Commodification of art

I’ve noticed that my entertainment consumption habits are very different to that of an average joe. When I listen to a new album for the first time, I need to close my eyes and use my best headphones and turn off all the lights and listen to it with my phone on Do Not Disturb. I can’t simply put it on in the background and take off on the subway. When I’m watching the new Westworld episode, it needs to be in a dark room with my headphones in and I cannot miss a single second of the show. If I do, I rewind. This isn’t something that I put on in the background while doing something else. The same goes for when I’m playing a video-game or reading a new book for the first time.

This type of behavior can cause the people around me to go nuts. I’ve declined Game of Thrones viewing party invites because of this. I’ve shut off people in the living room to go into a room by myself to listen to the new Vampire Weekend album. As you can imagine, interrupting me during these states of deep concentration can drive me up the wall. I’m trying to take it all in and something comes along just to ruin it all. I’ve been wondering why this is and why I “can’t just multitask”, as a friend put it once.

After much reflection, I think I know why. It’s because if I don’t give a movie my full, undivided attention when it demands it, I feel like I’m disrespecting the creators of the film. This 90-minute piece of cinematography has been carefully scripted, shot, edited, and polished to hit all the right narrative beats at all the right moments with a finely-tuned pacing and tempo that carries itself through the entire movie. To simply look away for a few minutes or be distracted by something else on your phone while watching it is like loudly booing from the front row of the audience section during a slow moody song that the band is performing. I know how geeky and nerdy this sounds, but this is what it feels like.

When I’m playing a video-game, I know that the developers have precisely timed certain AI behaviors or gun recoil animations to happen at very specific moments to provide just the right amount of feedback so that players can have more decision-making agency at their fingertips. To ignore all this or skirt past it without stopping to appreciate it feels disrespectful to the makers of the game. This is especially true when you know you’re playing a game that has this much love and care put into the tiniest of details (Naughty Dog’s games come to mind).

It’s the same with every medium and every art form. If someone or a group of people have put this much time and effort to create something for me to enjoy, I’d better enjoy it as best as I can, or it won’t be what they wanted it to be and I won’t get the full experience that they intended for me to get. So many people I know are content with putting a new episode of a show on the TV and lounging on their couch as they scroll through Twitter on their phone. So many people I know play video-games in the living room without headphones, completely missing all auditory feedback that was so painstakingly recorded and carefully put into the game at the right moments.

I think a big reason for why things started to trend this way is the commodification of art forms. Books used to be a treasured and sacred thing that people would plan to and make time to read. Libraries were a literary haven that housed the genius of the greatest minds, printed and preserved for all to read. Now with Kindles, eBooks, and what feels like an overload of pointless articles published on the internet, the art of reading itself has been made into a business. It’s becoming rarer and rarer to find people who are reading a book as the main activity of the moment. It’s usually almost always a secondary thing that they do when traveling or waiting for their laundry to get done.

The same is happening to television. With Netflix and on-demand services allowing us to watch whatever we want, wherever we want, and whenever we want, we don’t have to carve out time for a specific half-hour slot to catch our favorite episode. We don’t even have to fully be paying attention because we can simply rewind if we miss something or if we feel like we weren’t paying attention when an intense scene began. I’m not trying to defend the “old-school” cable TV, I’m just saying that the art form of creating films is taking a hit due to our newly-limited attention spans.

Maybe this is what sparked the vinyl revival with music recently. Consciously selecting a record from your library, taking the vinyl out from its sleeve, and putting it into the record player is such an intentional action of you yourself choosing to listen to that specific series of songs in that set order that it almost feels like a counter-culture rebellion against the “Shuffle Play” generation of music listeners. Most people don’t even know what they’re listening to these days with the always-on radio of Spotify and Pandora that just plays similar music to what you like listening to. And hence you have the commodification of music, an art form quickly becoming a secondary background activity that you have on for something else that you’re doing.

As these mediums become more and more accessible, the creators must compete with the consumers’ heavily limited attention spans. We’re certainly headed for an interesting era of entertainment as most of it goes through a digitization not just to be delivered to the audience but also for sustained interaction with it. It’s hard to say what will happen when we get hyper-personalized offerings served to us based on our tastes and interests. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and the market dynamics are poised to shift slowly from the preferences of the creators to that of the consumers. Gone will be the days when artists created songs based on their own views of life and the world and soon will come the days when they make it just to satisfy the emotional wanderings of a large majority of their listeners. It’s already happening to some extent with AI, and it’s only going to accelerate. For better or worse, we can’t say yet. I’m cautiously partaking in this transformation to see where it leads while also being very aware of its shortcomings. Godspeed.