7 minute read
Emma Panasiuk | Who's Afraid of Silence? Or, Why I Hate Van Gogh
from Issue 11
Emma Panasiuk | Who's Afraid of Silence? Or, Why I Hate Van Gogh
The title is clickbait, I admit. I don’t actually hate Van Gogh; what I hate is Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience. Many of my friends and relatives living abroad would probably beg to differ. Over the years, I have watched their preferences shift – at least when it comes to the attractions they choose during their regular visits. For a long time, our (fantastic, in my opinion) National Museum was the undefeated winner of different must-see lists. During the last couple of years, however, I have watched them gravitate towards the immersive exhibitions – more entertaining, more appropriate for a fun city break, I guess.
My dislike towards those exhibitions was not caused by a particularly negative experience at any of them, it’s really just the idea itself. The way visitors are encouraged to participate in them seems like the very antithesis of a quiet, focused, and conscious looking – the paintings magnified and projected onto walls, their glowing surfaces necessarily losing all the physical properties of the canvas the artist actually touched. Painting, like most things, can be made to seem effortless only by putting in a lot of effort, and recognizing this is a skill in itself. This is not to say that a piece of art gains value simply from the fact that work was put into it; rather that all this work behind the subtle details cannot be fully appreciated through a few short, distracted glances.
I don’t necessarily mean that attending such an exhibition once or twice would be a detrimental or unpleasant experience. It could be fun, who knows. What seems much worse is the persistent narrative that this is the inevitable future of visual art – more attractive and engaging, meeting the visitors’ expectations to a greater degree than the traditional museums, which should swiftly move in this direction if they want to remain part of the game. At the immersives, the pictures are animated, the floors welcoming and cozy to sit on, even the smells improved. The usual silence of traditional art galleries is also eliminated – with music playing, not a single sense is left out. (Aside from taste, but maybe soon there will be a solution to that as well.) These comforts, although arguably distracting from the pictures themselves, are seen as advantages, helping the guests achieve a more pleasant experience. They also promote the strange idea that exhibitions or museums are visitor-friendly to the extent that they alleviate the burden of doing any perceptive or interpretative work, which begs the question – why even go there at all?
It’s very easy to dismiss the immersive exhibitions as just kitschy. But I think their main problem lies in how strongly they embody the contemporary desire to “smoothen out” any encounter with art, eliminating all possible inconveniences. In her recent essay Machine Yearning, cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann connects the effortlessness of consumption under contemporary capitalism with the increasing popularity of AI-produced, sloppy art: “This availability culture […] relies on the mystification and obfuscation of labour. Capitalism ‘teaches us that the objects surrounding us are inert and barren of any human origin’*, void of history. It demands and rewards the transformation of art into pure product, beholden to the needs of the market”, she writes.
*This is quoted from Zoë Hu’s essay on Andrew Tate.
Availability culture has long been a hallmark of how we obtain physical commodities like food or clothing, ordered through a finger tap and delivered straight to our door by an invisible stranger. But now it has begun to sneak into experiences and sensations too. Just compare the two settings – the challenging, yet meaningful silence of the traditional museum vs the easy, yet overwhelming stimuli of the immersive exhibition. Similarly to how the frictionless purchase of goods easily leads to disregarding the human labor put into their production, immersive exhibitions are bound to simplify our engagement with art.
One example Fisher-Quann cites in her essay is the 2024 investigation into the socalled ‘ghost artists’ on Spotify. As described by the journalist Liz Pelly, the Perfect Fit Content (PFC) initiative had employees quietly fill different playlists with massproduced pieces whose authors had waived their rights to royalties. The sole aim was maximizing the company’s profits. The scheme concerned mostly music that users were likely to play in the background, for example while working or relaxing – so genres like jazz, ambient, classical. Each is unique in its own right, requiring as much effort and craft as compositions with vocals. Still, they were all sensitive to this particular type of expropriation precisely because of the inattentive way listeners interacted with them.
This is, of course, to some extent understandable – sitting in complete silence, alone at home all day, can be unpleasant, and people seek to escape that. Silence in general is very often uncomfortable, frantically avoided in modern urban life. Yet it is also a natural part of life and, arguably, the perfect embodiment of the discomfort we’ve begun to abhor. In Pelly’s book Mood Machine, there is a quote by one of Spotify’s exemployees: “I honestly think that the core of the company’s success was recognizing that they’re not selling music. They’re not providing music. They’re filling people’s time. And he [Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify] said at a company meeting [...] ‘Apple Music, Amazon, these aren’t our competitors. Our only competitor is silence.’”
All this puts contemporary audiences in a cultural landscape where the default mode of experiencing cultural texts is changing. I think this shift should lead to a critical examination of not only how we look at art, but also why: to experience something profound, connect with a different human being, grow as viewers and as creative thinkers? Or just to pleasantly distract ourselves from the daily frustrations? Of course, the latter isn’t all that bad – I love a good song when I’m stuck in traffic. But demand creates supply, and so experiencing creative output only in this low-effort mode of consumption is starting to sway its production this way, too. Considering that the companies supplying us with art and content are not human- or worker-, but profit-oriented entities, and with AI already replacing human artists at unprecedented levels, this is something that should be taken seriously.
As consumers or audiences (and this, too, is a choice), we would be mistaken to think we are not a part of this cultural shift. It’s easy – and mostly valid – to shame the dystopian politics of companies like Spotify. And yet, the PFC initiative couldn’t have been born if the executives had been certain that a considerable part of listeners would quickly notice. If the only drive behind listening to music or viewing paintings is this frantic desire to kill the uncomfortable quietness around us, we’re eventually likely to become desensitized to any sort of perceptive effort. This, in turn, will likely lead to more art being transformed into consumable content, and the reasons behind choosing either may become similarly mechanical, escapist. A rejection of this shallow engagement must necessarily lead to the poignant question Fisher-Quann asks at the end of her essay: “can we handle the silence?”.
It’s clear that the consumer-friendly, tech-driven approach to art development is reaching its limitations; or, perhaps, it already has. I would argue that the astounding technological progress of this century and the increased availability of nearly every commodity have lured some of us into thinking we can effortlessly bridge the gap between our psyche and the external environment. But the question remains: are there any shortcuts on the road to genuine connection, to profoundness, to transcendence? The answer, I think, is still no.
