A morning at Tate Britain
“To make a collection is to find, acquire, organize and store some items, whether in a room, a house, a library, a museum or a warehouse. It is also, inevitably, a way of thinking about the world - the connections and principles that produce a collection contain assumptions, juxtapositions, findings, experimental possibilities and associations”
It was half term this week so we went on a little day trip to Tate Britain in London. For some reason Tate Britain seems to live in the shadow of Tate Modern. The building which it occupies is arguably less impressive than its younger sibling, especially since The Blavatnik Building was added to the former power station near London Bridge.
But, Tate Britain is certainly not without its charms.
The Tate’s collection of work by Rothko now resides at Tate Britain once more, having returned from Tate Modern. It can be found adjacent to the Clore Gallery which houses their collection of work by JMW Turner. The Seagram Murals did not gain my son’s approval, sadly. There is also the recent-ish renovation of the Members Room, complete with stunning glass dome and imposing spiral staircases. Features which I’m pleased to say succeeded in attracting loud gasps of admiration from the boy.
Away from Rothko and Turner though, the Tate Britain does something quite unusual and really quite clever with its vast permanent collection. Something that is incredibly effective in teaching its visitors about how artistic movements really work.
Rather than dividing the work by genre, or material, or even artistic movement, it organises the work chronologically. As the video below describes, you enter the collection at the earliest point and work your way through the artwork toward the later pieces. From beginning to end, this is a journey that spans work produced over a period of roughly 500 years.
This is a clear editorial choice. A decision to invite the viewer into a discussion about the production of art - and therefore, about the production of media.
This decision lays bare something we often don’t acknowledge in the communications industry. The fact that genuine paradigms shifts rarely occur. Whilst there are scientific elements to our work, a great deal of what we do in the communications industry is akin to the humanities. Ours is a subject concerned with human society and culture. Like students of the humanities we find ourselves presented “constantly (with) a number of competing and incommensurable solutions” (Kuhn, 2012).
The walls of the collection show that at any one period in time, there were often several different styles of art being practiced with a variety of different ideas, techniques and contexts being explored. Artistic expression is a bit of a blurry mess chronologically speaking, with multiple styles or schools of work competing with one another at any one point in time - and certainly doesn’t exist in the way that dedicated exhibitions might have us think, living as discrete and distinct phases in time.
At the core of the Tate’s editorial decision is the truth that there is no neat baton passing between the practitioners of different artistic movements and the work they produce.
The same dynamic informs progress in technology and commercial media too.
The stories we like to tell ourselves are ones of technological death, of sudden upheaval, of bloody revolution. These stories make for good copy, are easy to sell and easy to understand, but are fundamentally flawed. The world just isn’t as simple as that. Russell Davies, writing in 2007 sums this up brilliantly:
“The tendency (is) to argue that they arrival of X will cause the total eradication of Y. The internet will destroy television. Phones will destroy MP3 players. Curry will destroy chips (that didn’t happen did it?). We all do this. I do it. You get carried away with rhetoric and enthusiasm and forget that the likely scenario will be that everything will be a blurry munge like it was before, with this new element added in”
At a superficial level, this tendency encourages some sloppy thinking. Journalists and commentators start to apply loose, sensationalist labels to the capabilities and properties of emerging technology. This recent article from the New York Times was a particular favourite. Twitter duly reminded us how low its tolerance for bullshit is with its trademark, brutal clarity.
I'm not gonna read the article, so someone do me a favor and tell me if they just reinvented the radio play https://t.co/c5q8nFWU8B
— Sarah Walsh (@BigDamnHerosSir) December 28, 2021
More seriously, articles like this start to create noticeable distortion between the way the industry is thinking about media and the way audiences are thinking about media. These distortions are dangerous. Marketing Directors start to ask questions about emerging technology that are misaligned with the size of the opportunity they present. People lose sight of the fundamentals. They start to innovate for the sake of innovating. Babies get thrown out with bathwater.
The reason this is important and particularly salient, is because we currently find ourselves on the eve of another supposed ‘revolution’. Currently, you can’t move for discussion of Web 3, the metaverse and the associated technologies. Sadly, I’m old enough to remember the arrival of Web 2. The new era was announced by a now famous cover on Wired Magazine alongside an accompanying article by editor Chris Anderson. It proclaimed the web is dead.
A number of Anderson’s predictions did indeed turn out to be true. None more than the assertion that “a technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others” (Anderson, 2010). We saw how the idealism and early promise of the social web ended up manifesting itself in the eventual consolidation of behaviour, traffic and ad spend into a few key platforms and services. These platforms ended up looking quite like the media that they promised to disrupt in a number of ways, not least in the way they charged advertisers for attention and eyeballs.
Indeed, we also now live less on ‘the web’ and more ‘on the internet’: consuming media, socialising and shopping through dedicated apps which are powered by internet based technologies. But as Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic at the time, “the browser-based web is not a goner. It's still experiencing substantial growth… that should be one big clue that the technological worldview that says, "The new inevitably destroys the old," is fundamentally flawed….Serious technology scholars long ago discarded the idea that tech was just a series of increasingly awesomer things that successively displace each other” (Madrigal, 2010). Twelve years later, web browsers are still very much in use. Changes to the technological infrastructure underpinning browsers and their interaction with advertising, is currently one of the most significant issues facing media professionals today.
To make his point, Madrigal references the brilliantly bizarre example of World War I pilots using homing pigeons as a means of communication. Technology has, and always will, live for long periods of time in happy co-existence with the technology which is notionally destined to usurp it, as part of a brilliant, vibrant “blurry munge” (Davies, 2007).
Whilst the reality of innovation and technological adoption isn’t as clean and tidy as many industry figures would have us believe, the blurriness and the mess of reality is exciting. In fact, for me it is perhaps even more exciting than the new shiny technology itself.
This mess represents creative opportunity, opportunity to make interesting work that lands with impact. The combination of old and new, digital and analogue, real and virtual creates an incredibly fertile canvas for marketers to use. Digital didn’t kill TV, it made it more interesting. Suddenly you could be sat on your sofa with thousands of other fans, discussing shows in real time. You could find super-fans creating content about their favourite programmes online, deepening the sense of fandom and community…. and there are many many more examples of this sort of improvement when media channels are combined, not replaced. Exclude channels and touchpoints at your peril.
It’s back to that idea of ‘bothism’ I guess.
In 1969 Rothko gifted The Seagram Murals to the Tate because of his admiration for the work of JMW Turner. He hoped that his paintings would be hung alongside the Turner Bequest within the Gallery. Presumably, he saw commonalities in his approach and that of Turner, despite working some hundred years apart. Turner proceeded the Impressionist movement which Rothko’s work would later use as the basis of its abstraction. The juxtaposition of these works - classic and modern, creates a new powerful work of art, which is greater than the sum of their parts. Just as the rest of the Tate’s collection does. There is no tidy timeline of technological progress. No matter what we are led to believe. Instead we have a range of tools at our disposal in an ever growing toolkit. These tools should chosen based on the objectives at hand and the type of effect we’re trying to create with consumers, not because of some predilection for the fashionable, the new and the shiny.
Bibliography
Anderson, C. (2010, August 17). The Web is Dead. Retrieved February 2022, from Wired.com: https://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff-webrip/
Davies, R. (2007, February 27). Good Better Than Bad Shock. Retrieved February 2022, from Russell Davies: https://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/
Kuhn, T. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th Edition ed.). London: University of Chicago Press.
Madrigal, A. (2010, August 17). What's Wrong With 'X Is Dead'. Retrieved February 2022, from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/whats-wrong-with-x-is-dead/61663/
Obrist, H. U. (2014). Ways of Curating. London: Penguin.
