Multiple-choice reading

In the winter after the last pandemic wave had subsided into a sort of bureaucratic aftertaste, the city museum reopened its galleries with a new wing devoted to “the Anthropocene”: vitrines of melted plastic, satellite photographs of algal bloom, a room in which the lights dimmed and brightened as if imitating the planet’s own feverish pulse. The curators spoke, in the press release, of “making visible the invisible,” as though carbon dioxide were a shy animal that could be coaxed into view by good lighting and a sufficiently chastening wall text. Visitors filed through with the solemnity of parishioners, pausing obediently at the infographic that compared yearly emissions to the weight of a mountain range. The gift shop sold reusable water bottles, and beside them—without irony, as far as I could tell—limited-edition tote bags printed with an image of a burning forest. It was difficult not to feel that the institution had perfected a new genre: the aestheticisation of catastrophe.

This is not, to be clear, an argument against museums, or against art, or against the attempt to translate scientific abstraction into something the senses can apprehend. It is a recognition of a more uncomfortable fact: that our culture has become exceptionally good at converting moral alarm into consumable experience. We do it with climate change, with war, with protest movements, even with private grief. The camera, the gallery, the streaming documentary, the viral thread—each offers a format in which anguish becomes legible, shareable, and, crucially, distanced. The viewer is invited to feel something intense, but at a manageable remove; the institutions that mediate this feeling can claim both relevance and virtue. Meanwhile, the underlying conditions that produced the anguish continue with the indifference of geology.

The historian in me wants to say we have always done this. The nineteenth century built its panoramas and its waxworks; the early twentieth century staged world fairs that made colonial extraction look like a pageant of progress. Yet there is a particular texture to contemporary moral spectacle, shaped by psychology as much as by politics. We live in an economy of attention in which indignation is a currency and fatigue is a chronic illness. The cognitive scientist will tell you that repeated exposure to threatening information without an avenue for effective action produces a kind of learned helplessness: a dulling, a withdrawal, an almost physical reluctance to look. The cultural critic will add that institutions have learned to offer the semblance of action—sign the petition, buy the ethical product, post the right sentence—precisely because it is scalable and because it flatters the participant. One leaves the gallery not with a plan, but with a sense of having been the sort of person who cares.

I watched a group of schoolchildren in the “Anthropocene” wing stand before an installation of discarded fishing nets. Their teacher asked what the work made them think about. “Plastic,” one said dutifully. “Animals,” said another. A third, perhaps bored or perhaps braver, said it looked like a monster. The teacher nodded, as if the child had stumbled upon a metaphor the artist would have been pleased to own. But the child’s remark had a different quality from the adult discourse around the exhibit. It was not an ethical statement; it was an imaginative one. It suggested that the problem was not merely data and policy but the way the world now presents itself to the mind: as something uncanny, misshapen by our own hand, returning to stare at us with our own eyes.

That, I suspect, is where art can be more than decoration for despair. The trouble with much “issue-based” art is not that it is political, but that it is too eager to be understood. It comes with instructions. It wants to be applauded for its correctness. The result is a kind of aesthetic compliance: the viewer agrees, feels appropriately pained, and moves on. By contrast, the works that linger—whether a novel about a drought-stricken town, a painting that makes a landscape look simultaneously tender and hostile, a film that refuses to provide heroes—do something less consoling. They complicate the reader’s position. They make the self feel implicated without offering the cheap relief of confession.

There is, however, a danger in praising ambiguity. Ambiguity can become an alibi for passivity, a way of sounding sophisticated while avoiding commitment. One can admire the “nuance” of a predicament and still do nothing. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing about moral responsibility in times of collective wrongdoing, warned against the comfort of abstraction; she distrusted the habit of replacing judgment with slogans, but she also distrusted the habit of replacing judgment with endless analysis. To judge, in her sense, is not merely to have an opinion; it is to decide how to live among others. Our cultural institutions, like our political ones, tend to prefer audiences who feel rather than citizens who act.

And yet action, too, can be theatrical. The environmental movement has its own iconography of virtue: the earnest march, the photogenic arrest, the carefully branded outrage. This is not to sneer at protest—history is full of moments when public demonstration shifted what had seemed immovable—but to notice how quickly dissent is absorbed into the circuitry of spectacle. The corporate sponsor plants a tree for every share; the airline advertises carbon offsets with the serene confidence of a confession already forgiven. Even guilt has been commodified, packaged into services that promise absolution without inconvenience. We are offered redemption on a subscription model.

What would it mean to resist this? Not to turn away from images of suffering, but to refuse the bargain they sometimes propose: feel deeply now, so you can forget later. The museum, at its best, can be a training ground for attention rather than a theatre of virtue. It can teach a slower looking, a willingness to remain with difficulty without converting it immediately into a personal brand. It can also, if it is honest, reveal its own entanglements—its funding sources, its carbon footprint, its complicity in the very histories it narrates. Such candour would be unfashionable. It would puncture the pleasant fiction that enlightenment is something one purchases with a ticket.

When I left the “Anthropocene” wing, I passed again through the gift shop. A young couple were debating whether to buy the tote bag with the burning forest. “It’s a good reminder,” one of them said. The other hesitated, then laughed: “Or it’s just… depressing.” I wanted to tell them that the question was not whether the object would remind them, but what kind of remembering it encouraged—whether it asked them to keep faith with the world as something more than an aesthetic problem. Outside, the air was unseasonably warm. People sat at café tables as if the weather were a gift rather than a symptom. The city, like the museum, continued to perform its normality with impressive discipline. And I found myself thinking that perhaps the most radical response to a crisis we have learned to curate is not louder alarm, but a more exacting form of sincerity: one that cannot be folded neatly into an exhibit, and that persists, inconveniently, after the lights have gone out.