During school holidays, around 15 years ago, I used to stay up late to watch TV. There were certain channels I would gravitate to. One featured loud and passionate American men and women; so loud, I had to turn the volume down. I didn’t want to wake the neighbours. This was my guilty pleasure.
I am talking of Fox News. It certainly wasn’t good for me, the conspiracy-mongering and disregard for evidence and truth, but who can turn down a sizzling hot kebab after weeks of eating cool greens? At that time TV was still my main source of fun. But it was contained fun.
I don’t watch terrestrial TV any more. What was once confined to my living room is now anywhere I can whip out my phone; social media sites have rendered linear TV redundant in favour of diffuse content. A friend my age still watches television; he is like one of those old and rural men who still speak an endangered dialect.
This is why it makes sense for TalkTV to abandon its television channel and switch to online platforms – as it announced last week. Piers Morgan had already stated he was moving his show to YouTube; his shouty debates about contentious geopolitical issues and exclusive interviews with disgruntled footballers are perfect for the digital world.
News and media can no longer be contained in a box. The kid who watched the occasional Fox News show on TV for fun more than a decade ago probably now consumes an endless supply of hard-right online content out of fanaticism. If you watch something religiously it is no longer entertainment; it becomes an integral part of yourself.
You’ll have kittens
The Cute exhibition at Somerset House in London vividly illustrates that the distinction between cute and creepy is thin. Some pieces were indisputably cute. Others were creepy – anything that involved shadows, for instance, or two or more things combined together that should stay apart.
What makes things cute is a kind of straightforward innocence. What makes things creepy is unease: the unavoidable sense that something is not quite right. The transition from cute to creepy is a staple of children’s fiction and film. It was classically expressed when Dorothy says to her dog in The Wizard of Oz: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.”
The reason the distinction between these two things seemed so thin in the exhibition is that our imagination is restless. We can never allow innocence to stay static. We always want to tilt it into the unknown. Creepiness is cuteness that goes on an adventure. Adam and Eve were cute until Satan came along.
Portrait of a proud man
Going to an exhibition these days is like visiting a Baptist church. There is an atmosphere of scolding. It is impossible to look at a painting without being reminded of a sin that has stained the art: white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism.
Declaring a work of art as a product of its time is not radical or particularly insightful.
This is why I so enjoyed the Entangled Pasts exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. It is not perfect, and some of the sanctimony that pervades much of the contemporary art world infects some of what is on display, but, more than many other exhibitions I have recently been to, it allows the work to breathe.
My favourite portrait is Portrait of a Man by Joshua Reynolds. The subject is probably Francis Barber, the manservant and assistant of Samuel Johnson, but it ultimately doesn’t matter who it is. The portrait stands apart as a magnificent expression of a proud, confident and keenly intelligent man; I was transported.
• Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman
