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In the opening pages of Ben Lerner’s first novel, “Leaving Atocha Station” the narrator goes to the Prado museum in Madrid and observes a sobbing stranger in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s “Descent from the Cross,” a votive portrait attributed to Paolo da San Leocadio, and “The Garden of Earthly Pleasures” by Hieronymus Bosch. She follows the man until he is gone and follows him into the sunlight. The narrator has long worried that he may not have such a deep experience of art. Most of us have experienced the failure of staying under the influence of a painting as we had hoped. I thought of this snippet while watching the first big ad for Facebook’s rebranding as a metaverse company and Meta, again in a museum. But here the art moves – literally.
The video begins with the four teenagers looking at Henri Rousseau’s “The Fight Between the Tiger and Buffalo” hanging at the Cleveland Museum of Art. When they look at the frame, the tiger’s eyes flicker and the whole painting comes to life and opens into a 3D animated forest. The tiger and the buffalo, the toucans and the monkeys and the mandrels in the trees all start dancing to an old crazy tune; children accompany. Fruit trees grow around the gallery. In the distance, above the rainforest canopy, stands a mysterious hexagonal portal, and beyond it, the towering silhouette of a great tropical city in the misty red hills. This is a scene that suggests Facebook may be returning to the countercultural origins of Silicon Valley: the psychedelic dream of a global community sharing collective hallucinations.
Video keynote published by Meta Art is also featured to explain itself to investors, with a demo where several of Mark Zuckerberg’s colleagues found a piece of augmented reality street art hidden on a wall in SoHo. It was brought to life in 3D animation and moved from Lower Manhattan to virtual reality and transformed into a nightmarish Cthulhu-like blob surrounding their avatar. (Zuckerberg: “This is great!”) For some reason, the company wants us to think about art when we think about its new product. Maybe because they want us to see it as a platform for creative self-expression – or maybe because it just provides a more educational context than fine art video games or working from home.
This blatant stance towards art is both silly and appropriate; silly because it reduces art to a simple gewgaw, convenient because other entrepreneurs have taken this view. The animated Rousseau assumes the popular logic of the game. “Van Gogh immersive experience” where the sullen Dutchman’s images of starry nights and ominous wheat fields are projected onto walls and floors, creating a wrap-around backdrop of spectacle, glamor and selfies. Both assume that viewers can only enjoy works of art when they are in the process of being ruined. When it comes to the Van Gogh experience, the market has them right: There are at least five different competing Van Gogh experiences touring the country right now. The copy exceeded the original. This has remained a consistent theme throughout Facebook’s history, offering a pale simulation of friendship and community in place of the real thing. Meta promises to take us further into the forest of illusions.
Yet the return to the art of dreaming and escaping reality is a seductive proposition. Starting from middle age, Rousseau painted forests in his Paris studio, escaping his own monotonous life as a retired city clerk. He is often said to tell stories of his youthful adventures how his mission trip in Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico inspired his forest paintings; but they were all lies. In reality he played in an infantry group and never once left France.
An important thing to remember about the metastore, neither the forest nor the technology to display it, is that none of this is done.
Rousseau found his true inspiration in his travel books and regular visits to the Jardin des Plantes, which he once described to an art critic: enter a dream.” It was this haunted dreamland that he portrayed in children’s book illustrations of wild animals and bananas growing upside down on trees; and his artist friends admired him. What remained was the infantile originality and naive purity of these depictions.
In Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rousseau and his contemporaries (Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, etc.) were busy inventing bohemian modernity, creating new ways of living and seeing the world. In our century, this visionary role seems to have passed from artists to engineers to Zuckerberg and the like. Who else tries to invent new universes? Who dares spin grand utopian fantasies? Artists no longer exist. Those who try—and routinely fail, are the Promethean founders of Silicon Valley.
Meta’s offering isn’t appealing: It’s somehow both childish and sarcastic. However, a vision of the future conceived by a creative agency for a mega-corporation would always be dire. The problem isn’t that today’s kids can’t appreciate a Rousseau masterpiece, it’s not that their elders, my generation, aren’t sure how to come up with anything comparable to it – we’ve forgotten how to imagine a completely different world.
An important thing to remember about the metastore, neither the forest nor the technology to display it, is that none of this is done. You really can’t go to a museum and do that. It’s just an idea, a whisper in the wind. An ad about nothing. This is Meta. The more I watch the ad and the keynote where Zuckerberg explains his vision in detail, the more it seems like he doesn’t know what he’s producing or selling. That’s bad for a company, but not for artists who thrive on a clear brief. In fact, much of the keynote is a call to thousands of “creators” to help build a functioning metadatabase, and a promise that they will be paid to do so.
Contemporary art is currently dominated by painting and sculpture, traditional materials and ancient construction methods. Meanwhile, companies outside the art world are using digital technology to remake timeless masterpieces as temporary gimmicks, projected attractions and animations. But few artists do what Rousseau and his colleagues do: accepting the realities imposed by new technologies – in their case, photography – and breaking down old ways to create something new. An artist in the spirit of Rousseau can appreciate the potential of this new medium and want to make art for the metaverse and the wider public. Now, instead of recreating relics from the past, as he had done in his time, he would dream up fantastical scenes: landscapes he had never witnessed in his own life, rendered in a way that no one had seen before. As long as one takes the reins from technologists, it seems possible today, perhaps for the first time in this century, to invent an entirely new aesthetic.
Source photos: Screenshots from YouTube
Dean Kissick is a writer and New York editor of Spike Art Magazine. He recently wrote about the Pomodoro technique for the magazine.
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