What is internet criticism?

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Daisy Alioto is the CEO of Dirt Media. This piece was originally published on October 12th, 2021.

Anosmia. This is what it is called to lose your sense of smell, as happened to me recently. Scents became the suggestion of scents. It reminded me of being a teenager again and the chlorine that burned through my nostrils after a long day lifeguarding and stayed with me on the way home and the walk up my parents’ driveway, where I could hear the chirps from the woods and vernal pools but couldn’t smell the wet night air. 

While I was sick, I read about a company that has created “perfume for the metaverse,” a perfume that only exists in the digital realm. And yet, it appeals to me, because I like to describe things that do not exist. Ekphrasis and anosmia are strange bedfellows, but in this case perfectly suited. I tried not to think what would happen if I could never smell again and avoided checking if the perfume I ordered was out for delivery. Instead, I listened to a playlist created for my perfume by the company that sells it. I was thinking about how Schrödinger's Cat would look the same to a blind woman whether the box was open or not. But if there was violin music coming from the box she might feel moved to describe a cat that doesn’t exist. 

In middle school I was voted “most likely to invent a new style of art.” I am still waiting to invent it. But in the meantime, I like to think this small superlative—long forgotten by everyone else in my 8th grade class—has given me a gentler view of art that is emerging, unusual, ugly, or just plain weird.

In coping with the rise of NFT art, others have found it useful to look to historical precedent for interpretation: Duchamp, Yves Klein, June Paik. Then there is the list of unsurprising entrants into the contemporary NFT game: Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, the estate of the late Andy Warhol. All of this is useful to explain what exactly is going on. For me? I would rather explain it all through the lens of 2013, the summer I spent in DC. A summer full of things that weren’t as they seemed, that set me on the path to being an internet critic (I think). But before I tell that story I need to back up and ask: what is internet criticism now? 

In 2019, I wrote a piece for Playboy about the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, the study of the way our brains process Art. Periodically, I get notifications from Academia dot edu about adjacent topics. Rarely do I open these emails, but in early August the subject line "What Are Aesthetic Emotions?” compelled me into an article of the same name published in the Psychological Review. And because I like aesthetics and I like emotions, I began to skim through. 

In order to offer their theoretical framework for aesthetic emotions, the authors of the paper must distinguish these aesthetic emotions from ordinary emotions, which often go by the same names.

“Like all aesthetic emotions that are linguistically derived from ordinary emotion terms (further examples being suspense, surprise, interest, boredom), being moved can be an ‘everyday’ emotion, an art-elicited emotion in the broader sense, and, to the extent that it directly predicts aesthetic appreciation, an aesthetic emotion in the narrower sense.”

In other words, these non-aesthetic (ordinary) emotions like “boredom” that happen to share the same name with aesthetic emotions — a feeling of boredom when viewing a work of art — can still correlate with the aesthetic one. “The aesthetically evaluative dimension comes not as an alternative to, or instead of, the non-aesthetic meaning of that emotion term, but on top of it.”

And so I thought, what if the emotions that determine how we feel on the internet are distinct from the emotions of the same name that govern our offline lives? And what if those emotions on the internet are heightened by the ordinary emotions we are feeling? If that is the case, doesn’t internet criticism in a sense have to speak to both levels of emotion? Just like being bored in an art museum is not the fault of the Whistler in a room you haven’t yet entered, being sad online is not necessarily the result of the stream of content flowing past. There is a duality to the emotions felt online and those felt off. However, there is a third level: the integrative one, combining the two. The level at which one can experience a natural disaster and read the thoughts of other people experiencing it in real time. Or the gaming of algorithms to curate a “vibe” that heightens the mood one is already cultivating. Internet criticism is increasingly about the integrative. 

In order to designate what exists and what does not we are forced to put things into the categories of real and unreal. “The Internet is not real life” was once a far more popular refrain before a quarantine that required business and social lives to move online. Still, there is semantically an online and an off. The sun rises and the sun sets, but when it sets, it sets for us and rises for someone else. So in the collective sense there is no “off.” If you tell someone to “touch grass” and they decide to touch grass in the metaverse, well what are you going to do about it? 

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• A new EP from Isaiah Rashad (Spotify)

• “We have lost our symbolic common ground. TV has become a place haunted by the supernatural, cringeworthy and surreally violent.” Grace Byron on Anna Kornbluh. (LARB)

• Jocelyn Silver on the Margiela show taking the internet by storm (Vogue)

• Paula Mejía on Mary Weiss, the late lead singer of the Shangri-Las (The Atlantic)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Molly Ringwald loves Phoebe Philo (Blackbird Spyplane)

• Broadway sensation Chita Rivera has died (New York Times)

• Cancel your morning for this Atavist story: The race to find four children who survived a plane crash deep in the Amazon. (Atavist)

• I will read everything about mid-century modern furniture: “The furniture objects became a representation of the marketing and advertising slogans that the originals had inspired.” (The Nation)

• “The top 2 percent of luxury customers drive 40 percent of luxury sales.” Remember this stat, because you’ll be hearing it a lot. (Business of Fashion)

• “It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does.” Amen. (Lithub)