In the past, Entertainment was used to support a meaningful event, such as a ceremony or ritual. It has been associated in recent years with Entertainment or diversion. This is consistent with the French notion divertissement.
Until recently, Entertainment was a background noise in our lives. Entertainment is now a major part of our lives. We live in a “sensurround” of billions of bits – audiovisual, graphic, factual or fictional – distributed through algorithmically-generated social media formats and played on devices of ever-decreasing sizes.
The rapacious monetization of human activity drives this transformation. Entertainment makes money. The process has emptied human activity of most of its meaning that is not financial. We see the absence of community in sport, arts, and politics, as well as the lack of genuine emotion, and the dominance of false news.
Enjoy the Sport
Cricket is a good example. I used to enjoy watching cricket. Now I don’t understand it. God knows how players keep up. Greg Baum, a journalist for Fairfax, wrote an article recently in which he pitched the idea of the way the game is played today to a hypothetical young Australian cricketer. It was surreal. It was surreal. Follow the balls as they bounce across different formats. Big Bash. Twenty-Twenty. One-Dayers. Test matches.
The cricket community has a dwindling. Dave Hunt/AAP
Cricket is suffering a crisis of identity because it has forgotten that its greatest attraction is the game itself. A batsman offensively or defensively negotiates the efforts of a bowler of various inclinations – spin, off and leg – and speeds – fast, medium and slow. It’s a very simple contest of strength, skill and hand-to-eye coordination.
But over the last decade, all manner of gimmickry and novelty has been rolled out to exploit income streams across multiple platforms. Cricket is no longer a game, to be enjoyed live, but a mediated entertainment played in near-empty arenas around the world. The crack of leather on willow barely resonates in the absence of a real community.
Nor is cricket the only sport to lose itself.
Australia’s national football game, AFL, declared 2015 the Year of The Fan in an effort to tackle falling crowd numbers and flailing interest. The previous administration had tried almost everything to increase profit margins – from the insinuation of gambling into the nooks and crannies of the spectator experience to an obsession with changing the rules of the game and tinkering with the fixture to make it more “fan-friendly”.
That administration clearly had one eye on the wealth creation-culture of NFL, American football, which for the uninitiated, appears to be a game invented as a pretext for the advertising-sponsorship complex that underwrites the American corporate sector. It’s only in a highlights package that a spectator can read the dramaturgy of NFL. Its operating system – the playbook – is utterly obscured by the entertainment paraphernalia attached to it.
In sport, the elements that provide meaning are the actual game, the way it is performed and the relationships and interactions with spectators and the broader community. Sport shares this performative dynamic with the arts.
The arts
In 2010, when funding cuts of almost 20% decimated the Dutch arts sector, some critics in Western Europe were unsurprised. They claimed that a drift away from art towards instrumentalisation and the rubric of Entertainment made such decisions consequential. The argument runs that as the arts gives ground to the imperatives of Entertainment you end up with fast-food culture. McCulture. The drive to be “relevant”, “economically sustainable”, “viable”, “agile” and “innovative” leads to mutton dressing up as lamb.
The drive to be relevant is giving rise to a fast-food culture, where art becomes Entertainment. Wally Gobetz/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
The absolute buy-in of the arts to the market risks the obliteration of meaning from art. Artworks are “cultural products”, “cultural commodities” presented in “blockbusters” and “spectaculars”. The art is in the wrapping, the hype, the arousal factor. Content is peripheral. There is only icing, no cake.
A culture that sees Art as elitist and Entertainment as populist fuels this attitude. But it eviscerates the very real points of difference the arts have – celebrating the human spirit’s capacity to transform the everyday into a profound shared meaning, to transcend adversity, to imagine and create new futures – along with our soul.
It’s enough to feel good. It’s even better if you feel nothing. Art, like the game, is reduced to spectacle.
Politics
However, it is in the political arena where the consequences of Entertainment are most dangerous. As the progressive commentariat attempts to disinter itself after the election of Donald Trump, there is a savage irony in its incapacity to understand the broader context in which its “politics” plays out.
Trump’s victory has as much to do with his populist appeal in a political context as it does with his understanding of the American presidential campaign as “an entertainment”. Since the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy Debate, the presidential campaign has slowly transmogrified from the key to the country’s democratic process to a quadrennial long-form entertainment.
By the time the reality TV show US Election 2016 was launched, the difference between the democratic process and “the entertainment” had become indivisible for many in the US electorate. The democratic process was the Entertainment.
The meaning of an American presidential campaign is no longer about choosing the best candidate but the creation of a narrative that voters can buy into – in Trump’s case, an heroic outsider who overcomes overwhelming odds.
A successful product and producer of the entertainment industry – a reality TV star no less – was always going to be able to convince the US electorate to “vote off” an actual politician.