Immediacy

Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy looks at the dominant look and feel of twenty-first-century culture, which prizes speed, flow, transparency and direct expression. She links this taste to the economics of disintermediation, the removal of go-betweens from commerce, and treats it as the same logic as ride-hailing apps, only applied to art. The book gives this style its name and asks what is lost when the contradictions of contemporary capitalism push aesthetics to reject mediation.

The argument is that the appetite for realness fits an economic demand to speed up circulation while production stagnates. Flow may be the favorite buzzword of the age, but rapid circulation wears art down to almost nothing. Meanwhile, political upheaval and social problems call for more mediation, not less. Collective will, stirring ideas and deliberate construction are the way forward, and the prevailing style leaves them aside.

Kornbluh draws on original streaming television, popular literature, trends in the art world and academic theory to explain the current fixation on immersion and the impatience with representation. She also points to alternatives in photography, television, novels and constructive theory that favor distance, impersonality and big ideas.