Spectacle Machine

on the rise of "interactive pop-up museums"

Through a series of events I have difficulty tracing, I was offered a free ticket to visit the Color Factory, a self-described “interactive art museum located on the lower level of Willis Tower.” (Tickets on its website are currently going for $38-$46.) The Color Factory seems to be one example in a new family of paid experiences that are often marketed as interactive pop-up museums. First appearing in the mid-2010s, these spaces have multiplied like mushrooms to occupy several American cities, bearing names such as WNDR Museum, Happy Place, Candytopia, and the Memory Museum. One in Austin is called the FOMO Factory.

It seemed laughable to call the Color Factory an art museum; there were built-in cameras that would photograph visitors from CCTV-like angles on demand. A QR code ensures that these photos of you make their way to your email, watermarked with the Color Factory imprimatur. The exhibits were full of sweets, all wrapped in single-use plastic. The whole thing was fully one-way, and I was warned multiple times that I could not turn around even if I wished to go back. 

In terms of the art that was advertised, there were several installations from local Chicago artists, which had me feeling heartened, then disappointed. These installations were high on interactivity and thin on substance. One was a collection of ropes hung from the ceiling while classical music played. There was one “exhibit” which involved pairing up with someone on the other side of a glass wall, communicating through a telephone; it looked like the sick child of a preschool classroom and a visitation room in a county jail.

All in all, the art was instantly apprehended, easily digested, inoffensive, and completely apolitical. The better moments seemed to be miniscule corporate imitations of Christo and Jean-Claude’s huge monochromatic installations. I had some dim awareness going in that the entire enterprise wasn’t more than a background for an Instagram post, but witnessing it gave me an eerie numb feeling. I exited through a gift shop.

But, whatever, is it really that deep? Isn’t more art always better? Isn’t it preferable to read Rupi Kaur than no poetry at all? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone; I too took my selfies. But there was something about this space, and its cousins all over the country, that continues to trouble me. Are these pop-ups a passing trend, or do they anticipate the future of art in public life? And what does the high demand for them say about our culture?

The obvious comparisons here are to Foucault’s panopticon, the security state, the ever-present gaze of authority that keeps the subjects dominated. But the subjects don’t seem dominated if they approach the camera willingly. Maybe the difference between this and Foucault’s panopticon is that there is the illusion of control, that one poses for the ever-present gaze instead of shying from it. This, to me, is emblematic of a particularly American phenomenon, enabled (if not caused) by Instagram’s unblinking eye.

Social media is a unique means of communication because it is at once internal and external; a message can be conveyed to a limitless number of people without necessitating a single real-life interaction with another person. We have a twin life that takes place on the internet, one that must be carefully tended like a particularly diverse and volatile garden. This life needs constant enhancement and novelty: we must be forever searching for new content to infuse in our feeds. But we apparently choose to post, again and again, reaffirming this shadow life even as we neglect reality.

Thinking about social media, I find Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s work particularly prescient. In his 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, he lays down over two hundred theses concerning the place symbolic representation occupies in modern social life. Debord's fourth thesis is: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” The American media biosphere has trained us to live the spectacle: to not just embrace being in a panopticon but to relish it; to be willing to pay extravagantly to live lives mediated by images. 

I am deeply curious about how historians will return to this moment of deliberate exposure, the intentional melding of public and private selves. I wonder which will last longer, the memories of my life or the internet record of it.

---