This is the third essay in a series on digital identity, culture, and social life. The first part takes up an essay by art critic Sean Tatol. The second part examines a play by playwright Matt Gasda. The third part, the heart of the essay, develops an account of digital experience and identity, which culminates in the ‘death of the cool’. Thank you sincerely for reading.
I
In his September 2024 review essay “Manhattan Syndrome: A Survey of New York Trends”, the art critic Sean Tatol identifies a growing tendency toward what he calls “art-cool reflexivity”, in which “the coolness of the New York artist existing in New York” constitutes the form and content of the artwork. One characteristic example he details is the Win McCarthy exhibition “Kingdom Come” at Francis Irv. Composed of distorted iPhone panoramas of New York scenes, stacks of bricks and plastic take-out containers, and a cropped photo of a wheatpasted lingerie ad, McCarthy’s show, Tatol writes, is a “stylized evocation of walking around downtown”, reminiscent of “hanging out on a Chinatown rooftop”, “clearly evocative of the cool, aloof NYC feeling that it’s going for”. While such hyper-self-consciousness might inspire eye-rolling, Tatol identifies this reflexive tendency not to condemn it, but rather to suggest that it is a distinctive feature of the “emergent impasse” in artmaking which contemporary artists are struggling to break through.
For Tatol, this impasse – the widely acknowledged “aimless and uninspired state” of the arts, the art world’s inability to produce things of “lasting interest or value” – is inextricably linked to a “crisis of cool”. Certainly it can be traced to some degree to the shortcomings of the patronage class, interested on the one hand in the rising asset values of art, and on the other hand in art as a moral and political vehicle. But there is a more fundamental, existential problem, he argues, within the supposedly highbrow milieu of downtown artists itself. The origin of many, if not most, of the new things in art over the past century, and still something of a cultural vanguard after the end of the modernist avant-garde, the ‘downtown scene’ has lost much of its creative vitality, its cultural preeminence feeling “less fertile, less effortless, more studied and predictable”. Tatol puts it simply: “Almost nothing now is cool.” And his essay sketches the significance of this development, situating the cool in art-historical context and suggesting its substantive importance to artists. I found Tatol’s account fascinating when I first read it last October, and to develop some orienting concepts and questions for this essay, I would like to present several aspects of it below.
What is ‘cool’ exactly, and what does it mean for art to be undergoing a crisis of cool? For Tatol, cool emerges out of the modernist injunction, explicit since Baudelaire, that the artist represent their time – not in the narrow sense of realistic representation, but as “sense phenomena and feeling” which enable the viewer to discover their own world anew. While some art, like that of Rembrandt and Leonardo, is the work of a master stylist whose immense skill is immediately apparent to the viewer, other art – Tatol offers the examples of Manet’s “Olympia”, Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ urinal, and Johns’s “Flag” – is not inherently impressive, and its significance emerges only in the context of the time in which it was made. “Olympia”, for instance, is important not for its exquisite rendering of a nude – in fact, in some ways it is rather ugly – but for the way its frank and realistic depiction of its subject scandalized the French bourgeoisie of the 1860s. ‘Cool’ thus designates an artwork’s relevance to its time, its ability to represent contemporary reality in an insightful and provocative manner. And more broadly, coolness is a distinctive feature of modern art, its capacity to generate ‘relevance’ its stock-in-trade, and the battle to define and express ‘the now’ a central organizing principle of art-world competition. A crisis of cool then describes an existential problem for contemporary art: its inability to generate this quality of relevance to the present moment.
What makes ‘cool’ important to the artistic process? Tatol explains that coolness provides the “unique license” afforded to the insider. Once an artist has ‘made it in New York’ and intuited the social mechanisms of coolness – not only what is in and out at the moment, but also when and how to preempt what is not yet in, to utilize what is out in an ‘in’ way, etc. – then they can work without anxiety about whether they are cool or relevant. They are free to experiment and pursue their idiosyncratic visions, “unburdened by the worry that they’re doing the wrong thing”. But Tatol suggests that this process of cool is not currently working in a productive manner. Cool downtown artists are instead using their freedom to... be cool downtown artists. In a particularly lucid line, Tatol identifies a “preoccupation with the means of coolness as the thing to be attained, mistaking the attainment of cool as the object of desire rather than as a vehicle for exploration”. This fixation attests to the increasing scarcity of coolness: no longer an abundant feature of the downtown air, it is now a rare commodity prized for the value bestowed by its rareness and pursued as an end in itself.
What about the present moment causes this struggle to produce ‘relevant’ work? One major problem, Tatol suggests, is that the artistic practices and expectations inherited from modernism continue to loom large, even though they no longer function in today’s world. In the dynamic modern era, shaped above all else by the progressive convulsions of industrial capitalism, art’s representation of reality underwent continuous upheaval. In their attempts to achieve the transcendent, modernist artists used techniques of reflexivity – that is, of drawing attention to the medium, process, or context of an artwork within the artwork itself, thus inviting the viewer to consider the underlying mechanisms of artmaking and engage critically with the work – to convey modernity’s radical break with the past, and the essential newness of the present. The artist became the creator of a “new lightning bolt of an idea”, and the artwork valued for providing a “shock of the new”. But the underpinnings of this tradition of avant-garde novelty began to disintegrate with the transition to a post-industrial economy, and its altogether different set of social dynamics. And the prospect of novelty and surprise has diminished in the smartphone age, when everyone is inundated with an endless profusion of images. Furthermore, Tatol explains, the “conventions of signifying newness in art” have become so well-worn that purportedly subversive gestures have themselves become tired postures. Artists know that the “power of the new” is fading, a relic of a bygone modern age, but they are struggling to figure out how to replace it, and the rich legacy of the avant-garde continues to tempt many into the trap of producing “contrived novelties” which do not challenge viewers’ expectations.
II
To pursue the questions Tatol’s analysis poses – why are artists struggling to produce timely, relevant work? why has the attainment of cool become an end in itself? – I would like to return to the initial thread of ‘art-cool reflexivity’. For if this tendency has value as an avenue for artistic exploration, it would come from its representation of the changing conditions in which art and artistic identity are fabricated.
In December, I saw a revival of Matthew Gasda’s 2022 play Dimes Square, and while thinking about it after, it struck me that the play works in this mode of art-cool reflexivity: it takes as its subject the ambitions and anxieties of writers, artists, and filmmakers moving in a contemporary downtown scene, and offers curious audiences an insider’s view of bohemian free-spiritedness and debauchery. That interested me, for Tatol’s concept then seemed to name not a parochial art-world trend but a broader cultural tendency. And Gasda seemed engaged in this mode in a productive manner, employing his gift for fostering a multitude of memorable, sharply-drawn characters to represent a milieu saturated with morbid symptoms of the present. How then does his ‘reflexive’ play render art and life in our digital-metropolitan world?
Dimes Square consists of a series of late-night interactions in a Chinatown apartment. The apartment belongs to Stefan, a rich, connected writer who has attracted a social circle by virtue of his strategically applied charm, vague promises of professional opportunities, and abundant supply of cocaine. Among the scenesters passing through are Olivia, Stefan’s girl-about-town fashionista cousin; Ashley, a shy young drama student at Tisch dating Stefan; Nate, a recently-cancelled indie musician; Iris, an eating-disordered, polyamorous poet; Klay, an anxious aspiring fiction writer; Terry, a neurotic filmmaker striving for the profound; Bora, a cinematographer who worked on Terry’s latest film; and Rosie, a vague ‘artist’ whose true talent lies in publicity. In the play’s second half, these younger aspirants are joined by two established literati: Dave, a shit-talking novelist embodying a Gen X don’t-give-a-fuck sensibility, and Chris, the eccentric, recently-divorced editor who discovered Dave. The interest of the play consists in the way conversations unfolding within the pressure cooker of this scene build to tense philosophical confrontations and anxious, self-doubting confessions.
For a play about a ‘scene’, Dimes Square is marked by an oddly porous sense of place. While the action is situated in Stefan’s apartment, the dialogue refers continuously to events and interactions occurring elsewhere: in buzzy neighborhood locales like Clandestino, Kiki’s, and 169 Bar, and on digital platforms from Twitter and Instagram to dating apps and text messages. Such ‘distributed’ social awareness is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. The New York scenes of the past were concentrated in legendary places like Max’s Kansas City and Paradise Garage, whose four walls sharply demarcated inside from outside, providing not only a stage for performances and installations, but a sense of belonging borne out of collective presence and common difference from the mainstream. But here we are in an apartment through which people come and go, merely one node in a broader network of places and non-places, never quite at the center of anything. This scene is no scene in a theatrical sense, bound by particularities of place and time, but something abstract and diffuse, a web or cloud of social relations, in which one can never be fully present. It is the experience of what I will call a ‘total social environment’: a fusion of a bustling plot of urban real estate and publicity-generating social media, in which feedback loops of real and virtual compound to generate the happening place-feeling of ‘Dimes Square’.
The abstractness and diffuseness of this ‘total social environment’ has a distinct influence on the interpersonal dynamics of the Dimes Square world. The experience of scene-as-idea, of scene-as-decentralized-network, is an anxious, tenuous one. On stage there is a palpable sense of insecurity, of doubts about one’s social standing and the reality of one’s artistic ambitions, and such uncertainty conditions impulsive behavior and a suspicious, hostile relation to others. Gasda’s characters vacillate between two extremes: on the one hand, a manipulative, performative tendency, a willful attempt to control the social realm and elevate one’s position in it, often ruthlessly at the expense of others; and on the other hand, a kind of paralysis of the will, and feelings of dissociation from one’s actions, of having acted without knowing why, propelled by some strange motive force. In more intimate conversations, many characters have moments of honesty and recognition, acknowledging their doubts and artifices. But this reflective side dissipates in the heat of the scene, when backbiting gossip commences as soon as someone leaves the room, and schemes and posturings are employed for social and sexual advantage. Despite the grim reality of the scene – as Rosie tells Ashley, “It’s a bunch of social climbers railing coke at 4am shitting on their so-called friends” – it manages to persist, for social existence as a ‘cool artist’ promises liberation from the same problems of identity-uncertainty and status-insecurity which drive the scene’s antisocial tendencies in the first place.
While there are many artists in this scene, their art is rarely reacted to or described directly. The aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of an artwork are subordinate to its position within this ‘total social environment’. We learn little about Terry’s film The Work of Fire beyond its general air of ambition and seriousness, but we do learn that it is now playing at Metrograph, after having played at BAM Cinemafest, and Olivia mentions having been at the Q&A, while Iris asks him how he feels about all the attention he’s getting. Klay tells Nate he’s heard a song of his recently, but he can’t remember the name or much about it, mainly that he heard it at ‘Clando’. Iris gives Stefan the unsatisfying judgment of “fun” about his novel, but she insists that her opinion shouldn’t matter because Netflix bought its film rights. Rosie invites people to her opening, but we don’t know what kind of art she does, only that the opening is in Bushwick. This dynamic only changes in the presence of Dave and Chris, products of a different era, who have the capacity to engage in substantive literary discourse and bring that out in their younger compatriots. Dave offers sharp-edged critiques of Stefan’s novel and Klay’s story, and Chris gives insight into Dave’s novel, and they both drive intense discussions about what makes great writing and great writers. The contrast provided by the established Gen X-ers highlights the primacy for the young initiates of the network and publicity. Rather than existing as autonomous, beautiful, meaning-bearing objects, art is subsumed within the anxious impulse of ‘social scanning’ – of monitoring what’s happening, what’s trending, who’s important, in order to sharpen the contours of one’s picture of the complex, protean social world, and position oneself advantageously.
The characters described as ‘cool’ in Dimes Square are not artists but networkers, super-sociables whose effortless possession of important contacts endows them with charisma. Stefan, with his family connections to Hollywood and the literary world, is the foremost such character, and he exploits his status to his advantage. He offers the possibility of jobs on his Netflix show – for Klay to be a writer, Terry to direct an episode, Ashley to act – and while they all have their suspicions about his seriousness, his real ability to offer advancement keeps them in his orbit. The “ubiquitous” Olivia intimidates with her fashion-world gossip, blasé indifference to her cousin’s novel (a banality for someone from a family of writers), and skip-the-line treatment at Kiki’s. After Iris reads a poem, Olivia thrills her not by complimenting the poem itself but by offering to connect her with a friend who organizes a poetry reading at a “semi-secret club”. Ashley tells Rosie about a woman she met at a dinner at Lucien who was “holding court”: “She just seemed to know everybody and something about everybody and have all the connects with all these big name brands.” But these networkers are ultimately regarded as empty. “They don’t make anything, they don’t feel anything,” Ashley says, “they’re just a chain of references ... they’re actually nothing.” Stefan offers a grim assessment of his cousin: “Olivia’s really not that cool, just vacant.” And Bora suggests that Stefan is empty, frustrated that his novel hasn’t brought him the respect he craves, and envious of anyone with principles and integrity. The charismatic authority of the networkers consists in the impression of their interconnected extensiveness, their simultaneous omnipresence and insiderdom, but because this comes at the expense of interiority, passion, and conviction, their ‘cool’ is an illusion dispelled upon closer inspection.
For all the uninhibited behavior in this scene – the late nights, the casual cruelties, the nonstop cocaine use – sex exists in strangely inhibited forms. Onstage, potentially sexual situations are complicated by social performance, by wide gaps between outward display and inner being. Klay makes a move on Rosie after the two flirt on Stefan’s roof, but Rosie pulls away, admitting her amorous attentions were “just me on auto-pilot” and shouldn’t be taken seriously. There is a sexual undercurrent to Ashley and Rosie’s encounter – they had recently matched on Hinge, and discuss their mutual interest in sleeping with women – but no move is made, with Ashley maintaining her naive front (“I’m a baby”) and Rosie admitting she’s all talk: “I’m not sure that I’m actually secure enough to embrace eroticism as fully as I pretend to.” Even within couples, there is the anxious sense that one’s partner is withholding something, as when Nate airs his frustration at Iris for “choosing to be with me without really being with me”. The audience never witnesses chemistry or erotic charge between characters, and when sexual encounters are recounted on stage, they are typically told as awkward misfires inspiring ambivalence or regret. Klay describes a “letdown” date with a woman he met on Twitter, who had been an enthusiastic sexter but turned out to be a “total pillow princess” in person. After Bora has sex with Stefan on his roof, she immediately expresses remorse (“I hate that I gave in to you”) and frustration (“I’m an idiot! I’m so stupid!”). And when a jealous Terry tries to seduce Ashley as revenge, he starts to cry shortly into his clumsy advances. Dimes Square depicts a sexually stilted world, devoid of both erotic intensity and tender intimacy, in which eros is diffused into a series of half-hearted flirtations, perfunctory consummations, and image-driven status games.
III
A defining characteristic of 2020s New York culture is that the performance of being an artist has taken precedence over the production of art. The ingenuity of contemporary artists, their capacity for imagination, mystery, and style, is channeled into the creation of appearances, vibes, and happenings, of suggested bohemian worlds, rather than the fabrication of free-standing works of visual, literary, or musical art. What the artist working in the mode of ‘art-cool reflexivity’ can do is register and dramatize this strange condition, striving to express the subtle changes in the situation of artists which make ‘New York cool’ an object of desire rather than a vehicle for expression. One particularly salient element of Gasda’s play is its depiction of artists motivated less by the pleasures of craft or the desire for self-expression than anxious drives for attention, recognition, and status. Underlying the current crisis in artmaking, in other words, is a crisis at the level of identity, a pulsating sense of insecurity and consequent need for validation. Such insecurity, I will argue, is the product of the transformation of experience by digital technology – the experience of what I am calling the ‘networked individual’.
The networked individual emerges out of the transition from Fordist industrial mid-century to financialized neoliberalism. Its birth is induced by economic developments beginning in the 1980s that transform the world of work. The growth of international competition in manufacturing, and the empowerment of a new class of investors and financiers, impose a severe market discipline that undermines existing occupational structures – the professional, the union laborer, the organization-man – and cultivates a new working type: the freelancer-entrepreneur. This figure enjoys the privileges of freedom and flexibility, but bears the burden of performing all the varied responsibilities of a personal corporation. He enjoys greater freedom to chart his own course, but must navigate the changing tides of fortune as the crew-less captain of his own tiny vessel. In contrast to the passive, defensive bureaucrat, who defers to codified rules and procedures, and strives to evade blame and responsibility, the freelancer-entrepreneur must constantly be proactive, developing new relationships and practices, and adapting to new situations. Such fluid independent operation is facilitated by the development of digital technology. By cheapening and miniaturizing the means of audiovisual broadcasting, and opening new channels for electronic signals transmission, the digital offers the atomized individual a new existence as media simulacrum, visible to a wider web of potential clients, colleagues, friends, and lovers than could be found within a single company or social circle.
However much it facilitates a labor regime of independent contractors, the digital does not cultivate the strong individual personality. Instead, it imposes an abstract, televisual mode of human relations which intensifies the disciplinary power of the social. Social interaction typically takes place within some concrete context – the party, the workplace, the private correspondence – marked by site-specific rules of engagement, the reciprocal exchange of dialogue, and the felt presence of the other. But the digital disrupts such situated conversational interplay: it severs the particular utterance or gesture from its interactive context and broadcasts it as a free-standing transmission to an array of networked screens. The direct address to a responsive interlocutor, or the playful flirtation with an attractive prospect, is replaced by the self-telecast to an invisible general audience. With this screen-mediated separation of speaker from listener, and poser from gazer, flowing interactions decompose into series of discrete gestures, generating novel demands for social actors. Individuals must become sophisticated producers of momentary impressions, cultivating refined appearances and provocative affects. And because these impressions are steered by algorithms and received by masses of strangers, the individual must also play the sociologist, assembling, by means of discourse-following, trend-spotting, and structural analysis, the broader context in which they obtain significance. What emerges is the strange condition of being both highly socialized and starkly atomized, of having extensive contact with the lifestyles and judgments of others while spending more time alone with a screen. Connected everywhere but belonging nowhere, and receiving only the vaguest and lowest-intensity of feedback from others – the like, the repost, the fire-emoji comment – the networked individual is beset by anxiety and status-insecurity. Propelled by a desire for recognition and inclusion, she plunges ever-deeper into the digital social immersion, her behavior becoming increasingly mimetic, conformist, and approval-seeking, responsive to rapidly-evolving norms of expression dictated by the screen.
As a means of data analysis and instant global communication, the digital is a tool of ‘neoliberalism’, facilitating the restoration of a market-based order after the era of Fordist social democracy. But as a mechanism of socialization, the digital disrupts this liberal order, inculcating a subjectivity altogether different from the classical liberal type. This rupture follows from the peculiarity of the digital in the history of capitalism: that ‘consumer-facing’ tech firms typically traffic not in commodities bought and sold, but in free-to-use platforms for virtual interaction. They produce neither coveted material objects nor leisure-time amusements, but pixelated interfaces through which social life, commerce, and civil discourse are coordinated and experienced. And the growth of the digital depends not on industrial efficiency or iconic branding, but on inducing the inclination to mediate ever-greater portions of one’s experience through these interfaces. This can occur through the development of digital infrastructure, from the proliferation of networked screens to the continued growth of software applications, and through the employment of sophisticated techniques of dopamine hacking and algorithmic engagement. But more profoundly, such inducement comes also through the socialization effects of digital visibility. As users respond to demands for attention-seeking self-representation and internalize the all-seeing eye of digital surveillance, they become acclimated to particular forms of social experience – of the performer, the social surveyor, the angry mob, the object of desire. The person created through such experience possesses little of the liberal subject’s sense of identity, capacity for self-reflection, or willingness to break norms in pursuit of her own goals. He is a new being, shaped by continuous social integration and feedback, albeit of an abstract, virtual, distant kind.
Marx, in the context of industrial capitalism, describes the alienation of the worker from their labor – that is, from the processes by which they work and the products of their work. This separation is not incidental but a foundation of the system: it facilitates the efficient production of abundant streams of commodities, flowing above and beyond the workers who made them, which are channeled through systems of commercial distribution, and presented using the desire-directing mechanisms of advertising. Social cohesion in this world of alienated labor is achieved through the pleasures, conveniences, and fantasies afforded by consumerism. There is an analogous alienation which structures our digital world: that of the individual from their ‘private life’ – that is, from the domestic sphere of autonomy and intimacy, beyond the inquiring eyes of the social. This separation is essential to the production of networked society: it elicits abundant streams of digital representations, flowing above and beyond the individuals who produce them, which are channeled through networked distribution platforms, and presented using engagement-optimizing algorithms. Social cohesion is achieved through the widespread willingness to compete for attention within this system, to chase the rewards of influence, status, and notoriety. And as the networked individual follows the continuous compulsion to broadcast herself onto digital platforms, ‘identity’ migrates beyond the confines of her body and consciousness, becoming an autonomous composite of externalized images, gestures, thought-fragments, and affiliations, divorced from the lived realities of the self.
The cool as a cultural logic does not easily coexist with digital technology, for it emerges out of a dialectic of privacy and social immersion largely incompatible with digital experience. The cool is the product of neither the isolated individual (that would be sincerity, or outsider art) nor social convention (that would be tradition, or just banal imitation), but of the dynamic movement between these two poles. It is on the one hand outwardly attuned, involving a calculated, intentional performance before an audience, one informed by detailed knowledge of prevailing styles, ideas, and sounds. But it comes on the other hand out of the experience of inwardness – of solitary hours, in one’s studio or at one’s desk, in daydreams and soliloquies and private mirror poses. Cool entails a persona, a meticulously cultivated look and attitude, but such approval-seeking must be tempered by the appearance of self-involved immersion in one’s activity: playing music, making art, even walking down the street. Such attentiveness and responsiveness to the ‘now’, in efforts to belong, distinguish oneself, and create the ‘next’, give the cool its qualities of timeliness and relevance. The digital, however, disrupts this dialectic of self and society by weakening each of these poles, and offering instead an experience suspended hazily between them. The home is colonized by infinite conduits of information and engagement, which shift the mind away from one’s body, thoughts, and immediate environment, and into the happenings and opinions of the outside world. At the same time, social situations are transformed by the presence of pocket-sized networked screens, which act as escape valves for interpersonal energy, directing drive out into cyberspace instead of concentrating it in the crowded rooms constitutive of subcultures. As attention in all contexts becomes diffused across real and virtual spaces, the experience of ‘presence’ becomes increasingly rare, and the faculties for both private imagination and responsive social performance steadily atrophy. With these developments comes the death of the cool.