The Downward Spiral: Popular Things

Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.

I didn't get to witness the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. I grew up in a room, in front of a computer, fantasizing about the combination of art and technology. My generation doesn't produce pieces with the power to symbolize wars or revolutions, like 'Guernica' or 'Liberty Leading the People', because I am - or rather, we are - the byproduct of... See more

Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work.

“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend con... See more

Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corpo... See more