Lately I have been meditating on the concept of energy transferences, and the spaces that give, take, or create. I think there is something that can be called a kind of attention capitalism. Your attention is currency. Originally sapped from us through draining one-sided media, extended through to social media and other such painkiller-type platforms. However, I believe that this has extended through to events. Specifically certain events I have been attending in London.
Some of these events are truly amazing spaces where energy is created together, they feel safe, they feel intimate, they feel real. They tend to have smaller groups, and more of a focussed genuine activity. They are often free. Sometimes I leave having actually created something, e.g. a new piece of writing, a new sketch for a painting, a new friendship. However, a great many of these events feel incredibly draining, and I leave feeling as if something has been taken from me, rather than created or given. These events tend to be on a larger scale, more generally brought together on the basis of shallow identity politics, and demand a lot of patience and energy from the audience to digest a set of repetitive (and often harmful and ill-considered) ideas and concepts. They also tend to skew towards a High School level of clique-ness, with trauma olympics (I have been through more than you have therefore I have more value) or even ethnic olympics (I am less white than you are because I know more religious words etc).
I am thinking about giving up on the art world. The experiences I’ve had lately have been pretty… always feel like snakey spaces now. People are desperately trying to extract money, attention and value from other people who themselves are seeking the same things. The art world feels like a scam, it feels like a set-up to try and gain wealth from the elites. The glamour in the art world, is the fact that occasionally, some stupid rich person will drop 10,000 whatevers on a canvas with a single swipe of red paint on it. And it makes no sense. There is no logic. And then there is lots of money and people are dancing, profiteering off of this happy mistake, until they go searching for the next silly canvas. Because I really do believe that good art is just a happy mistake. Things I’ve made that people like, they seem to like randomly.
I feel the first category of event – the energy boosting type – does not participate in attention capitalism. This is an event that usually does not have any money-making plotting in mind, has a focus on inclusive sharing and does not have too large of a focus on social media documentation of the event. The latter category is a new manifestation of attention capitalism, capitalizing on trending identity and cultural aesthetics with the promise of being the former. This latter event extracts attention from people who may be loosely or somewhat interested in these trends with no real benefit to the people who attend, effectively draining them.
I think I need to reserve a bit of confidence for myself.
Of course, everybody needs to make a living. Some people choose to participate in attention capitalism because it can be seen as quite a glamorous and likely fun sort of career. However, moving forward, I have found it important to distinguish whether the events I am attending are feeding into trends and exhausting me in the process, or symbiotically helping to affect the changes I would like to see in the world.
