The barn
Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter/podcast about contemporary culture in China, recently explored the concept of wanghong, which means something like "internet famous" crossed with the current aesthetics of urban "authenticity." It resembles "hipster" in that it is often pejorative and implies a certain amount of contrived effort to "naturally" attract attention or encapsulate an on-trend lifestyle. But it also points to places that have been put on the map or have been palpably reshaped by social media — "how certain sites in the city ... gradually took on new significance as the background to a thousand selfies and short videos." These sites become at once very specific and recognizable, but also extremely amenable to being taken out of context and implanted in someone's social media feed as an indicator of status or a willingness to participate in a trend.
In other words, these places become like art objects that can be exhibited without any further context to justify their exhibition than their recognizability, or the visual interest they seem to provide in and of themselves (which may just be a sublimation of their popularity). To experience them is to document them; if they go undocumented, they weren't really experienced at all. As one of the Chaoyang Trap contributors points out, this is like Don DeLillo's riff in White Noise on "the Most Photographed Barn in America." It's not really an empirical claim but a spiritual one — a truth that you attest to by ritually photographing it yourself. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," one of DeLillo's characters says while visiting the barn. That seems to be the essence of wanghong. One can participate in fame without the risks and drawbacks, while confirming that one shares a widely held sense of what is significant without committing to specifying exactly what that is.
In a 1988 paper called "The Museum as a Way of Seeing," art historian Svetlana Alpers described what she called the museum effect: the visual interest created by placing something in a museum. In some senses this now applies to museumgoers themselves, who can stage themselves in selfies as visually interesting objects in the museum alongside all the other interesting, decontextualized objects. Instead of taking pictures of taking pictures, one is taking pictures of oneself as a particular sort of picture taker.
But wanghong points to how the museum is no longer needed for the museum effect, no longer necessary to create the ritualized experience of focused visual contemplation. One can point the phone at things instead, conjuring up the network behind the lens to impute a potential significance to whatever it is you are looking at. One organizes experiences under implied hashtags, received genres of established perspectives. One might take that to mean that museums and their supposed entombment of elite culture has finally been superseded. But it might mean that try as we might, we can never escape the feeling that we are in a museum no matter where we are.