The Atlantic this week published a quietly devastating piece on the attention-span class divide, arguing that the ability to sit still for opera, ballet, or a three-hour film is increasingly a class marker, something enabled by leisure, education, and the economic distance from precarity that allows sustained aesthetic engagement. At the same moment, Artnet reports a new culture crackdown in Hong Kong, including bookseller arrests, that makes the question of who gets to access difficult culture not just an economic one but a political one.
Friction as Feature, Friction as Weapon
Sustained attention is not just an individual cognitive capacity. It is a resource that institutions can grant or deny. Opera houses are expensive and intimidating. Libraries in Hong Kong are surveilled. The friction that protects highbrow culture from mass consumption in the West is replicated in authoritarian contexts as literal restriction. Both systems produce the same outcome: a narrowing of who gets to dwell with complex cultural objects. Pat Oleszko's Whitney Biennial Bucksbaum Award win, recognized for irreverent inflatables that perform accessibility and democratic absurdism, is the deliberate counter-move: art that refuses the gatekeeping terms entirely.
The Feed as the Great Leveler That Wasn't
Social media was supposed to resolve this. It did not. Kyle Chayka's Filterworld thesis is that algorithmic feeds homogenized taste downward, flattening the cultural landscape rather than democratizing it upward. The attention economy is not neutral. It actively penalizes the kind of sustained, slow engagement that The Atlantic identifies as class-coded. You cannot mudlark the Thames on a TikTok scroll. The New Yorker's piece on London mudlarking catches this contradiction neatly: a hobby premised on patience and physical presence that went viral on Instagram, which immediately began regulating it with permits and crowds.