Art review
I went to the Whitney Biennial art thing. It was fine for the most part, nothing too cringe (in recent years they have had a lot more political art that was kind of annoyingly liberal in very dumb ways). There was some of that this year too of course, but overall not so bad. There was one piece though that I wanted to touch on. It was a hot pink neon light display with statements along the lines of: “We must stop imagining destruction, extraction, deforestation, displacement, apocalypse and genocide. We must imagine liberation.”
(Evidently this piece has a hidden “Free Palestine” message in it that displays when the neon lights flickered in a certain way evidently, which the museum curators were unaware of and has caused a lame outrage amongst the CNNs of the world).
So what’s interesting about this? Obviously the message is fine—who could disagree that destruction and apocalypse are bad? But the theory underlying it seems wrong to me—that we are collectively imagining destruction and apocalypse, and we need to stop. Is this really how it goes? Are we all imagining these negative things that are destroying the world, and that’s where they’re coming from? And if this were the case, could we simply stop doing it if an artist asked us to stop? And then begin to imagine nicer things like liberation?
I don’t think any of that is the case at all. Let’s say it were true, that all the bad things in the world come from people imagining bad things, and then actualizing them in the world. Simply stopping that and replacing those bad imaginings with good ones, as the artist wants, would not create good things—that is a childish way of thinking how things work. It’s like a vision board idea—that if you put things you want on your vision board, you will achieve them. Does that work on an individual level? Maybe rarely! But on a collective world-historical level? I think we need more than this bougie self-help ideology. And that’s what this is—it’s elevating bourgeois self-help pathos into some kind of fake revolutionary, liberatory mechanism. Very childish!
But the more interesting thing about this is the basic theory that we are all simply imagining apocalypse and destruction, and so that’s why there’s so much of it in the world. I think the opposite is the case—most people already are imagining “good” things (or at least what the liberal-bourgeois self-help positive psychology industrial complex tells them are good things). How much of our culture is about positivity, good vibes, live laugh love, etc. etc.? It’s everywhere, and has been everywhere, for a long time now—in fact during the precise time that the world has gotten so much worse. You can almost trace the Oprahfication of the world—good vibes, self-care, etc.—to the massive disastrous descent into World War 3 and the New Great Depression that we are teetering on the brink of.
So it is not the case that people are imagining nasty things and that’s why the world is so nasty—apocalypse is not inside everyone’s heads, manifesting outwardly, and destroying the world. The opposite is the case—everyone is filled with awkward, fake Good Vibes, and that creates this kind of nihilism, this void, which the apocalypse rushes in to fill. We are on the verge of the end of the world not because we have been imagining that outcome, but because we have been imagining everything except that. The end of the world is happening because it hasn’t been imagined, it hasn’t been focused on—all these bad things end up happening because they are put off and kept as far away, unreal things; the reality of their negativity is never made actual, never brought into our lives in a way we can feel.
The apocalypse is driven by the false, empty positivity that runs our world, and which the elites feed to us—and simply “imagining liberation instead” will not work, since that is a positive concept about a better future world; but since our world is built on empty positivity already, any liberation we imagine will be doubly empty, and lead to nothing.