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Against scenes
There is no center.
Main Image: Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty (2013)
Daisy Alioto on getting off your sphere.
Last year, or maybe longer ago than last year (who cares), someone explained Jeff Koons’ new moon landing project to me. That person is probably reading this, and I do not place any of the blame on them for my misunderstanding of the work. Koons plans to put small, spherical sculptures on the moon and give the buyers–who will never live with their purchase–another mini sphere with a gemstone embedded in the coordinates where their work is supposed to land. I mistakenly thought he was leaving the sculptures on earth and sending up diamonds.
The Koons idea interested me, because at the time I was thinking about cultural “scenes” as spherical abstractions. Specifically, I was thinking about how exhausting it is to spend time with people who not only believe in the center of a scene, but are constantly clamoring over one another toward it.
Natasha Stagg captures the idea of a scene perfectly in the essay ‘Out of State,’ part of her book Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019:
Everyone in magazines and in advertising is obsessed with Studio 54. Recreating the feeling of the party, the eclecticism of the guests, the gossip about it on Page Six, the emptiness of an Andy Warhol superstar…But the people who were really there can’t recreate it. There are parties going on all over Brooklyn that are being mined for their diversity and youth instead.
The frisson of being involved in a scene, at least for those who believe themselves to be closer to the outside than the center, is not so much that the center cannot hold–but that it doesn’t exist. Or, if it does exist, it will never stay still long enough for us to catch it.
But what do I mean by a scene? I don’t mean people just hanging out, although we should do more of that. A scene starts out as a subculture interested in cultural production and becomes a scene when social access to the performance of cultural production becomes more important than production itself. There is a scene in every city from Toledo to Tangier and every college town in between. Maybe you have been a part of one or wanted to be.
Ok, but I will say something nice about scenes: I like that they are ancient. In the third century BC, Ptolemy I used the preexisting deity, Serapis, as the basis for a new cult that would attract more influence to Alexandria and unite the mixed population of Greeks and Egyptians. He combined the features of a bunch of different gods, before realizing that in optimizing for importance, he had made Serapis too foreboding to be at the center of this new scene. This is explained in The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Howard Reid and Justin Pollard:
To compensate for the negative image that Serapis’s associations with death created in Greek minds, he was also cast for them as a Dionysian character. He was an ebullient, festive god, filled with life and the love of life, who indulged in banquets and festivals: a Bacchic figure who, in the knowledge that a Greek afterlife was much less fun than an Egyptian one, encouraged his followers to seize the day and enjoy this life to the full. In short, he was all things to all men and women.
Who doesn’t love a party god? If you’re on TikTok, maybe you’ve seen the work of Jake Shane aka optopusslover8, who acts out scenes from history as suggested by his followers. The Last Supper becomes a spat over splitting the bill, and Shane–the friend collecting the credit cards–becomes increasingly frustrated.
We see the Boston Tea Party through the eyes of the friend that overslept: “Why would they dump all the tea in there? I don’t understand…” Shane says groggily to an imaginary person on FaceTime. He’s the bitchy door person guarding Noah’s Ark asking, “Name?” What Shane’s comedy presupposes is that the Boston Tea Party, The Last Supper and Noah’s Ark were all a scene. And his character is just playing it straight in the c*ntiest version of history.
Writers are uniquely susceptible to scenes when we should be skeptical of them. Being tied to one scene or publication for too long preserves your writing in amber. The scene may be a fake sphere, but time is a real one we are traveling along, and it’s necessary to shake yourself out of your inertia every once in a while. It’s good to remember that in art there is no certainty and uncertainty, there is only desperation followed by inevitability. Which is why you should never write about people whose approval you crave.
Recently, I got into one of those petty marital quarrels in which you get bored and start trying on new beliefs mid-conversation just to see if anything sticks. My husband, who has never cared about cool, asked me how I would know what is “cool” if we moved to a coastal lobstering town in, let’s call it Maine. “I’ll know,” I said. It’s about having spies everywhere.
You can really trace the zeitgeist in calls for freelance magazine pitches and in the aughts the hot thing was reporting on offline subcultures. Then it was reporting on online subcultures, the weirder the better. Now things are changing again. People are realizing there is no exact center of the algorithm, and your sense of what is cool is equally limited by spending all your time on Twitter as it is spending all your time in Silverlake. Any new religion that arises from AI will probably be Serapislike, an assemblage of inputs that confirm all our priors, with death totally sublimated.
Embrace the online/offline dichotomy by cultivating correspondence with people from other sites of cultural production, who can challenge your assumptions and tell you what people are talking about in Tokyo or Puerto Rico. Visit them where they live every once in a while. Just don’t make a scene.