Do Spectacular Visual Events Divert Us or Inspire Us to Think?
Each year, Pyro Shows travels to Washington D.C. for the Fourth of July. The east Tennessee company crams its fleet of flatbed trucks with enough pyrotechnics to make the annual spectacle of fireworks on the National Mall more spectacular than the year before.
After dark on Monday, Pyro Shows will strut its newest stuff (live on PBS), firing hundreds of mortar shells from the watery safety of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, each time hoping to impress us with new colors and designs, such as cubes, spiral, or fountains.
It will be pure spectacle.
As the estimated 1 million Mall visitors crane their necks to watch, they might be surprised to hear that, in some circles of the art world, “spectacle” is a dirty word. For the critics of spectacle, if a million people are fixated on fireworks, they won’t be doing anything to change society. They will only be thinking, “Wow! Look at that!”
The Fourth of July in the U.S. capital city is a spectacle through and through. During the day, a gala parade marches down Constitution Avenue. Over on the Washington Monument grounds, people attending the Smithsonian Folklife Festival may well notice as well that the U.S. Navy Concert Band, perched on an outdoor stage, does more than just military marches: it also does swing, pop, and rock and roll.
Years ago, art theorists began to worry about what spectacle does to people. When you have an art object, you have a spectator looking at it, but typically a spectator who is thinking hard about what that object is about. However, in the face of spectacles—such as movies or national celebrations—people don’t use their brains: they sit back and take it in. To use a Marxist phrase, spectacle becomes an “opiate of the people.” This attack on spectacle began in the 1960s, naturally, and it became part of the debate in the visual arts.
One of France’s left-leaning theorists, Guy Debord, wrote a 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, which argued that society has become numbed into silence by the spectacle of patriotic events, advertising, showbusiness, amusement parks and all the rest. Under the influence of spectacle, citizens became passive, not active.
In the decades since the 1960s, a more moderate version of this concern about spectacle has evolved. Today it is called “visual culture,” or being aware of how images influence us. Some radical concerns continued, however. Recently a group of art theorists in America has lamented that even installation art, the newest cool thing, has turned into mere spectacle: big, bright, weird and fun installation spaces with a “wow!” factor, not a message of critical thinking.
This is not the only way to try to understand spectacle, however. An alternative view of spectacle is offered by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, whose new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, is just out in paperback. He presents the case for “performance theory.” Among all species, Bloom says, only humans perform to gain attention. We enjoy seeing others perform, and we enjoy it more when it reveals the effort, skill, and process involved.
When one thinks of spectacle as making a society passive and non-productive, television definitely comes to mind. How many Americans have their eyeballs glued to “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” or “American Idol?” Far more than join the Peace Corps or help at the soup kitchen. However, according to Bloom, there’s no getting around this desire to be non-productive: our escape into imaginary worlds—books, art, movies, games, and daydreams—is “by a long shot” how we use most of our free time. We are “participating in experiences that we know are not real,” but we enjoy them immensely, he explains.
Bloom’s synonym for spectacle is performance. “We have evolved to take pleasure from virtuoso displays,” he says. Such displays require the intention of the performer and the attention of an audience. The more the audience recognizes the effort or process behind the performance, the greater the pleasure.
That is why, research shows, we like real Vermeer paintings more than fake Vermeer paintings that look just as good. “The pleasure we get from an artwork derives in part from our beliefs about how it was created,” Bloom writes. When something is created by “cheating”—like winning a race on steroids—our sense of awe evaporates.
Today, some social critics and the artistic left continue to remind us that in a “society of the spectacle” we could be entertaining ourselves to death. That may be so—but most of the time it is not the case. Besides, our enjoyment of spectacle seems to be a natural human instinct.
Who is to say, for example, that people on the Mall will not be thinking critically when they see Pyro Show’s fireworks on Monday, the Fourth? One thought will be, “Wow! How did they do that?” After the spectacle is over, the critical thinking won’t end. A million people will be thinking, “Hmm, now how do I get to the Metro and get home?” The Mall is usually cleared safely in about two hours—a mass spectacle in itself.
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