Art is meant to be a form of self-expression. A way to show the world who you are, how you see it, what you think about it and showcasing what makes you unique and an individual. It’s small individual pieces that is given to the masses so people can go search and dig for themselves what they like, love, dislike, hate and value. It was meant to be consumed as individual separate bodies of work but that has changed, and the system has made it that we get everything all at once on one plate and that kind of consumption is bad for the artists and consumers alike.
It sounds like I’m just putting a bunch of words together and saying a whole lot of nothing but this observation of mine came through my own experience of how I engage and consume the arts and noticing how I started consuming less but also starting to dislike the consumption of the arts because everything felt too much or too uniform or too standardised. It didn’t feel like I was getting the full experience of the art that I was trying to consume and I realised it’s because everything is on one platform. Everything is uniform.
I’ll start with music because that is my first and forever love. Growing up listening, buying and consuming music was a very intentional and thought-out process. You had to go to the stores listen and pick which CD(s) you’d want to buy. Once you got home, you’d have to pick which exact CD you want to listen to and for the next 35-60 plus mins you would have to give all your time and attention to just listening to that one CD, that one artist and be consumed by that one world you’ve been transported to. It’s not just that you had one specific device to play your music on. It was either your Walkman, MP3 player, iPod, CD player or in the car as you’re driving. It wasn’t on your phone where texts, calls, messages, and all these other apps can distract you and pull you out of the world you were so desperately trying to jump into. You would turn on the music and if you were listening via headphones or earphones, it’s like the world would disappear. You wouldn’t hear your phone ring, messages coming in or even the noises of the outside world, you were not just consuming the art but being consumed by it as well.
Today besides just being on one device because majority of people use DSPs even the music is all in one place. You can be listening to an album and midway through the album you’re already trying to make your next album pick and wandering through libraries of music. It takes you away from the listening experience. If not that people are more interested in listening and making playlists of their favourite songs instead of finding the deep album cuts that aren’t singles or became popular via social media. Album reviews meant something because you’d have to dissect and deep dive into the album and not just wait for the midnight drop so you can be first to have your opinions online. It feels uniform like we all know, “Drop on Friday midnight. Listen. Have an opinion by 7am. Post so everyone knows you’ve listened. Enjoy the weekend. Forget about it by Monday and wait for more new music on Friday.”. There’s nothing separate each drop from each other to make us want to invest into these worlds more and hold our attention.
I feel the same with how movies and series are being released nowadays. Streaming made it so that we don’t have to wait week-by-week for a new episode. We watch a series in a day, talk about it and then move on to the next. We don’t digest each episode and talk about it for the week. Discussing the messaging, dialogue, meaning behind it all. Trying to deduce what the next episode will bring and how we think our favourite characters will grow or build through whatever challenges or obstacles that they are due to face. We don’t even have the chance to get into the series deep enough because we can easily change shows and not just that but streaming platforms. If not Netflix, then Disney+ or Prime or Apple TV and so on.
Movies might even be worse because we can watch 10 minutes in and already be like, “Na, I’m not feeling it.”. I remember buying/renting VHS or DVDs and whether good or bad because it took so much effort to start watching the movie, you’d watch the whole movie to payback that effort and because of that we were able to get cult classics of good and bad movies. Movies such as Sharknado exist because someone had an idea, bought it to life and we took the time to invest and live in that idea. We watched through it and because of that we were able to dissect it, digest it and then discuss it and through word of mouth many more others did as well, and a cult classic is grown. Nowadays that’s a rarity because of all the access we have we want the best of the best or nothing else. It’s like we expect a uniformity in the level of production of movies and quality when really, it’s the variety of it that gives life to the movies and us as fans. I haven’t heard the words, “cult classic”, being mentioned about a movie in many years now and that’s because it’s either good or bad no colour in-between just pure black and white.
I don’t know know…maybe I’m being the old man yelling, “Get off my lawn!!!”, and “Back in my day.”, but there is a disconnect happening and I feel it’s the loss of diversity and individuality. Today we all have the same access which is beautiful in its own right and has some great advantages and benefits but the access is coming from all the same points making us uniform in our consumptions, opinions and our approach to the art. We need to bring back separation of the arts and individuality. Let people feel and live in the art instead of just consuming it.
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