In the past, entertainment was a vehicle for meaningful activity, such as a ritual or a ceremony. More recently, it has been associated with pleasure or distraction in accordance with the French concept of divertissement.
Earlier, the entertainment buzzed and caused the background noise of our lives. Nowadays it has come to the fore. We live in a "sensurround", surrounded by billions of information - audio, video, graphics, facts, fiction - distributed on algorithmically generated social media formats, played on devices of ever smaller size, via traditional platforms such as radio, television be laid and cinema.
This transformation has been driven by a rapid monetization of human activity: entertainment makes money. But the process has meant that human activity has been freed of much of its non-financial importance. In sports, art, and politics, we see the physical absence of community, human expressions without real emotion, and the rise of fake news about the truth.e
Reforbes, in touch with tomorrow
Sports
Take cricket, for example. I used to like cricket. But now I can not follow that at all. God knows how the players keep up. Fairfax journalist Greg Baum recently wrote an article introducing an imaginary emerging Australian cricketer to how the game is being played. It was surreal. Pink balls, less pink balls, white balls, red balls. Follow the bouncing balls through a variety of formats. Big bash. Twenty twenty. One day. Test games.
Cricket suffers from an identity crisis because it has forgotten that the biggest attraction is the game itself. A batsman offensively or defensively negotiates the efforts of a bowler with various inclinations - spin, off and leg - and speeds - fast, medium and slow. It is a very simple contest between strength, skill and hand-to-eye coordination.
However, in the past decade, all sorts of gimmicks and novelties have been introduced to take advantage of income streams across multiple platforms. Cricket is no longer a live game you can enjoy, but a mediated conversation played in virtually empty arenas around the world. The crack of the leather in the pasture hardly resonates in the absence of a real community.
Cricket is not the only sport that loses itself.
Australia's national football game AFL has declared 2015 the Year of the Fans, to counteract the decline in attendance and dizzying interest. The previous administration had tried almost everything to increase its profit margins - from the hint of gambling in the angles and angles of the viewer's experience to the obsession of changing the rules of the game and tinkering with the fixture to make it "fan friendly" , ,
This government clearly had an eye on the culture of wealth creation in the NFL, American football, which seems to be a game for the uninitiated, invented as a pretext for the promotional sponsorship complex that characterizes the US corporate sector. Only in a highlight package can a viewer read the dramaturgy of the NFL. His operating system - the Playbook - is completely obscured by the associated entertainment utensils.
In sport, the elements that give meaning, the actual game, the way it is performed, and the relationships and interactions with the viewers and the wider community. Sport shares this performative dynamic with art.
The arts
In 2010, when the Dutch art sector was decimated by funding cuts of nearly 20%, some Western European critics were not surprised. They claimed that a move away from art towards instrumentalization and entertainment led to such decisions. The argument is that art gives ground to the needs of entertainment, and in the end, one has fast-food culture. McCulture. The desire to be "relevant", "economically sustainable", "viable", "agile" and "innovative" results in lamb mutton dressing up.
The absolute buy-in of the art in the market carries the danger that the meaning of the art is destroyed. Works of art are "cultural products", "cultural goods", which are presented in "blockbusters" and "spectacles". The art lies in the packaging, the hype, the excitation factor. Content is peripheral. There is only frosting, no cake.
A culture that sees art as elite and entertainment as populism drives that attitude. But it defies the real differences that the arts have - they celebrate the ability of the human mind to transform everyday life into a profound common meaning, to overcome adversity, to conceive and create new futures - along with our soul.
It's enough to feel good. It is even better if you do not feel anything. Art is like the game reduced to spectacle.
Politics
In politics, however, the consequences of entertainment are the most dangerous. As the progressive commentary tries to disband after the election of Donald Trump, there is a wild irony in his inability to understand the broader context in which his "politics" takes place.
Trump's victory has as much to do with his populist appeal in a political context as with his understanding of the US presidential campaign as "entertainment." Since the Nixon-Kennedy debate of 1960, the presidential campaign has slowly developed from the key to the country's democratic process into four-year long-term entertainment.
By the time the US Election 2016 reality TV show started, the difference between the democratic process and "entertainment" had become indivisible for many in the US electorate. The democratic process was the entertainment.
An American presidential campaign is no longer about picking the best candidate, but about creating a narrative that voters can join - in Trump's case, a heroic outsider who overcomes the overwhelming odds.
A successful product and producer in the entertainment industry - not least a reality TV star - has always been able to convince US voters to vote for an actual politician.
It was an all too subtle distinction for the makers of the campaign "show" - the mainstream complex of American political media. They have lost control of the narrative and launched a new long-form entertainment in which American democracy maintains the very real possibility of posing as a "perpetrator and victim" in its own snuff film.
Well, that's entertainment.
The entertainment is no longer a spectacle that can only be enjoyed on a grand scale. It is an integral part of our daily lives. It is one way to live. More than that, it's a way of seeing the world. The question is: is this the world we want to see?
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