The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment

Martha Schwendener· Guest0:00

[instrumental music] They just lost this lawsuit, not around content, but around design. Their platforms are designed to be addictive, et cetera. That's very Flusserian, you know, again, that design is deceptive, but it's also how is it deceptive? It's kinda like a Trojan horse.

Ben Davis· Host0:17

[instrumental music] I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News. [instrumental music] The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today's image culture and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet. I'm talking about the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in Brazil for decades before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word. Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole vocabulary to think about it, concepts like the technical image,