How Eras, Renaissance, and Barbie are signaling the desire to find a personal way out of the morass of the 'data-driven' perspective of our own making.
I haven’t gone to see “Barbie.” I don’t know if I will. Cinema theaters are not a favorite space. Though I do love open theaters, like the one in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna in June. Somehow people hush and get still better when everyone can see them.
My hair stylist loved the movie. She went with friends. They enjoyed the sing-along, and got the puns. When Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever think about dying?” that was a chill moment, she said.
I would probably be more enthusiastic if I had played with Barbie dolls as a child. I would be able to give myself an alibi, the reason to go. On the other hand, there’s too much pink in and around the movie for my taste. (My color is blue.*)
Did you go? What did you think? You can be honest here.
However, “Barbie” and the big artist-entrepreneurs who are making rich connections with fans (I mean the rich part) are signaling something about culture—a shift. It could be temporary, but it’s not purely economic. And that’s interesting.
The movie is not just about the doll(s) and it/their corporate overlords—Mattel and Warner Brothers—it’s also about us. We’re torn between the desire to keep playing with our (digital) toys and setting off on an existential quest.
Greta Gerwig made a movie that is “a critique of the patriarchy in hot pink.” (NYT) Good for her and the $1 billion-plus box office haul. Gerwig and Warner Bros.’ marketing entourage managed to turn a 60-year-old doll with a lot of baggage into a sensation.
Forget aging gracefully, bring out the (disco) music.
Margot Robbie in "Barbie" Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.
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Beyoncé and Taylor Swift complete the triumvirate of powerful women ruling the discourse of pop culture. Which is interesting, because in 1965 Andy Warhol said, “the basic Pop statements have already been made,” and he promptly retired.
There’s a hint of a new narrative in the air this summer.
The forces behind myth-making compel us to keep trying to create whatever could make it into the story of art. Or at least into the modern version of whatever the broader audience deems to be art (the institutions are still gatekeepers, but the gates are not as imposing or working as well.)
“Women splashed out big this summer, and tickets to major cultural events were only the start of the spending. Groups of friends, mothers and daughters traveled to Beyoncé shows, bought Barbie-pink outfits, and did their nails in multicolor homage to Swift’s musical eras. Then they went again with different friends and more family, amplifying the amount each group consumed and purchased.”
Sarah Krause, Anne Steele, WSJ
Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” is likely to become the world’s first to bring in $1 billion over more than 100 shows. Vivid Seats says 80% of the people who bought concert tickets bought more than two.
Swift’s viral Era (NYT) started by breaking Ticketmaster, and continued through splashes, cuts, pouring rain, surviving break-ups (brilliant PR work), and bugs (she swallowed one; it happens to me when I walk and talk.)
Major cities saw the lift in sales whenever she was in town. Hotel occupancy, but also other goods. Beads don’t seem to go out of style (Seattle Times) with fans, a sign for the tribe. Yet, “You’re Your Own Kid.”
’Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So make the friendship bracelets
Take the moment and taste it
You’ve got no reason to be afraidTaylor Swift, Midnights
From a marketing standpoint, “Eras” is a perfect name for a tour. It helps connect with fans of different periods of her music, and it acts as a warm-up for the re-release of the singer and performer’s albums.
Swift is on a “crusade to regain control of her music.” Fans are on a journey to get back together and dance with others. But not in any willy-nilly community gathering. Signaling counts towards status value—we do judge by the ticket people buy.
The Eras Tour Friendship Bracelet Trend, ExplainedTwitter / @cait_loves_life - Getty Images
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When the Wall Street Journal totals up receipts and takes notice of women’s spending power, that is a data point that our data-driven digital culture likes. Women may not (or ever) be perfect by patriarchal standards, but they’re definitely getting share of wallet.
StubHub says among the top 50 acts globally, the average ticket price for female artists is $660, while it’s $245 for male artists. Women pay more for everything, from hair cuts to shoes, to t-shirts. Now we get paid more, too (or we should.)
If “Eras” brought to the fore Swift’s catalogue and new collaborators into the fold, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” brought forward disco and retro futurism in Sweden, Belgium, Scotland, France, and England (so far.)
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Parkwood
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Beyoncé teased her first solo tour since Formation (2016) on October 23, 2022, when she auctioned a ticket for an unspecified show. The ticket sold for $50,000 at a charity auction (in support of the WACO Theater) and included two tickets, first-class airfare, a three-night hotel stay, and a personal backstage tour led by Beyoncé’s mother.
A list of venue records for Beyoncé’s “Renaissance Tour,” so far.
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After a look at the venue records so far, we can safely say that it’s not just football matches that fill stadiums in Europe.
Beyoncé also supports communities in the cities she performs in. Throughout the tour, her BeyGOOD Foundation provides grant opportunities, celebration luncheons, and resources to support entrepreneurship to 1,000 small business owners from marginalized communities.
The artist-entrepreneur donates scholarships worth $1 million to students in colleges and universities in cities along the tour. (Verge Magazine) Give women more opportunity and they contribute to lifting the entire community (vs. just lining their pockets.)
We all have a propensity to making certain lifestyle choices. Our choices are never made in a vacuum. They always happen within a context. Status is part of that context—will I move up in status, keep my current one, or move down?
The question is not trivial because it helps in the formation of our individual identity. I mentioned my taste in the beginning of this article. Taste is a match-maker. It can bring people and things together that go together. It’s also a useful measure of who we are.
But I won’t go too far down this rabbit hole. Because what’s happening in stadiums and movie theaters this summer can help us answer a larger question. And that’s the question of renegotiating our deal with what’s real and true.
Antón Barba-Kay says, “digital technology is training us not simply to a new sense of what is real and really good, but to a new understanding of the contrasts within which we see that reality.”**
The Chair in Humanities at Deep Springs College says digital culture functions as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity.
“At the same time, we continue to express allegiance to [digital culture] because digital technology has become our clearest metaphor for universality as such, for humanity, for the global village, for what is always everywhere the case….
By giving us access to new kinds of self-determination, identity, and voluntary power, digital technology is our most vivid instrument of freedom. It offers an experience of time that, by dissolving ties to place and history, allows us to begin again.”
We can find new communities beyond those we’re tied to by circumstance. With all the bad habits and bubbles the Internet gave us, it also opened the door for personal reinvention. It’s possible to dismantle old hierarchies of birth and blood.
Humanity has come to worship data and tracking.
“This outsourcing of human judgment to data is also a form of the primitive impulse to idolatry: a heightened reverence for something that we desire to trick ourselves into forgetting we have made, a desire to obey ourselves writ large.”
But we hunger to close the narrowing gap between the simulation or virtual and the real. Because we can still tell what is true. And we latch onto those stories to act outside the immediate hungers of the self that feel so real.
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* Italian psychologist Marco Del Giudice tried to find the origins of the color idea. He could find only four short magazine quotes that pink was the color for boys. When he searched a database of five million books printed in American or British English from 1800-2000 he found they lacked mentions of “pink for a boy.” From 1890 onward there were increasing mentions of “pink for a girl.”
** Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making (Cambridge University Press (2023)