Welcome to metamodernism
PREFACE
At the dawn of an era in which art fuses inseparably with everyone's daily life, I want to explore with you a question deeply anchored in the fabric of our current society: does opening up to the public destroy the artistic movement of metamodernism?
Why choose this question? Quite simply because it turns out to be one of the most relevant in our social context, even though few people grasp its scale. At the heart of this generation, I am an active witness to, and a participant in, the pivotal period shaping metamodernism. My aim with this piece is to reveal the risks inherent in the expansion of an artistic movement that, far from keeping its elitist aura, is democratising at a dizzying speed to infuse the whole of our existence. Metamodernism, with its complexity and its richness, stands as one of the currents most present in people's everyday lives. Driven by a frantic digitalisation of information and media, this movement no longer knows any borders.
The stakes are high: to explain as well as possible, to the general public, the entanglements of the physical and digital worlds that envelop us almost invisibly. The task is all the more delicate because I have to captivate an audience hungry for explicit, fast, entertaining content. My challenge, through this study, will be to use the power of words to capture everyone's attention, articulating a discourse both deep and accessible.
Knowing how to analyse the world around me is the most important thing for living in community. Knowing yourself and knowing others will always remain a fundamental constant of our society if we are to keep evolving properly.
I invite you, then, to dive with me into the exploration of this metamodern reality, where every page turned aims to shed a little more light on the role and reach of a current that defines us all, at every instant of our digital and tangible reality.
INTRODUCTION
In a world like ours, where information and art combine ever more to work their way into people's lives, a crucial question resonates in the mind of anyone with even a passing interest in this field: can opening up to the public harm, or even destroy, the very foundation of an artistic movement? The question is all the more legitimate given that art has never been as accessible as it is now. To answer it, I decided to explore and understand the broad creative spectrum of metamodernism. This current is a perfect gathering of cultures, visions, ideologies and mediums, diversifying further every day.
For those to whom the term means little, let me walk you through the family tree of this contemporary universe that surrounds us. In 2015, the English artist Luke Turner explained, in an article called « Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction », that the prefix « meta- » takes its origin from Plato's metaxis, which evokes the oscillation between two opposing ideas while using them simultaneously. Climate change, financial recessions, the growing number of armed conflicts: so many problems, discussed later in this piece, that explain the emergence of this new concept from the 1990s until now. All these factors take their place in a seesawing movement that swings from one pole to the other, between two very distinct ways of thinking: utopia versus dystopia. The very foundation of our current society rests on this perpetual search for a middle ground between these two visions. Utopia and dystopia, parents of metamodernism, draw their essence from modernism and postmodernism. These two, which shaped our world before the current movement, inspire our fantasy of finding truth between the two antagonists. Our progress sits on a direct line of historical evolution, rich and complex. To understand more: postmodernism, with its irony, its scepticism and its appetite for destruction, was a brutal answer to modernism, which advocated progress, coherence and grandeur instead. Our world acknowledges the failure of the modernist ideal while rejecting the cynicism of its successor. Metamodernism is an answer: a cynical hope, a sincere irony, and so on. But it is also a varied and fascinating theme, with a convoluted history. And above all, it is our future, but more than ever our present. Understanding the stakes of this contemporary perfectionism and its downsides is more than necessary these days. Opening our eyes to an environment that pushes us to do the opposite is becoming mandatory.
Welcome to metamodernism.
COMMUNICATION
Welcome to an ecosystem that overwhelms many of the people who live alongside it: the digital. Leave behind the romanticism of letters and the complexity of print for the simplicity offered by the thirty or so keys of your smartphone's keyboard. Communication between human beings, reaching new heights day after day, has never been so poor in depth. According to Hootsuite, in 2022 more than 4.74 billion people used social networks worldwide, a total up 4.2%; they are mainly used to keep in touch with loved ones, spend time with them and follow the news. And what comes out of all this? The answer is personal to each of us. At the scale of a single human, it can bring good as much as harm; whatever its nature, something is created. At the global scale, however, a chill sets in. The few times humanity has gathered on one single line, to exchange and bring about an event beneficial to all, have been rare. People react, move on, and forget straight away. Like the paper newspaper, our phone locks its user inside a bubble representative of their universe. What must be understood is that captivating a person through information is nothing new. The real trouble appearing in the twenty-first century is that the user becomes what they read. The networks draw their strength from what comes out of them, and what people receive from the media is what they create themselves. Gone are the handful of bosses who alone decided what people read, saw and learned. Gone too is the border of the local: Mr and Mrs Everyone become the main actors of the information circulating around them. This has very positive sides but, badly dosed, they can turn harmful. Another major change the networks bring is anonymity. Even if it is hard to truly be anonymous on the internet, you can be invisible. Being heard, being seen, all without being either: that gives a power of speech to people who would never have expressed themselves otherwise.
From the early 2000s, and especially from 2010 to 2023, social networks accompany people's lives and follow them every day. These applications and sites would redefine communication. The term microblogging entered the common lexicon to describe short conversations of a few sentences, or simple exchanges of images and links.
The most powerful communication network had just been born: the internet.
So, if understanding and visualising the impact the internet has on our world is now done, let us go deeper into our main subject. Are we at the dawn of the end of the creator, and the beginning of a whole called « creation »? At the peak of these years' technological innovation, the networks are instantly tied to youth. This generation is the first able to rebuild the tower of Babel with a new universal language, symbolised by social networks. So far, the rise of the digital has been meteoric. People's voices carry more and more weight and units begin to appear. For better or for worse, this meta era gives power to everyone's voice. These groups are bound together by the arrival of hashtags, memes and styles ever more different from one another. This new form of communication is the new way of creating. People talk, people picture what they say, people share: communication becomes the engine of an era. But everything happens by group and by fashion. From one week to a few months, trends never last very long, because the world tires of them and creates as fast as it destroys. The very essence of metamodernism is directly anchored in the networks. The evolution of the smartphone and the power of the virtual image give life to this innovative way of transmitting information. The big problem with this way of doing things is that the creators whose job it is are not the ones doing it. The creator is replaced by the consumer, who comes to craft their own vision of things. Even if, technically speaking, metamodernism rests mainly on this new way of communicating, is it really beneficial to the sound development of an artistic current? All our senses are stimulated these days. The slightest detail is polished on the surface for the good of the consumers. Visual, olfactory, sonic and sensory experiences have become mandatory for successful communication. Thanks to this escalation of the ever more beautiful, ever more crafted, whatever the cost, art and design take a prime place in people's existence. But this rise puts art at the centre of an idea, of a marketing plan, and no longer at the heart of an era. It is no longer a question of finding which artistic expression best matches the times we live in, but which style matches the message we want to send. The breaking point between the history of art and our current movement is there. Everything works like a family tree: we start from our base of knowledge while mixing, adding and innovating along the way. We end up with a very contemporary base onto which all the designers' ideas come to graft themselves.
Opening up to the public becomes dangerous at that point. Metamodernism, artistically speaking, gathers the best and the worst of everything done so far and keeps it in memory in an immense library that feeds a complete creative whole. So yes, our time probably makes us the most creative movement ever to exist; and yet what it communicates becomes more and more devoid of meaning, because of a naive public. A public that creates because it is « cool », or because it « looks good ». Art becomes a message, a brand identity, marketing, and its real soul disappears little by little. The advantage behind this opening is that it still strongly nourishes our society. Thanks to this new image of art, people use it as a pretext for invention. Inventing a new style of music and getting millions of people to hear it can be extremely fast these days. Design, and art in general, are fed by what destroys them.
Every point I have just made would be amplified further by the unfortunate arrival of COVID-19. The pandemic would push people to stay home and favour digital contact. With that period, a whole page turned for metamodernism. In two years the world became almost completely digital, and the growth of the meta against the real was meteoric. The networks became the only means of exchange between people. This health crisis brought a new variable into the equation: the lifespan of a trend. With a rise of one billion users, TikTok is the application that would completely change the way we consume information. Overall, the pandemic was beneficial to all social networks. TikTok is a mobile video-sharing and social networking application; but to live and stay on top, it needs novelty. It is laying the foundations of the future of communication by normalising fashions with ever shorter lifespans. Anything can appear and disappear overnight. These days, something is considered long-lived when it lasts one or two months. This norm completely destroys the creative process of developing a concept.
No more time to innovate, or even to consume. Everything is doomed to disappear before it is even created.
Today's communication leans towards the digital and towards burnout. The flow of creation is incredible thanks to this new way of doing things, but the artistic sense takes a hit.
ENVIRONMENT
The environment of this current is extremely vague. Given that it is written into the life of every individual with an internet connection, everyone can touch everything. Still and always in this search for the perfect answer, you and I alike are brought into the middle of important decisions that make us believe our opinion matters just as much. When we speak of environment, the problem becomes central: openness to the public becomes a breach, and the movement finds itself amid those who think they can control it. Our era gives us more optimistic and pragmatic ideas and approaches to problems like climate change or international conflicts, but the same two camps from the beginning clash — idealism and realism — the very ones that make the movement's strength. Swinging from left to right, the pendulum oscillates more and more, until it goes in circles. One opinion diverging from the person across from me, and the debate is closed. Backed by thousands of others on the networks, the discussion no longer has any reason to exist. A virtual no man's land is born of this conflict. The search for validation and self-knowledge is no longer ours. Belonging to a group is becoming more important than belonging to oneself. In this social context, art carves out a path, and we discover more about its use. This journey from pole to pole questions us all on how hard it is to dissociate belonging from authenticity. Art becomes the aesthetic of a generation that tries to destroy and rebuild it every day. Never have the creative professions been forced to change and innovate so fast. This theme gathers a good number of sub-categories, geopolitical, social, physical, digital environments, and it all comes down to the social coverage metamodernism offers us. Beyond the borders it destroys, it sets a new one, impassable for many: questioning one's own universe. This desire to be like others while remaining oneself can sometimes lead to unrealistic idealisations, creating social expectations that are hard to satisfy. Expectations often criticised by popular opinion, yet which fuel more than one person's fantasies. And it is sad to say, but to stand out from the basket you have to do things differently, always more, to the point of becoming disturbing or even controversial. Ideas become causes to defend, a victory whose only spoils are its own existence. Graphic design has always been the reflection of an era, with the mediums people had. Over time, the elitism of this world disappears to make way for greater accessibility. This is one of the most important points to understand: openness to the public is the best and the worst thing that can happen to an artistic movement. Put like that, it gets us nowhere. But if I tell you that, according to the Blog du Modérateur, about 95 million photos and videos are published every day, and that on Instagram alone, do you think you could find a denser movement than ours? Obviously, the question of what has the right to be judged as art does not enter this analysis. I start from a principle of my own: from the moment a creation is imagined, thought through and executed, it has the right to call itself art; after that, everything depends on our tastes and our sensibility. It is therefore in the generation of concepts that this openness truly brings an enormous plus. Art develops, innovates and improves. But the environment in which it keeps on growing is as unstable as can be. This so-beneficial accessibility turns against metamodernism, because it can lead to a dilution of the movement's essence and integrity. Art becomes « mainstream » the moment everyone can obtain it quickly. A talent and a historical evolution progressively turn into a mere click. This simplicity of execution means that at the level of understanding, the pattern replicates. An understandable creation is a work that pleases a wider range of tastes and sensibilities — and therefore performs better. This great tree representing art as a whole grows a new branch: global human representation. This young branch grows fast, too fast, and starts taking up too much room. Popular opinion takes precedence over the deep analysis of a work, and this can lead to a homogenisation of the artistic landscape. As art grows and chokes on novelty, it spreads, melts and loses its splendour. Like the ice cap, art does not disappear: it changes state, and dies quietly. Its status as a carrier of strong messages gives it advantages and drawbacks.
As said above, art finds itself at the heart of our lives, but that also means it becomes the coveted prize, the goose with the golden eggs, of many investors and companies who will not hesitate a single minute to capitalise on art and monetise it in all its forms. Art becomes design, design becomes a plus. From your car to your kitchen to your clothes: now that design speaks to everyone, it has become impossible to ignore this major argument of contemporary selling. This use appeared because of — or thanks to — a growing globalisation of the art market, physical or online. This international circulation offers stronger accessibility and profitability to all the players. The public widens considerably, but to what end… This new audience appropriates a world it knows nothing of and folds it into today's pop culture. All of this pushes artistic authenticity to the gates of commercial demands. Art sees its expectations changed: it is asked to be much more inclusive, to reflect cultural and social diversity. Its role in our society is completely redefined, because of a rising tension between old and new practices. The controversies grow stronger for it, further separating the two poles of metamodernism.
The blend of physical and digital tips over our interactions and creates a tendency towards oversimplification. This leaning of metamodernism can be a problem, because it reduces complex concepts to simple pieces of information that quickly become false. This can lead to disinformation on sensitive subjects, and to ethical challenges that metamodernism has to face. However, the at once idealistic and pragmatic environment of this current gives people a refreshing, and necessary, perspective in this ever more complex world. Thanks to this openness, we notice that the movement allows a better understanding of the nuances of modern life, while remaining critical.
TECHNOLOGY
If until now I may have been pessimistic, or dramatic, this new chapter opens a door onto what the future holds for us, and onto what I find far deeper and more interesting for my question. With the elitism of art on its way out, new ways of doing things are revolutionising and shaking art in every direction. Technologically speaking, this openness is the best possible thing for art. A field far too peaceful until then, resting on its laurels, has just questioned itself completely. Technology: tool of creation or of destruction? Closely linked, the two combine, each the logical continuation of the other. But technology is the most beautiful fruit this tree could have grown. Are these innovative ways of creating salvation?
The evolution of metamodernism, parallel to technological advances, is not just a matter of new techniques. It encompasses a much deeper reflection, based on the impact and the imprint left by these novel technologies on us as individuals, and on society. This saga begins in the early nineties, with the appearance of computers in the art world. According to histoiredesarts.culture.gouv.fr: « Digital painting is a form of digital art that appeared in the 1990s in which the traditional techniques of painting, such as watercolour, oils, impasto, are applied using digital tools by means of a computer, a graphics tablet, a stylus and software. » Even if most artists remain critical of these new mediums, there is a real budding desire to explore and deepen the new artistic frontiers metamodernism imposes, and to push ever further the traditional limits known until now. And if so far I have introduced metamodernism through a rather philosophical lens, the great family of the technologies of the future tips us into the heart of the question.
« Do artists dream of digital art? »
Virtual assistants, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and so on: so many words you and I hear all day long, names that sit at the centre of almost every ethical question. The greatest masterpieces, fantasies and fears of big-screen science fiction have become everyday life for all of us. If Black Mirror sends shivers down your spine, go straight to the conclusion, because technology is gaining a lot of weight and, like it or not, it makes the scales tip heavily.
Let me introduce the team line-up, starting with the best known: ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Gemini. Artificial intelligences that make many people blanch, but that are just the logical continuation of what already existed with Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is a real innovation. Currently free, version 3.5 is adequate for experimenting with AI, but version 4 is a demonstration of the best the future has in store. When we talk about GPT, concretely, we are talking about generative pre-trained conversation: the chatbot strings together the words it finds logical to form sentences. To achieve such feats, GPT-3 is endowed with 175 billion parameters, and GPT-4 is estimated at 1,760 billion. « Metamodernism, artistically speaking, gathers the best and the worst of everything done so far and keeps it in memory in an immense library that feeds a complete creative whole. » That is one of the sentences I wrote earlier to explain how communication works… GPT is the very « materialisation » of that idea. These artificial intelligences are to be used wisely, of course, but for me they must exist as tools. Too often demonised, or painted as an easy way out, these digital assistants are already our present, no longer fiction. Try to chase them away: they come back stronger. OpenAI, the company behind many of these advances, is capitalising 1.6 billion dollars this year. In 2022, the small start-up reported 45,000 dollars in revenue for its non-profit AI research branch… In one year, OpenAI multiplied its annual revenue by more than thirty-five thousand. Beyond the pure evolution of the chatbot, the numbers speak volumes. But ChatGPT is not OpenAI's only child. DALL-E is an image-generating artificial intelligence, one of the most powerful currently on the market; the combination of the two, in GPT-4, is even more so. Behind its little name, a blend of Pixar's robot WALL-E and the famous painter Dalí, DALL-E, in OpenAI's own words, is an artificial intelligence that can create an image from a text. The San Francisco company, followed very closely by Microsoft and directly challenged by Google, specialises in artificial reasoning. AI research companies matter greatly in our world: from marketing to the automotive industry, through science and medicine, predictive algorithms and cognitive systems are becoming necessary to our evolution. The real explanation for the arrival of artificial intelligence in fields accessible to everyone, like art, is simple: for an AI to perform and keep growing, it must be trained. Now, the boundary lies in knowing whether the art that comes out of it is a mere exercise or genuine research. AI in art is a tool, as we are for it. It is wrong to consider an artificially generated work as an end in itself.
The arrival of learning machines scares people, whatever the field. Some professions are threatened by machines, as they have been since the start of the industrial revolution, but art is not one of them. Right now that is a certainty; in the future, the question stands. Artificial intelligences are to be taken in hand and controlled like tools, not compared to evil robots. Without a human behind it, the pencil draws nothing. Without a human behind it, the brush paints nothing. Without a human behind it, the camera captures nothing. Same as the others: without someone behind it, an AI creates nothing. Every medium has its share of recognised masterpieces, and its share of things made to send something funny to a friend, and so on. AIs are neither more nor less than one more medium in a well-stocked toolbox.
All these generative intelligences are the biggest advance of the past ten years. However, they are not the only technologies to have appeared recently. The evolution of the digital pushes artists to make their works more accessible across different supports. The shift from print to digital completely changes how design and art are consumed. That is why, three or four years ago, the creation of the metaverse came to confirm and solidify this idea of digital power. When we speak of a universe, it is not just an image but a reality: a world created, and accessible only by computer. Its creation and the arrival of the blockchain favour the growth of the online market. The term NFT means that the authenticity of a digital file is certified. With everything I have just explained, the field of possibilities opens up to the most adventurous artists. Thanks to this system, works can now be certified, sold and exhibited without the help of galleries or museums, and from home. It is a real plus for many artists. For technology enthusiasts like me, you can push the experience even further by adding mixed or augmented reality, and visualise your work in whatever world you want. The way art is consumed becomes different, but the paths that open up thanks to it bring nothing but bonuses, and for once in this text, I end on a very optimistic note.
Technology creates new experiments that enlarge the world of art and reach a new public. But at the same time, this world needs that public to let itself catch a second wind. Technology is probably the middle ground metamodernism is trying to reach.
A research project from my studies, written before generative AI entered my daily life, and published here corrected but not rewritten. To dig further: Luke Turner, Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction, 2015. The figures come from Hootsuite (2022), the Blog du Modérateur and OpenAI; the definition of digital painting, from histoiredesarts.culture.gouv.fr.
