EVERYTHING IS ENTERTAINMENT

In the age of mass culture.

On one of the ten TV screens that are unavoidable through the misfortunate alignment of the elliptical machines in my gym, I am forced to watch an ad for the Harris / Trump debate presented in a format formerly reserved for wrestling matches. On the adjacent screen the History channel offers not educational programs, but sensationalist spectacles of gang wars. A weather report is delivered with the aplomb of a boxing match announcer. 

On the business end of things, Elon Musk challenges Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match on Twitter / X, while NVIDIA’s new AI chips are presented by Jensen Huang, its black leather jacket-wearing CEO in a setting fit for a rock arena. In fashion, Balenciaga makes memes not clothes, and Coperni stages a show at Disneyland, while the draw of other big brand shows are celebrity attendees whose main audience are hoards of screaming teenagers waiting outside. 

Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s art can now be seen as an “immersive experience” and museums have become entertainment centers. Walk down Broadway in SoHo and the busiest storefront is of something called the Museum of Ice Cream. Music superstars are no longer content with a stadium show with lights; there is now something called The Sphere, in Las Vegas of course, whose LED-covered dome looks like an instrument of perpetual seizure inducement. Meanwhile in London, you can see ABBA play in an arena… as avatars. Over 1.5 million tickets have been sold to date.

In his 1987 book The Empire of Fashion, Giles Lipovetsky, the sole intellectual apologist for fashion, posited that in our postmodern world everything will eventually operate by the logic of fashion, with an impact on newness, superficiality, and transaction. He saw this as a good thing; in keeping their relationships light, he thought, humans would avoid everything from family squabbles to global conflicts. In some ideal scenario in which the entire world just shops, this makes some warped sense – very typical of a 1987 view as the Soviet Union fell apart, Wall Street was the sexiest place to be, and the Japanese were sweeping luxury goods off the shelves. But as everything that happened since 1987 shows, we don’t live in an ideal world. 

Lipovetsky’s position is outdated. Because today, everything in our culture – politics, news, art, and fashion – operates by the logic of entertainment. Our last President is a reality TV show host with a terrible history of running businesses and a worse one running a government. His hero is Ronald McDonald Regan, an-actor-turned-President, a charming ignoramus who kept failing upwards in the age of mass media. Contemporary politicians in general have lost any sense of decorum and dignity and behave like circus clowns. The news has long ago descended into some kind of perpetual algorithmic hell whose only aim is to get eyeballs on words (or, really, the ads between the words). This morning, with two weeks before the Presidential election, most shared articles in the New York Times include a story about Lana Del Rey marrying “a normie” and a grizzly bear being killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, athletes entertain us with their stadium tunnel fits. And everyone entertains everyone else on TikTok and Instagram.

Behind this general degeneracy is the insatiable maw of mass culture that demands constant entertainment. In return the members of the mob are happy to squander their hard-earned cash. As far as Western civilization goes, this is nothing new. It’s not like things were better before. Bread and circuses during the Roman Empire were the same thing as McDonalds and WWE today. On some level the mob is more civilized – its members are literate and have learned to not pass gas in public. But it is vastly more numerous and with much more money and time on its hands, and most consumer-facing entities (businesses, politicians, etc.) have by now figured out that catering to the mob is the shortest way to profitability (monetary and otherwise). So, when you think that people behave like animals at airports and on planes these days, it’s not because they have worse manners, but because twenty years ago they couldn’t afford to fly.

It is also true that people used to read more books. But a lot of those books were penny dreadfuls and other refuse whose only value was entertainment. And as soon as the masses had access to visual forms of culture that demanded less effort, they switched over. Why wouldn’t they? It’s easier. And that is the key to entertainment – it’s easy. The difference between art and entertainment is that art demands something of you. Art is work. Entertainment demands nothing but your money. (Besides cash, entertainment also wants your time, but as we know from the greatest line generated by American folklore, time is money. Which is strange, considering how much of both we waste on entertainment.) And that is why the opera and the symphony halls are dying and fine art museums are retooling themselves to host exhibits of the likes of Virgil Abloh (Abloh’s exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary art was the second most-visited exhibit in its history. The first? That of David Bowie paraphernalia.), while the grotesque spectacle of the Vogue-run Met Gala eclipses any exhibit it puts on. Meanwhile, Vogue is getting into the show biz with Vogue World, a “runway show” that has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with entertainment.

In any case, it’s hard to blame Joe Briefcase, the memorable everyman name coined by David Foster Wallace, for wanting to be entertained. Chances are Joe B. works at an unfulfilling, soul-killing job and all he wants for the rest of the day is to turn his brain off. Fair enough. Entertainment itself is not the problem – it’s just another industry. What becomes a serious issue is when the logic of entertainment, with all of its vapidity, banality, fat and fatuousness, infects everything else. It is not hard to see the damage it has done to our society. And I truly hope we don’t see this logic take its next step during this Presidential election.