In this column published by Art Industry Insights with Reena Devi, arts journalist and editor Reena Devi responds to news headlines with incisive analysis on our art and global systems.
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Following nuclear weapons testing in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated new steel production worldwide. For decades, scientists requiring radiation-free metal for sensitive instruments had to “salvage steel from pre-war shipwrecks”.
They called this steel “low-background steel.”
Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming observed a parallel between the affected metal and AI-generated material increasingly mixing with human-created content and “contaminating” it.
However, there is also a parallel with the kind of individuals we are becoming in this day and age.
Our inherent voices, ideas, and instincts are increasingly overshadowed or “contaminated” by the social dictates of prestige systems, high profile individuals, aesthetics, and more.
These social dictates are “mainlined” to our worst impulses, with the help of algorithms and media ecosystems, creating an atmosphere of cult-like movements that are truly ailing us.
Latest Trend: Outsourcing Yourself
During periods of volatility, it is all too easy to outsource your sense of identity, purpose, and beliefs to aesthetics, high profile individuals, movements, and crucially, prestige systems.
Amongst generations of young men across the world, the manosphere and its highly popular trends of looksmaxxing and ballsmaxxing, are all about deprioritising one’s sense of self in times of doubt and uncertainty.
The MAGA movement in the US and beyond has always involved deep social conditioning and deprioritising of self.
The tech industry is populated with billionaire CEOs, from Elon Musk to biohacking tech bro Bryan Johnson, and their rabidly strong following via social media, podcasts, and online forums.
Did The Art World Accidentally Become A Cult?
When Johnson and looksmaxxing influencer Braden Peters made their runway debut at Paris Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week earlier this year, it highlighted the congruency between cultural prestige systems and the cult-like movements sweeping the globe.
In the art world, most of us consistently associate proximity to elite global cultural networks and institutions as proof of wisdom itself.
This observation is based on years of interactions and conversations with individuals from arts scenes in Singapore, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai, Berlin, London, and more.
Many of us unconsciously presume someone’s position in the art world hierarchy – exhibiting in a prestigious biennale, curating at a major museum, working at a leading art fair, speaking at art forums in London and Berlin, associating with VVIP in the Gulf and Europe – automatically make them experts.
Not just experts on art or its related fields, but experts on life itself. More damagingly, experts on our own individual professional and personal trajectories.
In doing so, we are over-prioritising integrating into the global art industrial machinery above our own sense of self. This pattern also plays out in local and regional cultural prestige systems.
The Grift of Aspiration & Access
Producer of ‘Inside the Manosphere’, Louis Theroux, describes the hotbed of toxic masculinity as a “large-scale grift”.
Essentially, a masculine counterpart to female-focused online wellness culture, “with influencers peddling an aspirational image and with it, products and services.”
In many cases, misogyny, racism, homophobia or antisemitism are used mainly as engines for attention and profit.
Yet, doesn’t the monetisation of exclusivity, insider language, and social access sound familiar? The art world operates an unsurprisingly similar economy of aspiration.
Its elite circuits sustain their own mythology of exclusivity through an endless carousel of VIP previews, invitation-only dinners, biennales, and art fairs spread across global capitals. Access is the product.
So much so, in February this year, the Financial Times unironically ran a piece titled: ‘No queueing please! How to keep art world VIPs happy.’
Accompanied by a cover image of Gwyneth Paltrow, founder of Goop and the face of aspirational wellness culture, the article advised, “fairs need to strike a balance between offering a buzzy affair and a pleasant experience to satisfy these collectors.”
When Reality Is Being Curated
What links these worlds is not simply influence, but managed narratives.
Former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair asserts that the real onus is on elected representatives, elected officials, and people from the upper class who are paying social media influencers hundreds to thousands of dollars to shape narratives.
Paid campaigns, social pressure, and the desire “to be in the club and not be ostracized” shape what becomes culturally dominant.
Such tactics are hardly unique to politics. They are deeply embedded across PR, media, and creative industries, including the art world.
It is most heavily employed in overhyped art capitals, from Singapore to United Arab Emirates, often with drastic consequences during crises.
According to former US National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, “The Emirates would literally pay influencers to come and post pictures of themselves on social media enjoying Dubai, (but now) nobody there is allowed to post anything or they get arrested.”
Ultimately, instead of an open cultural sphere, we end up with a heavily curated system of amplification: attention flows toward those already closest to wealth, prestige, and power.
Are We Enabling Our Own Inequality?
The “contamination” of steel began with nuclear weapons testing, and that of information began with machine-generated text, audio and images.
The source point for our ongoing contamination of self could very likely be the ecosystem of individuals, institutions, and companies orbiting power and wealth during this era of in-your-face oligarchic populism.
In ‘The Blind Spot’, political scientist Jeffery Winters argues that in an “extraordinary paradox” we currently exist within a state of “participatory inequality”– a world in which 99.99% of us participate openly and freely in our own ongoing economic exclusion.
One of the ways we are doing so is by constantly abdicating our own instincts, voices, and ideas for the sake of integrating into systems and movements that only aid the rich and powerful.
Instead of splintering ourselves to quell instability in our lives, isn’t it time to create more space for our inherent instincts, voices, and ideas?
Stay tuned for more from The News Desk.
For exclusive updates on Art Industry Insights With Reena Devi, you can become a one-time or regular supporter.
You can also follow the independent media on Substack or Instagram. Commissions, tips, and leads are more than welcome.
This article is non-commissioned (unpaid). Future pieces for the column may be commissioned (paid) and will be disclosed accordingly. They will not include a Buy Me A Coffee link.
Art Industry Insights With Reena Devi 