stop recommending to me was Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which promised “modern truth” and “ancient wisdom.” Happiness was big in the aughts and early 2010s; the positive psychology movement had learned how to market the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Martin Seligman. Harvard and Yale both hired happiness professors. In 2011, happiness was a topic of discussion at the UN General Assembly, and in 2012, the first World Happiness Report came out.
The problem with books like Haidt’s, at least from my point of view, is that they were almost always addressed not to Aristotle’s suffering crowds or Winnicott’s social organisms or Rorty’s hopeful citizens or Robinson’s noble souls but to optimizing meritocrats angling for leverage. In early press interviews, Haidt recommended Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement regime, which I took to be a bad sign, for I had come to think of myself as a budding Emersonian. My colleagues, of course, were Franklinites, even the ones who had taken Interpersonal Dynamics, the “touchy-feely” class offered at Stanford and other business schools. Their reasons for wanting to cultivate emotional intelligence had little to do with virtue or love; the point was simply to outperform one’s peers in the boardroom. This atomizing tendency manifests today in a certain brand of Stoicism—what the scholar Beth Blum calls “apathy prestige.”…
[Calvert reviews the history of the tension between literature and self-help…]
… It’s hard to keep up with all the overlapping crises. There’s the crisis of democracy, and the mental-health crisis, and the crisis of the humanities, and the death of the English major, and the spread of AI tools through the education system and the publishing industry. My sense is that these crises have an element in common: the refusal of experience. Ideology is one way to refuse it. Social-media use is another. (Haidt, to his credit, calls Instagram an “experience blocker.”) Formulaic self-help and fantasy might qualify, too, since those books fail to engage the moral imagination, relying instead on stereotypes and clichés to build a fan base. One has to be suspicious when a genre attracts pundits. David and Arthur Brooks are both riding the self-help gravy train, and Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. None of them seems to have read much literary fiction. Ditto our tech overlords, whose lists of favorites always include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which they misread fairly catastrophically.
Can literary fiction solve the polycrisis? Probably not. But it might not be a bad idea to preserve its place in the culture, even at the risk of sounding cringe or lame or snobbish…
… The comedy of self-improvement has fueled the novel ever since the origins of the genre, whether one traces it back to Don Quixote or Confessions. George Eliot’s characters are always seeking virtue in their hearts and in their communities. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet follow amateur scientists who embark on absurd but ultimately moving quests for how to live. “Who does science belong to?” these novels seem to ask. “Who, if not the Church, will be the authority to guide our lives?” I read these books in 2015, at the height of the so-called “replication crisis” in social science, and I can’t help but think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as podcast bros “doing their own research.” Their experiments in gardening, husbandry, chemistry, and spiritualism are silly and disastrous. (At one point, they use the gastric juice of a duck to “produce digestion artificially.”) If the novel had been written today, its wayward bourgeois characters might have tried shakes and supplements, like the narrator of Jordan Castro’s recent novel Muscle Man, a disillusioned English professor who copes with the absurdities of the modern university (“People wanted clear-cut moral lines, like cocaine on a mirror”) through a strict regime of powerlifting.
Given how obnoxiously reductive self-help can be, it’s tempting for the discerning reader to mock the whole industry and even, at times, the impulse. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966, Philip Rieff does so on behalf of moral order. Douthat, drawing on Rieff, bemoans what he calls the “Oprahfication” of Christianity. In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy, addressing himself to the “post-religious technological society” of 1983, satirizes the genre with deranged glee; each chapter ends with a silly quiz or thought experiment.
But the industry is one thing, and the impulse is another. A management consultant once told me she was reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Why not read Proust himself? Because that would be an experience, and what my colleague wanted was a few key takeaways. I, too, have browsed the shelves in search of key takeaways. Last year, when my daughter was born, I did so rather desperately. Yet the books that meant the most to me were still novels and memoirs: Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature; Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors; and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a story of early motherhood that quotes Proust and Edith Wharton between descriptions of sleep training and horrifying play dates. This memoir taught me nothing, but I highly recommended it. There was something about the experience.
In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.
Can a novel really offer the kind of revelation that transforms a self into a soul? A version of this question came up recently on an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy. At the end of a conversation about religion and politics, cohost Sam Adler-Bell admits that he would be worried “to a theological degree” about the humanity of someone who’s incapable of reading a novel. Half in jest, his cohost Matt Sitman recommends the Bible. “Well, let’s start with Tolstoy,” answers Sam (Matt is a practicing Catholic and a former editor at Commonweal; Sam is a secular Mets fan with a serious interest in Freud). The episode ends with a quote from Marilynne Robinson, a shared touchstone. What occurred to me in the moment (I was jogging on the treadmill) was that Robinson, in her latest book, Reading Genesis, invites us to consider the fact that Tolstoy and the Bible offer similar spiritual benefits.
The Old Testament, in Robinson’s view, is a kind of realist novel featuring complex characters, high stakes, a narrative arc, comedic tension, and carefully chosen imagery. “The remarkable realism,” she writes, “is a product of the interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Of course, there are genre elements—trickster tales, flood narratives, threats of human sacrifice—but ultimately, the Bible has a deep concern for the psychological nuances of life. In this sense, it achieves a higher literary quality than the tales and myths from which it emerged, just as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, turned tabloid gossip into art through the force of his authorial attention, or as Dostoevsky used the popular structure of a trial in The Brothers Karamazov. Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. It also helps us pass the time between loads of laundry.
Encouragingly, the self-help crowd, including the happiness warriors, are suggesting that we ditch our phones and pick up books instead. Haidt, in particular, has identified the loss of immersive reading as a problem as severe as teen depression. But Haidt is a social psychologist employed by a major business school. As much as I support his recent antitech crusade on behalf of young people, I would not want to entrust him with the power of recommending which books they should read when they turn off their devices. I imagine the list would include more formulaic guides to life than challenging modernist novels. I imagine they would be the kind of books that only help the self…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Turning fiction into self-help amounts to a refusal of experience: “Literature Is Not About You,” from @drwclvrt.bsky.social in @commonwealmagazine.org.
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As we read on, we might note that today is the final day of the 2026 Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.
By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country. – source
Sadly, the problem seems to be growing. In a report timed to coincide with BBW, PEN International detailed nearly 12,000 instances of book banning affecting 7,370 unique titles across 114 U.S. school districts during the 2025–26 academic year, a record high since PEN began tracking literary censorship in American public schools in 2021. (And, of course, this is in addition to censorship in libraries, book stores, and elsewhere.) Texas (8,193 bans) vaulted past the prior “champion” Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 (a censorial state law that applies to “broad categories” of books) by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban. More on these bans here.
Lest we need a refresher on why this matters. the estimable Richard Ovenden reminds us that “there is no political power without power over the archive” (“Titles banned, data deleted, the nation’s librarians sacked without explanation – Donald Trump’s war on books is a threat to democracy across the world.”)
“Who would believe that so small a space could contain the image of all the universe? O mighty process!… Here the figures, here the colors, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point. O what a point is so marvelous!”*…
Centuries before photography froze the world into neat frames, scientists, poets, and artists streamed transient images into dark interior spaces with the help of a camera obscura. Julie Park explores the early modern fascination with this quasi-spiritual technology and the magic, melancholy, and dream-like experiences it produced…
The camera obscura, a device known as the photographic camera’s predecessor, was originally the size of a room. As an artist’s aid for rendering perspective, a scientific model for understanding optics, and a source of popular entertainment, it furnished observers with all kinds of information during the early modern period. In the context of pursuing knowledge about the natural world — whether in studying the sun, the light it emits, or the very organ for seeing, the eye — alchemists, astronomers, and mathematicians turned rooms in their homes into camera obscuras for revealing what was previously invisible.
In the most rudimentary terms, the camera obscura (whose Latin name means “dark chamber”) is a dark and enclosed environment with a hole on one side. This aperture allows light to stream into the interior space, casting moving images onto the opposite wall. Because its images of external reality appear reversed, both laterally and vertically — in colors deeper than their original, with movements intact but seemingly exaggerated — the camera obscura’s projections of the world re-envision it as a dream.
One of the very first mentions of the phenomenon behind the camera obscura is tied to the viewing of a solar eclipse. Aristotle, while observing a partial solar eclipse in the fourth century BCE, glimpsed its reflection in the play of light that seeped through the dense canopy of a tree. Here, the “dark chamber” is not a box or a room, but the critical space between solid things. Transposing this phenomenon onto the walls of domestic architecture, early modern natural philosophers made it possible to experience the domain of one’s personal space as a realm of marvelous reversal and illusion.
For Giambattista della Porta, polymath author of Natural Magic (1558), a book of natural philosophy and alchemy filled with magic tricks and scientific experiments, the camera obscura was a space for “see[ing] all things in the dark, that are outwardly done in the Sun, with the colours of them”. This evocative phrasing suggests the metaphysical happenings that the experience of being and peering inside a camera obscura offers. Della Porta’s instructions for engineering this “very pleasant and admirable” experience — among the “great secrets of Nature” — involve managing sources of light and creating the conditions by which it can be strategically channeled: “you must shut all the Chamber windows, and it will do well to shut up all holes besides”, except for one that is as wide and long as your hand. By covering the walls with paper or white cloth to create a viewing screen, the outside world will appear indoors, both familiar and estranged: “so shall you see all that is done without in the Sun, and those that walk in the streets, like to Antipodes, and what is right will be the left, and all things changed.”
A spiritual dimension inheres in this experience: the notion of illumination via obscuration that surrounds the early modern camera obscura carries remnants of the medieval period’s approach to darkness as the medium for perceiving the glorious light of God. Elina Gertsman explains how nowhere was this more evident than in windows through which light, both colored and clear, flooded into the darkness of cathedrals. Without the dimly lit cathedral space, this transmission of light as an expression of God’s splendor would not be so keenly felt. Both cathedrals and camera obscuras share the principle that dark places form the critical environment through which transformative light and its effects can be channeled. Yet in the case of camera obscuras, it was not just light alone, but ever more wondrous projections of the world that illuminated enclosed spaces…
[Park describes the camera obscuras of Johannes Kepler, Alexander Pope, Joshia Reynolds, and others…]
… While one might draw parallels with photographic technologies (both still and motion) — regarding how images are conjured by controlling an aperture — a key difference lies in the ephemerality of the viewing experience offered by the camera obscura. It captures life and its happenings as they take place, rather than preserving their images for the future. In other words, the moving images of the world it brings into its dark room are as transient as the dream state it appears to summon. And like dreams, the camera obscura could offer a new perspective on the world, to reveal things that might otherwise remain invisible. In 1764, the author of a dictionary entry on the camera obscura reflected on the ways in which the device underscores the motion of “the object itself”, such as a man walking, so that he appears to “have an undulating motion, or to rise up and down every step he takes”, in a way that could never be “observed in the man himself, as viewed by the naked eye”.
Despite their delight, the beguiled eighteenth-century viewers and inhabitants of the camera obscura’s worlds ineluctably expressed a sense of melancholy over the ephemerality of its projected scenes. Such sentiments are apparent in the numerous poems that appeared in the period conveying regret over the eventual disappearance of its pleasing phantoms. Yet, for a brief time, the camera obscura, especially when experienced as a room, gave individuals a sense of owning their own moving images of the world, in ways that might have felt far more vivid and evocative of one’s dream life than our own experiences with cinema are felt today. The moving images it mediates come from the viewer’s immediate environment, not from a world created by a scriptwriter and producer. This aspect of the camera obscura encouraged viewers to see reality in an unreal guise, both as an inner reality and a dream world, an elsewhere that is in fact quite nearby.
Paying attention to the historical role that the camera obscura played — allowing humans a safe and enclosed environment for accessing their imaginations, the sun, and many things in between — might transform the ways we look at our own spaces of solitude. Its visual effects can make us see that our emotional and mental landscapes are inseparable from the spaces in which we live and organize our lives. The very walls that provide us with shelter can also transform the world into scenes from a passing dream. By showing the world “with all things changed”, the camera obscura reveals just how clearly we can see in dark places…
More on– and many wonderful illustrations of– the early modern camera obscura: “Watching the World in a Dark Room,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
* Leonardo Da Vinci on the camera obscura
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As we marvel, we might send birthday greetings to a modern photgrapher who has resurrected the technique, Abelardo Morell; he was born on this date in 1948. While his work is wide-ranging, he is perhaps best known for turning rooms into camera obscuras and then capturing the marriage of interior and exterior in large format photographs, for example:
More of Morell’s camera obscura work here.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”*…
Adam Frank argues that to understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code…
Much of our current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw. It’s a mistake built into the very foundations of how we view science — and how science itself is perceived and conducted across disciplines, including today’s hype around artificial intelligence.
What most popular attempts to explain consciousness miss is that no scientific explanations of any kind can be possible without accounting for something that is even more fundamental than the most powerful theories about the physical world: our experience.
Since the birth of modern science more than 400 years ago, philosophers have debated the fundamental nature of reality and the fundamental nature of consciousness. This debate became defined by two opposing poles: physicalism and idealism.
For physicalists, only the material that makes up physical reality is of consequence. To them, consciousness must be reducible to the matter and electromagnetic fields in the brain. For idealists, however, only the mind is real. Reality is built from the realm of ideas or, to put it another way, a pure universal essence of mind (the philosopher Hegel called it “Absolute Spirit”).
Physicists like me are trained to think of the world in terms of its physical representations: matter, energy, space and time. So it’s no surprise that we physicists tend to start off as physicalists, who approach the question of consciousness by inquiring about the physical mechanics that give rise to it, beginning with subatomic particles and then ascending the chain of sciences — chemistry, biology, neuroscience — to eventually focus in on the physical mechanics occurring in the neurons that must generate consciousness (or so the story goes).
This kind of “bottom-up” scientific approach has contributed to modern science’s success, and it is also why physicalism has become so compelling for most scientists and philosophers. This approach, however, has not worked for consciousness. Trying to account for how our lived experience emerges from matter has proven so difficult that philosopher David Chalmers famously referred to it as “the hard problem of consciousness.”
We use the term consciousness to describe our vividly intimate lives — “what it is like” to exist. But experience, which encapsulates our consciousness, thereby cuts more effectively to the core of our reality. An achingly beautiful red sunset, a crisp bite of an autumn Honeycrisp apple; according to the dominant scientific way of thinking, these are phantoms.
Philosophically speaking, from this physics-first view, all experiences are epiphenomena that are unimportant and surface-level. Neurobiologists might fret over how experience appears or works, but ultimately reality is about quarks, electrons, magnetic fields, gravity and so on — matter and energy moving through space and time. Today’s dominant scientific view is blind to the true nature of experience, and this is costing us dearly.
The optic nerve lies at the back of the human eye, connected to the retina, which is made up of receptors sensitive to incoming light. The nerve’s job is to transmit visual input gathered by those receptors to the brain. But the optic nerve’s location atop a tiny portion of the retina also means there is a blind spot in our vision, a region in the visual field that is literally unseen.
In science, that blind spot is experience.
Experience is intimate — a continuous, ongoing background for all that happens. It is the fundamental starting point below all thoughts, concepts, ideas and feelings. The philosopher William James used the term “direct experience.” Others have used words like “presence” or “being.” Philosopher Edmund Husserl spoke of the “Lebenswelt” or life-world to highlight the irreducible totality of our “already being in a living world” before we ask any questions about it.
From this perspective, experience is a holism; it can’t be pulled apart into smaller units. It is also a precondition for science: To even begin to develop a theory of consciousness requires being already embedded in the richness of experience. But dealing with this has been difficult for the philosophies that guide science as it’s currently configured…
[Frank introduces the perspectives of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Edmund Husserl, Thomas Nagel, and Immanuel Kant, urging that we move beyond the machine metaphor, and work with concepts like autopoiesis and embodiment…]
… The problem is, once again, surreptitious substitution. Intelligence is mistaken as mere computation. But this assumption undermines the centrality of experience, as philosopher Shannon Vallor has argued. Once we fall into this kind of blind spot, we open ourselves to building a world where our deepest connections and feelings of aliveness are flattened and devalued; pain and love are reduced to mere computational mechanisms viewable from an illusory and dead third-person perspective.
The difference between the enactive approach to cognition and consciousness and the reductive view of physicalism could not be more stark. The latter focuses on a physical object, in this case the brain, asking how the movements of atoms and molecules within it create a property called consciousness. This view assumes that a third-person objective view of the world is possible and that the brain’s job is to provide the best representation of this world.
The enactive approach and similar phenomenologically grounded perspectives, however, don’t separate the brain from the body. That is because brains are not separate things. Like the unity of cell membranes and the cell, brains are part of the organizational unity of organisms with brains. Organisms with brains, therefore, aren’t just representing the world around them; they are co-creating it.
To be clear, there is, of course, a world without us. To claim otherwise would be solipsistic nonsense. But that world without us is not our world. It’s not the one we experience and from which we begin our scientific investigations. Therefore, this third-person perspective of a world without us and our experience, is nothing more than a sophisticated kind of fantasy…
[Frank oultines a line of inquiry that builds on these insights…]
… Moving beyond consciousness as a mechanism in the dead physical world toward a view of lived experience as embedded and embodied in a living world is essential for at least two reasons. It may be the fundamental reframing required to make scientific progress on a range of issues, from the interpretation of quantum mechanics to the understanding of cognition and consciousness.
Recognizing the primacy of experience also forces us to understand that all our scientific stories — and the technologies we build from them — must always include us and our place within the tapestries of life. Recognizing there is no such thing as an external view has consequences for how we think about urgent questions like climate change and AI. In this way, the new vision of nature that comes from an experience-centric perspective can help us take the next steps necessary for human flourishing. That goal, after all, was also one of the primary reasons we invented science in the first place…
“Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)” from @adamfrank4.bsky.social in @noemamag.com.
Apposite (both to the post above and to the post from July 15): “Human Stigmergy” from @marco-giancotti.bsky.social.
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As we embrace experience, we might send critical birthday greetings to Herbert Marcuse; he was born on this date in 1898. A philosopher, social critic, and political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, he critiqued capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represent new forms of social control. Best-known for Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), he is considered “the Father of the New Left.”
To the degree to which they correspond to the given reality, thought and behavior express a false consciousness, responding to and contributing to the preservation of a false order of facts. And this false consciousness has become embodied in the prevailing technical apparatus which in turn reproduces it.
– Marcuse
“Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought”*…
Many bemoan the experiential art that has taken over our galleries and screens, but is, Róisín Lanigan asks, it a populist fad or a way to make art more accessible?…
You don’t have to be a historian or a creative to notice it: art just isn’t what it used to be. Or at least, the act of experiencing art in public isn’t what it used to be. Whereas once we paid to go to galleries to silently view paint behind plexiglass, a new wave of curators and creators have decided that for art to be truly appreciated, we must be completely immersed in the audio, visual and experiential world it inhabits. From London’s Outernet to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors and Vegas’s controversial The Sphere, it’s never been clearer that we’re living in the midst of the immersive art boom.
Even if you’ve never been to one of these spaces – all immersive art exhibitions exist as ‘spaces’; ‘gallery’ is increasingly an archaic term – you’ll be cognisant of their existence. Because they don’t just live in the real world, they live on your screen too. Social media is awash with immersive exhibition selfies, with videos recommending the top ten best immersive art events to see for free in most big cities. The hashtag ‘immersive art’ clocks in at over 99 million views on TikTok and nearly half a million on Instagram (where in all fairness millennials are less amenable to the transformative power of the hashtag than the algorithmically attuned TikTok zoomers).
Outernet, based in Soho, sees around 1.5 million to their ‘district’ on a monthly basis, and say they’re on track to hit 6.8 million visitors this year alone, which would put them on track to be one of the most visited destinations in the UK, just one year after opening. The Smithsonian says that Kusama’s roving Infinity Mirrors exhibition has reached 330 million people across Twitter and other platforms. It’s not a leap to say we’re reaching, if we haven’t already, peak immersive art. But is that a bad thing? And if we’re already at the apex, where do we go from here?
It’s easy to take up the mantle that immersive-mania is, of course, wholly bad. The arguments for this always follow common throughlines; it’s common, it’s populist, it’s diluting the experience of what true art really is. In a recent scathing example, a Vulture review of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised at Moma called the immersive exhibition “a glorified lava lamp” and accused it of being nothing more than “crowd-pleasing, like-generating mediocrity”.
But who decides what that experience is, what it looks like? The art world, much like the fashion and film industries, has undergone much-needed transformations in recent years to get rid of those antiquated ideals and cultural gatekeepers. Slowly but surely, it’s become more diverse, younger, more experimental and in the process, more accessible. For every charge that immersive events are diluting our experience of artistry, there’s a counterpoint to be made that it’s opening that experience out to people who might not normally gravitate towards it…
[But, she reports, there’s a snake in the garden…]
There is, though, for all the accessibility that immersive exhibitions offer, something antithetical to the experience of being moved by a piece of art when in the back of our minds we’re thinking about how many likes we might get for it on social media. Immersive events which actively encourage selfies and photo opportunities risk detracting from the art itself; a depressing natural end-point to queues to take photos in front of the Mona Lisa and cameras being banned from Basquiat’s recent exhibition in London. Although cameras could never be conceivably banned from the grid-ready world of immersive art, it’s a fine line to treat between posting too much too; leaving your exhibition open to an ‘Instagram vs Reality’ takedown, or revealing spoilers. In the case of Sphere, organisers briefly considered asking guests to put stickers over their phone cameras before realising that their footage is as much promotion as it is a leak…
… There are so many immersive pop-ups that even the gallerists and producers themselves are getting sick of it. Lizzie Pocock tells me almost every brief she’s received for the past five years has used the word “immersive”, a term she now calls “overused”. “I don’t want to sort of be disrespectful, but so many things that get called immersive, you still sort of just go and watch,” she says. “You don’t feel like you’re in them, or you’re affected by them. It’s almost a bit of a lazy word, a buzzword, isn’t it? It’s like, let’s do something that’s immersive. It’s perhaps an excuse to not really delve into sort of the deeper experience and the deeper reason for why you’re putting it live.”
If the people behind the immersive shows are getting sick of them, then perhaps we finally have reached peak immersive. Now we just have to wait for audiences to catch up, for the algorithm to get bored, and for the art world to determine what their next lucrative buzzword will be. Personally, my money’s on AI…
“Have we reached peak immersive art?,” from @rosielanners in @itsnicethat.
See also: “The Rise of ‘Immersive’ Art” and “Ready to plunge in? The rise and rise of immersive art.”
* “Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.” – Walter Benjamin
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As we dive in, we might spare a thought for Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni; he died on this date in 1564. A sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer in the High Renaissance, Michelangelo was considered one of the greatest artists of his time. And given his profound influence on the development of Western art, he has subsequently been considered one of the greatest artists of all time. Indeed, he is widely held to be (with Leonardo da Vinci) the archetypal Renaissance man.
Further to the item above, we might also note that, via his painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he was a pioneer of immersive art.
“One cries because one is sad. For example, I cry because others are stupid, and that makes me sad.”*…
From our friends at The Pudding, a case study in Chinese censorship: Manyun Zou watched the first 100 episodes of The Big Bang Theory that stream in the U.S. and on the Chinese streaming site Youku, side by side, and tracked 206 missing scenes from the Youku version…
Growing up in China, I had a blast watching American TV shows. They not only helped me learn English, but also introduced me to fresh perspectives and worldviews. The Big Bang Theory was among my favorites.
I quickly became a fan of the sitcom when it was officially introduced in China on a video streaming website in 2011. But when I rewatched the show in 2022 on Youku, a Chinese video streaming website backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, I couldn’t help but notice weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter…
What happened to the show?
To understand that, we have to back up a bit. This change can be traced to a sudden political decision in 2014. According to the state-owned media outlet Xinhua, streaming platforms received a private notification from regulators to remind them of one key rule:
“imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public.’”
Shortly thereafter, The Big Bang Theory was among a handful of imported shows pulled from Chinese websites. Audiences were only left with a black screen and a line: “video has been removed due to policy reasons.”
When these shows resurfaced, they were full of these weird jumps, signaling that scenes were removed during censorship because someone somewhere thought it would be inappropriate or illegal to stream such content.
So the question has to be asked: what kind of content has been removed, and why?
To find out, I compared 100 episodes of the original version of The Big Bang Theory with the edited Youku version to understand what was cut out and decipher the logic behind the decision…
A fascinating look at what Chinese censors fear: “The Big [Censored] Theory,” from @Manyun_Zou in @puddingviz.
* “Sheldon,” The Big Bang Theory, “The Gorilla Experiment” (Season 3, Episode 10)
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As we contemplate censorship, we might spare a thought for Immanuel Kant; he died on this date in 1804. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790). But he made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy as well; for example: Kant’s argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
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