Between Art and Reality by Aaron

Between Art and Reality

“Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

-Don DeLillo, White Noise

Words by Aaron Finnegan

This quote is the very last line from White Noise, a book concerned with ideas of mortality, mass hysteria, and the nature of reality itself. A lot of DeLillo’s work centres on this idea that reality as we perceive it is not necessarily how it is perceived by others. He is compelled by the ideas of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and simulacra. Briefly, Baudrillard’s theories on simulation and simulacrum are as follows: a simulation is a false representation of something tangible and real, while a simulacrum is a representation of something that has so many different forms of simulation that it has no discernible original. Americana, DeLillo’s first novel, explores these concepts as it follows a news broadcaster who embarks on a road trip across Middle America to document what the country is “really like”. This desire to document what is “unquestionably real”, and to represent it in its most attractive form, is not just a literary one. This permeates every facet of our society and has done so in various forms for centuries. From the polished representations of divinity that cover the ceiling of the Sistine chapel to the advertising culture of the 1960s that sought to show Americans the paradigms of a nuclear family; we are continuously bombarded with images that try to represent an ideal that has

no real basis in reality. We carry this desire to represent and to create into our daily lives. Our presence on social media is meant to represent us, or rather, is meant to be an accurate simulation of us in an online setting. But for some, the challenge lies in representing the best possible version of us that could be represented. Rather than being a living, breathing document of a life, our online representation becomes a copy of what we would like our life to be. In a sense, we become authors of how we are perceived as we constantly strive to reinvent and become something more. We claim to be documenting life, but really we document what we want our life to be. As Baudrillard puts it, rather than having something real, we have “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”. Michelangelo’s representation of God was not based on any living, breathing human, but instead it was a representation of what was considered a symbol of divinity at the time. This representation of God is a simulacrum. We find it in White Noise when the protagonist takes a friend to see the “Most Photographed Barn In America”: the barn underwent no journey to becoming the most photographed barn in the country - it simply is, because that is the label the locals have chosen for it. Seeing people champion this ideal on a smaller scale is a new development, rather than the usual mega-industry of advertising that held the world by the throat for most of the twentieth century. As the world is changed and brought closer by the internet, we consume information on a more personal scale, and to ensure that we are still sufficiently ensnared by ingrained cultural ideals, the media has adapted to push these ideals at a much more intimate level than they have done previously; just as video killed the radio star, the smartphone has effectively obliterated television. Influencer culture has shot to the center of the world stage in recent years. Confined to websites and apps like Facebook and Instagram, each person becomes their own advertising agency, and each one reaches millions per day,

ensuring that the cults of the famous and the dead continue to thrive, just at a point where they are in danger of being forgotten. Their representation of a perfect life is consistent throughout their respective profiles with images of travel, expensive food, niche experiences, alcohol, and ideals of perfection curated to appear as though these are basic elements of a person’s daily life. This is a representation that has no real basis in reality. It is an amalgamation of topics chosen to appeal to the largest possible audience; rather than document a life that has become extraordinary through achieving the means to make it such. In other words, it is a document of a life that is lived to represent what it wants to be, without appreciating what it is. This is how the simulacrum manifests itself in the real world, when we try to do as we see. The image undergoes permutations and then manifests itself in reality through one who wishes to exemplify the best parts of their idols, and so makes them real using themselves as an avatar. While unable to achieve true simulation, the follower ends up at something closer to homage, and readily identifies with others who have attempted the same thing. This could be seen as representing a loss of individuality on some level, but on another actually stands as an example of honest human connection in a perpetually connected world. When people commit to a persona or a style, it is because they see both something they want and something they are, within said style. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize lecture, he commented on the nature of art, stating that a writer is putting forth their own feelings on something and saying “This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” Despite the fact that this creation of content that represents something unattainable has its own agenda and is mainly a machine for the world of marketing to catch us in our most vulnerable states, it can, in a way, act as a means of connection for those who feel that other parts of life have nothing to offer them. DeLillo’s idea of documenting a

“ When people commit to a persona or a style, it is because they see both something they want and something they are, within said style. ”

world in the most minute detail to the point where the details blend into the bigger picture carries through here. We’re presented with a collage of different lives every second we spend scrolling through our phones, or rather, we’re presented with a collage of what our lives should aspire to be. We hope that one day we’ll catch up to these aspirations, but we secretly know in our hearts that we’ll never get there. It sounds insidious, but in a way, it’s weirdly hopeful. To get out of bed in the morning and to look at everything you experience and wonder whether or not that’s real, to know the difference between what’s happening to you and what’s happening around you, to see the cracks that run through everything, and to say to yourself “I can be better tomorrow than I am today.” It’s easy to be cynical about this sort of thing, to say that we’re bound by systems from which we can’t escape and can never hope to effectively change - because for the most part, that is true. What we want is based on what everyone else perceives to be desirable on the whole, and we will always be bound by that. But to slip through the cracks and to recognize what matters to you, and to acknowledge that you’re only seeing a vision of what everyone claims to be ideal living gives you freedom to live on your own terms and beat against what they tell you is the truth. It will forever be there, at the tip of your fingers, a craving that clicks harder than the strongest nicotine addiction, a buzz just barely audible in the back of your head, pushing you forward, and pulling you back, the perpetual white noise that encases you in the cults of the famous and the dead.