Online platforms collapse the institutional framing that once distinguished cultural forms from capital flows.
Evidence
The art historian Boris Groys understands this flatness as a function of the platform (hence medium) convergence of formerly discrete modes like art, literature, and theater. As he writes, “On the Internet art and literature do not get a fixed, institutional framing, as they did in the analogue-dominated world. Here the factory, there the theatre; here the stock market, there the museum. On the Internet, art and literature operate in the same space as military planning, tourist business, capital flows, and so on; Google shows, among other things, that there are no walls in the space of the Internet.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 436
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Names the aesthetic feature of ‘flatness’ as a consequence of platform convergence — a core term for the reader’s project of enumerating immediacy’s features.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s defense of mediation as politically necessary — Groys describes precisely the loss of mediating institutions the reader wants to defend.
Related
- Digital platforms erase the institutional walls separating art from commerce. (similarity 0.92)
- The boundedness of artforms is necessary to theorize social immediacies (similarity 0.80)
- Digital immediacy emerged from an obfuscated mediation, not a resolved crisis (similarity 0.79)
- Compressed capitalist circulation makes culture value disintermediation as a style. (similarity 0.79)
- Immediacy reduces discourse to self-evident presence while mediation demands deliberate construction (similarity 0.78)
- Strikes across publishing and culture build a base for renewed representation (similarity 0.78)