Forty-Three: Art Review (03-14-2023)
Recently, unfortunately, and forcibly viewed Glass Life, the videographic companion piece to Glass Life by certainly formerly hipster, begrudgingly Millennial, and profoundly vacuous Sara Cwynar. The piece is a hectic, trite, and overdrawn deconstruction(?) of social media, whose most salient point is made unintentionally- for a brief few seconds of the piece's unnecessary nineteen minutes, Cwynar, who is curiously visibly present in a film about how visual presence is unpleasantly obligatory, scrolls her own camera roll, demonstrating her own uninnocence, but also a total absence of self-awareness in regards to her personal participation in the clearly demonized internet social machine. The artist clearly opts into this spiral, but is not aware that this choice is even being made.
Opting out of the social machine is deceptively easy, and requires no more than deleting or avoiding the applications and sites that facilitate it. This mysterious remedy has been lost to the annuls of history, as far as the perspective of Brooklynites reaches. The lense of "internet bad" has finally become overused. This does not mean that it is now prescient to discuss the value of the internet, or any of its myriad uses as somehow ostensibly valuable, there is no reason to be needlessly contrarian as it becomes uncool (or rather dated) to dislike the internet while still maniacally utilizing it.
The bigger complaint to be had with Ms. Cwynar's little video is it reasonless existence. Technically, it is interesting, with its sliding glass and camera parallax formation being just barely apparent, and the conceptual similarity to the scroll of the internet being made clear. The use of numerous quotations, and then the ultimate alphabetical listing of their contributors, demonstrates further that this video has nothing unique to say, literally, and only a relatively well-established camera gimmick to demonstrate. The listing of its unwilling contributors adds to the faux-academic necessity to be well-read, and to conjure up quotation as justification for any opinion, a crutch to avoid any novel thinking and to join in on a social exercise rather than develop intellect. Recent Oscar nomination Tar, which contributed to the recent wave of media non-literate complaining, prominently displayed the bad habit of creatives and academic-adjacent creatives to be quote regurgitators ahead of actual experts.
Glass Life realizes the greatest anxieties facing millennials, and soon, generation Z, that they have no quantifiable identity- a problem they made for themselves and now must face head on. Their habit of phone-checking and post-scrolling is secondary. Terrifyingly, the well accredited amongst them will sell them on their failings, and rather than become conveniently avoidant as most before them have, they will opt to again repaint the world around them in the image of their self-flagulent disappointment. "They" being in this case the very dislikable, barely relevant Brooklyn hipster class, and their wide social circle of tweed-elbow academics and whoever claims to be "working class" without ever working a job site.