Breaking the Tyranny of Obviousness

We are stuck in a hell of frictionlessness.

For whatever reason, most likely because stupid Twitter accounts hoping to cause controversy in order to generate clicks and revenue latched onto an effective mechanism to do so, Mark Rothko has come up a lot this year. How, those stupid accounts kept asking, can people enjoy a Rothko painting, which, after all, is just a few blobs of color on a canvas? What happened to real art (paintings of horses!)?

As evidenced by these “trad” social media accounts, and by that 30 Rock clip, there has long existed a tension between those who see art as a tool to convey something readily understandable, and those who see its purpose as more mysterious—as something that can evoke deep feelings within us, stir us, without us really knowing why. 

Rotko, too, thought about this. He wanted his paintings to elicit strong and universal human emotions—”tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” but without the viewer knowing exactly why (he by and large refused to talk about the purpose or meaning of his work). But he knew this was a risky proposition, given that much of the world was not ready to feel these things so deeply.

“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer,” Rothko once wrote. “It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend the affliction universally!”

What a scary thought: that something you spend months or years making could, because so much of the world is vulgar and impotent (as evidenced by how many people refuse to “get” any form of art that is not obvious and forthright in its point), fall on deaf ears, or even worse, become the tool through which those vulgar and impotent beasts, “extend the affliction universally”—convince the world that exploring the depths of our feelings is not worth it, or besides the point of, or even dangerous to, life.

Well, sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but, I think, we currently live in a world of pictures of horses; under a tyranny of obviousness. As I have not lived through any other era, I cannot say for sure that it is worse now than it has been in the past, but I think I can say that we are working against a lot right now; that there are many forces preventing us from feeling abstractly and confusingly and deeply, and from producing things that help others feel so. 

Literalism and obviousness is the preferred language of capital. It allows for frictionless movement across households and cultures and countries. Our methods of communication—the internet, for example—would not work as well if they allowed for the same forms of interplay between text and reader that a Rothko does. Tweets and TikToks do not usually gain virality because they require five minutes in silence to process before evoking feelings of despair or ecstasy in their viewers. Which is not to say that they never do! I’ve seen some TikToks that have made me feel things; but that the ideal form of internet communication is easy-to-understand literalism. 

It’s no coincidence that Mr. Beast is the most successful content creator. His works can be easily understood by any and everyone. There is no friction. And there is nothing to be taken away at the end. He, by his own admission, did not begin creating content for any purpose other than the sake of it going viral—i.e. being understood by the largest swath of people possible. And today there are quite literally millions of imitators—YouTube channels and TikTok and Instagram users whose sole purpose is to find a form of content (throwing things as far as they can, lifting the most weight, destroying some object) that is as frictionless as possible and thus can most easily flow through internet capital’s cables most seamlessly. 

It’s no coincidence that AI art and text have taken over the internet. It’s not that anyone seems to particularly like these texts and objects—they’re usually very bad. But they are cheap or free to produce and useful in as much as they can be profitable. Will one day someone cry over an AI-generated piece of art? I’m sure. But the art and text that clogs up all of our feeds does so not because of its emotionally-resonant qualities but because of its frictionlessness, its obviousness. 

It’s no coincidence that “therapy speak” has become so popular on all the apps. Real therapy is confusing, very non-literal, very non-obvious and very individual. You go to a therapist, often for years, to explode your psyche and piece it back together again in a way that, by design, cannot really be applied to anyone else. But therapy translated to the internet functions in the exact opposite way—it is universal, obvious, appeals to base instincts. You like the video about how XYZ toxic behavior is due to childhood trauma for the same reason you like the video of someone putting rubber bands around a watermelon until it explodes—not because it is true in any emotionally resonant or intellectually challenging sense but because it is true in the easily identifiable sense, in the same way that a parrot says “walnut” when you show it a walnut. 

I won’t go into other forms of culture this applies to….but, like, certain pop stars with lyrics so universal that they cause people to pack stadiums, not because these lyrics excavate anything deep and stuck within these people, but because they allow universal nodding along (again, like a parrot seeing a walnut)—and thus provide friendship, identity and camaraderie through frictionlessness (which, perhaps, is a fine goal in itself, but not, in my opinion, the highest purpose of art). 

Perhaps we have always lived under a reign of frictionlessness (the TV sitcom, a Bing Crosby album, etc.). But, at the end of this year, I have been reflecting on just how dangerous and sad this all becomes. Because, I think, without the ability to experience culture that allows us to plumb the depths, we become stuck, very stuck. Destined to a life of nodding along but not able to move beyond the current horrors of our lives because we cannot find where those horrors exist within us. And what are we now, if not stuck—having the same conversations over and over again online, relitigating the same controversies, re-making the same movies and television shows, reliving the same political nightmares. We have found boundless connection through frictionlessness—the entire internet the equivalent of a Taylor Swift concert (whoops I said her name); and so we have the illusion of emotional release because we all look at each other and and we’re all in a room together and we’re all feeling the same thing, and that feels good (“walnut!”). But then what? 

Contrast that with the experience of sitting alone in a museum in front of a Rothko painting. It’s become a trope at this point. People write about it on Reddit. You look at the painting, and you begin to cry. And you don’t know why. But it breaks something in you. I haven’t had this experience with Rothko specifically (though I do think there’s something incredibly affecting and deeply disturbing in his paintings—especially the way the colors meet each other but often refuse to touch, which leaves me feeling wonderfully uneasy). But I do remember sitting in Dia Beacon, the museum in upstate New York, on a random weekday several years ago, in a cavernous room alone, looking at a series of Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs—black-and-white portraits of German factories and grain mills—and beginning to silently sob. 

Why? All these years later, I still do not know. And, I think, that is the point. 

That in our tyranny of obviousness, everything must have a reason, a purpose, a defined cause, and thus, cannot affect us in ways that go deeper than language allows us to express. To un-stuck ourselves, we must experience things that do not have an obvious “why.” Instead, we must search, through art, music, psychoanalysis and dreams, whatever, for things that make us feel, and thus move forward, without defined reason. 

This has been an incredibly bad year. As Israel has bombed and displaced and starved Palestinians and as the whole world has watched and felt powerless, as the world slides further into chaos because of global warming, as our politicians give up the pretense that they care about us, I have noticed this feeling of stuckness. That we retweet and post and protest but cannot seem to move beyond repeating these things, and repeating the cycle of anger to action to despair within ourselves. I am not suggesting we stop doing any of these things, but that they are not enough, that there must be something more.

Rothko was a Jew, and though he mostly refused to talk about the why of his work, his daughter said the Holocaust was, “always there in the background.” As a Jew from a Holocaust-surviving family, before even knowing his daughter said this, I somehow had intuited it. That these paintings were about conveying a grief and confusion about the violence of humanity that is so deep that there is no obvious way to express it. That the only way to excavate it, and thus help others excavate it within themselves, was through an interplay of shape and color that is indescribable in purpose but nonetheless incredibly effective (hence why people cry when viewing them). 

As I look to 2024, I have little hope that the material conditions of the world will improve. We live in incredibly callous times. But what I do have hope for is that we can begin to better process and reflect these things in our words, our art, our minds. That we can move beyond the era of the obvious and push ourselves to sit in the proverbial museum room alone and see what comes up. We won’t know where that leads us, but that is exactly the point.