“I have been arguing that during the last century in and as cinema and other media technologies, capital, that is, leveraged exchange with productive labor for the purpose of profit, has undergone a metamorphosis” -Jonathan Beller
Here Beller makes in interesting point about where the future of the entertainment and art industries are going. They’re moving away from simply paying people for their work and moving towards a system that pays per view. There is now a large market for just consuming content and to companies are scrambling to monetize it. For example, YouTube pays content creators by they amount of views that they get on the ads on their videos. The incentive is no longer making something for the sake of art it is now making something in the sake of attention. Attention rules the way the internet makes money and those who keep the most attention make the most money. So the capital that you’re trading for your labor, in terms of how Beller is speaking about it, is attention for content. It makes an interesting dynamic in terms of content being put out into the internet and the true intentions behind them.
“The history of photography reveals a further motivation behind art’s experiments in stopping time: to escape death, to reel the body back from certain deterioration.” –T.J. Demos
This excerpt puts into perspective the human fascination with photography. It allows us to take a moment and take it out of its reality and make it yours. Photography allows us to keep a fleeting single moment and make it las a lifetime. There is something interesting about the connection people have with photography especially in terms interpretation. Interpretation plays a pretty large role in the draw of photography since there are no specific instructions when it comes to photography. It’s you look at the picture and see what you feel when you look at it. I think photography is mostly about snatching a moment in time and presenting it in a way in which others will feel what you felt in that exact moment. You experience someone else’s perspective in a single moment in time and that you were never a part of, but here you are witnessing it. The feeling of seeing someone else’s is so foreign that photography will always have people appreciating it.