Why does Australia still surrender to Big Brother? Because it fulfils our need for art-as-endurance
In the decade since its debut, Big Brother has changed its format only a little. What has altered is the temperature in which this fever-dream was conceived. Twelve years ago, Big Brother was a hot, hot hothouse. Now that the commonplace on telly is commonplace, our interest has cooled into a new reverie.
Once it was with real interest but now it is with a sort of compulsive unconcern we see the ordinary unfold at DreamWorld. While I watched Sara-Marie Fedele's "bum dance" with real warmth, there is a cold distance between me and Tahan – doomed in the first week of this newest cycle on Nine to wear nothing but a crocheted bikini.
In 2002, the spectacle of unremarkable people was in itself remarkable. Now, they're just actually unremarkable. So unremarkable. There is no one who would argue that Big Brother is a dynamic and exciting program; least of all its hostess Sonia Kruger whose sunny looks quarrel with all logic. Why is this woman smiling and not hitting herself in the head with a lump of igneous rock that she found in a quarry to try to eclipse the dull, heavy pain of a program in which a woollen bikini is news?
My guess is that Kruger is a great fan of Matthew Barney. I'm quite serious. There has to be a reason that people are still watching Big Brother in numbers sufficient to allow its network broadcast and I say it is our need for art-as-endurance. Goodness knows, it is not the "twist" of a sham marriage or the spectacle of someone forced to sleep temporarily on a floor that accounts for a sustained interest in a group of middling young white people. I'd argue that the conditions that gave us Barney's Cremaster are those that give us our cool interest in this house full of nothing.
If you have never seen The Cremaster Cycle, then what you have missed is an elaborate visual metaphor for sex that is longer than the corridors of the Guggenheim that commissioned this work and every bit as arty. This series of films has no need for linearity and demands only patience of its viewer. Like the Andy Warhol films Sleep or Empire, this work is to be endured and not, at all, enjoyed.
Of course, Warhol's works were avant-garde and the endurance of them was a badge of honour. As the great and unapologetically snobby critic Susan Sontag said of such openly boring works in 1966, "There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration." In other words, only stupid people who don't understand art theory get bored watching Empire. The rest of us can watch eight slo-mo hours of footage of a building and understand the Warholian critique of cinema itself.
Or something. I don't know. I didn't last more than 20 minutes into the repertory screening of Empire and The Cremaster Cycle made me want to exhume Peggy Guggenheim and beat her corpse for setting into motion these motionless, tedious films about nothing. Frustrated in a way that Sontag would abhor, I never had much truck with Barney.
But, it seems, I do with Big Brother and I am hardly alone. I can watch this world in which nothing happens and find it oddly mesmeric.
Like Empire, Big Brother makes no sense. There are few conclusions to be drawn from such an aimless use of time and even the contestants seem lost in logic. In the first week of broadcast, sham husband Drew said to his sham bride, "People are looking at us". This can remind us of nothing so much as Yossarian in Joseph Heller's great novel about the boredom of war, Catch 22. "They're trying to kill me," says the bombardier. In a war, people are going to try to kill you. On reality television, people are going to watch you. Even if you don't deserve it.
When the thing we used to call Web 2.0 was emerging and Andy Warhol's promise that everyone – even the Empire State Building – could have its experience of fame, Big Brother was an instructive show. Here, we saw what happened when mediocrity was elevated and when celebrity was democratised.
Now, we see the offspring of that impossible boredom identified by Sontag. This is boredom without the possibility of frustration and without the imprimatur of art. This is a kind of pop-endurance in which we give up the hope of finding any meaning and surrender instead to a world of bad camera angles and ill-conceived "twists" and people who are not really married who express surprise that someone is watching.
Drew does have a point, though. Someone is watching every night. Comfortable with this hypnosis and certain that there can be no meaning, I give in to Big Brother in a way I cannot to Barney or to Warhol. Reported by guardian.co.uk 14 hours ago.
In the decade since its debut, Big Brother has changed its format only a little. What has altered is the temperature in which this fever-dream was conceived. Twelve years ago, Big Brother was a hot, hot hothouse. Now that the commonplace on telly is commonplace, our interest has cooled into a new reverie.
Once it was with real interest but now it is with a sort of compulsive unconcern we see the ordinary unfold at DreamWorld. While I watched Sara-Marie Fedele's "bum dance" with real warmth, there is a cold distance between me and Tahan – doomed in the first week of this newest cycle on Nine to wear nothing but a crocheted bikini.
In 2002, the spectacle of unremarkable people was in itself remarkable. Now, they're just actually unremarkable. So unremarkable. There is no one who would argue that Big Brother is a dynamic and exciting program; least of all its hostess Sonia Kruger whose sunny looks quarrel with all logic. Why is this woman smiling and not hitting herself in the head with a lump of igneous rock that she found in a quarry to try to eclipse the dull, heavy pain of a program in which a woollen bikini is news?
My guess is that Kruger is a great fan of Matthew Barney. I'm quite serious. There has to be a reason that people are still watching Big Brother in numbers sufficient to allow its network broadcast and I say it is our need for art-as-endurance. Goodness knows, it is not the "twist" of a sham marriage or the spectacle of someone forced to sleep temporarily on a floor that accounts for a sustained interest in a group of middling young white people. I'd argue that the conditions that gave us Barney's Cremaster are those that give us our cool interest in this house full of nothing.
If you have never seen The Cremaster Cycle, then what you have missed is an elaborate visual metaphor for sex that is longer than the corridors of the Guggenheim that commissioned this work and every bit as arty. This series of films has no need for linearity and demands only patience of its viewer. Like the Andy Warhol films Sleep or Empire, this work is to be endured and not, at all, enjoyed.
Of course, Warhol's works were avant-garde and the endurance of them was a badge of honour. As the great and unapologetically snobby critic Susan Sontag said of such openly boring works in 1966, "There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration." In other words, only stupid people who don't understand art theory get bored watching Empire. The rest of us can watch eight slo-mo hours of footage of a building and understand the Warholian critique of cinema itself.
Or something. I don't know. I didn't last more than 20 minutes into the repertory screening of Empire and The Cremaster Cycle made me want to exhume Peggy Guggenheim and beat her corpse for setting into motion these motionless, tedious films about nothing. Frustrated in a way that Sontag would abhor, I never had much truck with Barney.
But, it seems, I do with Big Brother and I am hardly alone. I can watch this world in which nothing happens and find it oddly mesmeric.
Like Empire, Big Brother makes no sense. There are few conclusions to be drawn from such an aimless use of time and even the contestants seem lost in logic. In the first week of broadcast, sham husband Drew said to his sham bride, "People are looking at us". This can remind us of nothing so much as Yossarian in Joseph Heller's great novel about the boredom of war, Catch 22. "They're trying to kill me," says the bombardier. In a war, people are going to try to kill you. On reality television, people are going to watch you. Even if you don't deserve it.
When the thing we used to call Web 2.0 was emerging and Andy Warhol's promise that everyone – even the Empire State Building – could have its experience of fame, Big Brother was an instructive show. Here, we saw what happened when mediocrity was elevated and when celebrity was democratised.
Now, we see the offspring of that impossible boredom identified by Sontag. This is boredom without the possibility of frustration and without the imprimatur of art. This is a kind of pop-endurance in which we give up the hope of finding any meaning and surrender instead to a world of bad camera angles and ill-conceived "twists" and people who are not really married who express surprise that someone is watching.
Drew does have a point, though. Someone is watching every night. Comfortable with this hypnosis and certain that there can be no meaning, I give in to Big Brother in a way I cannot to Barney or to Warhol. Reported by guardian.co.uk 14 hours ago.