Thomas Beard INCITE - Response

Thomas Beard’s analysis of the work of Shana Moulton places her work in a transitional era of changing styles in video art. He identifies her heavy use of subculture as opposed to mainstream pop culture as indicative of a shift. Another thing he highlights is her use of items and products to make comments about consumerism. Beard quotes Douglas Sirk, “you can’t make films about things, you can only make films with things…” and I feel that this is a critique on how items have no real substance, but they can be used to create things of substance.

I believe that Moulton’s work challenges capitalistic ideas of peace and happiness. With the advances in the internet, we have things like social media and blog sites that allows creatives to produce, at scale, to a niche audience without going through the traditional network gatekeepers. Because of that, it is easier now than ever to have access to content that we are most interested in, and the general “mainstream” audience is siphoned off by the subcultural content that developed from independent artists.

Moulton’s work uses a subcultural platform to make critiques about mainstream products. Capitalism attempts to convince consumers that using a product would complete them and make them happier, but Moulton disagrees. She instead insists that we can complete ourselves.