Some unforeseen circumstances fell into place (do those two idioms work together? maybe no), and I have added an upper level media studies class to my slate this semester:
The students so far are sharp and engaged and staying with me for a long evening class. My buddy in reality TV casting, the ever-knowledgeable Morgan Fahey, has helped me hook up with some excellent guest speakers. We just watched the episode of Real World Season 3 when Pedro and Sean had a commitment ceremony and contrasted it with an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians which, despite some real expertise in reality tv on my part, I had never seen before.
The students were unable to get me clear on which sister was which. It turns out that if you keep changing your hair from one shot to another but your makeup is all the same and you all have names that start with K, I'm going to have real trouble telling you apart. Then we discussed momager economics.
More on guest speakers later. I have two TAs, who are the GOAT, in my humble opinion. It's kind of amazing. The massive screening room is like a movie theater. We watched RuPaul's Drag Race, and she was calling someone "regional" as an insult, so I know I sound hella regional being starstruck by the tech, but it's fancy! my little-hard-up-SLAC cup runneth over.
I published the piece below, "Extreme Hoards," about Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Hoarders in 2017. I assigned it first because I had to throw the syllabus together quickly, with a slight cringe. But I have to say, the connections I was making between EMHE and the mortgage-backed securities bubble and Hoarders and the foreclosure and evictions crisis have really held up! EMHE was the neoliberal soul of the MBS bubble, Hoarders was the reflection of the evictions mess. ( #CiteBlackWomenCollective and Koritha Mitchell, hat tip, and no matter what they say, we will be reading Kristen Warner on RHOA, citing WOC and asserting my own expertise, watch me).
The class is really making me think about how authentic life, under the regime of neoliberal reality television the influencer economy and extremely online everything all at once, has come to be defined not against the market but against art itself.
It's not that "unscripted" non-unionized self-presentation is automatically granted the status of the Real, in fact, a lot of what we're talking about is the aesthetic construction of "authentic" feeling. But even more than ten or fifteen years ago, under the current regime of screens, we are all always adjusting to the demands of an omnipresent market in human capital. The demands of reality TV are now the water we swim in. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to the hustle for influence. "Selling out" gets more and more meaningless. Meanwhile, ArtPrice.com tracks the $186 million turnover on Picassos in 2024, while a hoard of paintings sits in the Geneva Free Port warehouse as a store of value for the obscenely wealthy and reality tv seems more authentic.
We talked about Benjamin in class. Art in the age of late reality has lost its aura to the point of becoming a valuation process for NFTs. But this class is really driving home that it's art that we miss, it's art that we're mad at, and we still live our lives through aesthetics. Of course, I remain on the side of it was capitalism all along. But as we pursue our niche and quixotic efforts at human connection, meaning, and ritual, I can feel the ghost of the arts and humanities laughing at us.
Maybe this is an unformed claim, maybe this is me working through the current gnawing despair as the darkness rises, maybe it's both!
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