Nineteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

I investigate the interface between social media and art through emphasis on the recent worldwide trend of experiential art: immersive art parks that transport viewers into an alternative visual universe. These spaces have attained prominence in large part because visitors take and post selfies from within them, reaching huge numbers of mainstream viewers as they bypass the art establishment and flout its staid sensibility. While museums have welcomed immersive art alongside more traditional programming, scholarship has been slow to analyze its unique aesthetic characteristics or interrogate it as a new form holding significance for art spectatorship and the role of art in society more broadly. I argue that these spectacle environments exemplify contemporary art’s convergence with popular visuality through their privileging of play and mobilization of the interactive structures that characterize technologized life. I introduce the concept of “hashtag art” to describe how lay viewers democratize art by incorporating it into quotidian life through the daily image acts of social media. I additionally extend Miriam Hansen’s conceptualization of cinema as a “play-form” of technology that articulated and negotiated modernity by adapting the viewer’s sensorium to the technologically-changed environment. I apply this aesthetic of play to the present to explore how spectacle art integrates marked visual experiences into technologized life through the proliferation of selfies across social media. In so doing, I point to the critical significance of play, which has been an underrepresented dimension of art spectatorship, as I also draw attention to art’s changing function as a popular form.