Context Is (No Longer) King

 

We used to say that "context is king" (and in the early web, "content is king") as the more information you provided the more it was enriching. I think those days are fading, if not gone, with short-form content. 

On YouTube, the descriptions are mostly hidden and you have to poke viewers to read them. This is all by design of course because YouTube doesn't want to disrupt the algorithmic flows. Short-viewing is not about having to read, but context is still king if you want people to really know what you're attempting to do.

This is particularly inimical to anything conceptual (which is decidedly "Make You Think" instead of "Don't Make Me Think", and "How To Build Habit-Forming Products"). 

I've been making more short-form content because I like the power of constraints. But there are also conceptual ideas behind them that I think make them complete, But people stopping to reflect (or even read a little bit) is anathema to the idea of making habit-forming content.

People seem to either be laser-focused on extracting entertainment value or are looking at peripheral information (like in a museum only looking at the ornateness of frames instead of the paintings) and not understanding anything about them. It's all about amusement value wherever you can find it. Sometimes it's going straight to the food court for a burger and fries before moving on the main attraction. This has sort of been the experience for museums for a long time because Ithink people get overwhelmed with too much information. (I've had this experience lately with the binge watching of Waldemar Januszczak art history documentaries with multiple hours on the Baroque alone). But the artist wants the audience to understand what they're doing and to the extent that that's successful then I think it makes the art more enriching. But it could take hundreds of years for that to happen because people will be curious in the future and then they'll go back and look. In the initial stages when new works are released (especially conceptual works) no one's going to spend the time to read through essays, like Donald Judd's Specific Objects. If the aluminum and Plexiglas boxes were videos the "watch time" would be 1 or 2 seconds.

 

The beauty of the internet in the beginning was that context could be king with hyperlinking but people don't want to be bothered with citations. (On YouTube hyperlinks are below the fold and you have to remind people that they're there by doing absurd things like pointing to it in the video--look here!)

Save for what artists say in interviews, conceptual work is very hard to pull off these days, in contrast to the 70s when people would devote vast amounts of time absorbing all the details. This still holds true, ironically, on YouTube in which all the details are made into long-form documentaries. But like 3-hour documentaries on the baroque you just want something short-form and superficial. The danger is that becomes habit-forming.