The People’s Tools
Sarah Hromack on a 2011 Cory Arcangel show that captured the museum’s entry into the experience economy
I worked as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s first director of digital media from 2009 to 2015—another lifetime ago, truly. Of the many remarkable exhibitions that took place at the museum during my tenure, I consider Cory Arcangel’s 2011 solo exhibition “Pro Tools” to be the most significant. The works in “Pro Tools” were technically complex yet often subversive in their visual simplicity and use of obscure or obsolete pop cultural relics. The invisibility of the technology itself as a medium rendered some of the work hard to encounter or recognize as art, in turn yielding confusion, delight, or even outright obliviousness. Arcangel turned a trifecta of hardware innovation, shifting media climate, and institutional obstinance into an exhibition that deserves to be remembered as a marker of the decidedly transitional—not to mention exceedingly awkward!—2010s.
This is my opinion, and having had a job in an institution at a particular point in time doesn’t render me a de facto authority on someone’s work; it merely gives me a different vantage point. The trickiness of this particular exhibition, as well as its social reach, grant it rent-free real estate in my mind all these years later, which is all the more remarkable, given that the show’s more impactful works were all but invisible.
Institutions have their own means of devising cultural value. Traditionally speaking, the exhibition catalogue—which the Whitney notably did not produce for “Pro Tools”—is one such vehicle of object fetishization. Aggressively branded, show-specific gift shop swag is another. Arcangel would later explore this concept when he opened his product line Arcangel Surfware in 2014. But in that moment, he took an entirely different tack, capitalizing on forms of digital production and dissemination to spread the show across the internet in a remarkable way. Even the exhibition’s title carried a sly meaning: Pro Tools is the name of a difficult-to-master, studio-grade software product that is used to author, record, and mix sound. It’s cultishly popular among musicians and audiophiles, constituting a universal technical language in the music industry.
The year 2011 marked a swiftly ascendant, yet somehow gradual turning point in the social role of consumer technology in everyday life. Tonally, it was still characterized by the distinctively chatty, confessional feel of an online media ecosystem hanging on to blogs and citizen journalism. Instagram had launched the year before, in 2010, and the iPhone had been on the market for a scant four years. The smartphone’s barrier to entry, financially and otherwise, was still relatively high, even as the iPhone-enabled photographer-as-citizen-journalist was rising to power. Many museums, including the Whitney, still held strong to the “no photography” policies that reinforced the hushed, contemplative experience of the museum’s white cube spaces while preserving a set of ideas around artistic sovereignty in the face of vernacular documentation. Arcangel played with this, turning policy into a medium itself: For a piece called 777—a reference to a command in the Unix/Linux programming language that grants read, write, and execute permissions to a file—the Whitney allowed visitors to photograph the show. The resulting archive still lives on via Flickr. (Several images were uploaded by Roberta Fallon, who used them to illustrate a review of the show on her blog.)
Citizen photography of “Pro Tools” prevailed over traditional exhibition photography, but only because of Real Talk and Airport. For these nearly invisible works—respectively, a piece of standard-issue hardware and a dedicated wifi network—the Whitney’s IT department boosted the museum’s cell phone signal at Arcangel’s behest. The iconic uptown building, designed by Marcel Breuer and opened to the public in 1966, was a Potemkin village where wifi was concerned. At openings crowds would huddle in the stairwells, hoping to catch a few bars’ worth of cell service. Hobbled by its Brutalist concrete walls and ceiling, the Breuer building required extra technical intervention to support the sort of real-time online interaction Archangel imagined for his show.
Arcangel’s demand that the museum’s human and technical resources be redirected toward the work could be historicized as a form of institutional critique. In the New Yorker, Andrea K. Scott likened the piece to an earlier one by Michael Asher, where the museum was kept open to the public for 24 hours straight. In Arcangel’s case, I think it was as much about a simple desire for legibility and memorability beyond the museum itself, one that transcends the bounds of academia. Real Talk and Airport functioned to normalize the museum experience by marrying it with the banal, everyday act of talking on, or photographing with, the phone. On his own website, Arcangel says that he felt the works in “Pro Tools” were best encountered while only somewhat paying attention.
At the time, critics focused on Arcangel’s obsession with the afterlives of obscure software and pop cultural relics. The digital reach of the show was much more widespread and inventive—and unfortunately likely forgotten—than the press suggested. The Whitney’s website has shapeshifted many times since 2011, but one can still consult the Internet Archive to find Brochure, the downloadable PDF version of the free, in-gallery version, which contained a curatorial essay and eight professionally printed lithographs from Arcangel’s “Photoshop CS” series (2007–). The best, wildest, and most of-the-time intervention in the entire exhibition was a series of advertisements that Arcangel designed for the infamous, now-shuttered news site Buzzfeed. It’s no irony, then, that Arcangel’s personal website still serves as the most comprehensive archive of the exhibition.
It was in the halcyon days of the late 1990s that B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore introduced their model of the so-called “experience economy”—a world where experiences are distinct economic offerings—in a now relentlessly cited article in the Harvard Business Review. Starbucks was their main case study. American museums are arguably still catching up to the full-throttle, retail-driven approach Pine and Gilmore identified as the future-present state of American desire. And yet, the public demand and preference for art-as-experience in the form of massive, immersive screen-based works—the Hyundai Card Digital Wall in the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby is an example—has a precedent in “Pro Tools.” It was the bigger, screen-based works—Paganini Caprice No. 5, Various Self-Playing Bowling Games—that received the most attention, both from visitors and the press.
Now, many years after Arcangel’s Whitney exhibition, it could be said that we as a society have all the “experience” we need, even as institutions and art—digital art, in particular—skew bigger and more experiential than ever. The concern is about the attention economy and the havoc technology is wreaking on our mental health and our cognitive ability to encode and retain information. As a value proposition, what makes a memory worth retaining beyond the point of mere nostalgia? Why drag the past forward through time? And why does Arcangel’s particular sensibility, rooted at its core in the visual and social language of a now rapidly degrading internet, still resonate in an age of AI-generated slop, so-called “brainrot,” and the enshittification of seemingly everything?
Critics tend to situate Arcangel as a forward-thinking artist, one with an ability to predict the future of mass culture by engaging with its physical and digital detritus. In a recent conversation, however, Arcangel seemed less interested in premonition—his own, or that of others. For him, the mark of a great work of art is an artist’s ability not to predict the future, but to capture the present. “Pro Tools” crystallized a moment in American popular culture, both online and off, that in retrospect turns out to have been exceptionally slippery. It’s worth dropping a pin on 945 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, from May 26 to September 11, 2011.
Sarah Hromack is the founder of Soft Labor, a consultancy that works with organizations, designers, and the culture industry. She is the author of the newsletter Soft Labor.