Who Sells Lifestyle?

John Berger, moodboarding, and social media profits.

John Berger opens his 1972 art history program “Ways of Seeing” by knifing a Botticelli. He cuts Venus’s face out of “Venus and Mars” (1483), tells us he wants us to think about how institutions present oil paintings in the televised era, and has the camera pan to a printing press mass producing her face for textbooks, postcards, and souvenirs. He argues that postwar institutions subsumed oil painting into a European culture-building project that inhibited people’s ability to connect independently with artists’ work. He then tells us to dispel that miasma by moodboarding. 

Later in the episode, he suggests we moodboard by putting pictures of oil paintings next to magazine cutouts, children’s drawings, and anything else they connect to in our minds. “When children or adults pin up reproductions alongside snapshots, their own drawings, or pages from magazines… everything belongs to the same visual language used for describing or recreating experience,” he says. Berger argues that museums’ and historians’ “false mystification” of art inhibits spontaneous intellectual connections and keeps people from contextualizing paintings through their own experiences. Moodboarding defamiliarizes and lets us notice things altars or museum ropes separate us from. At the end of the program, he records children noticing Caravaggio’s gender-ambiguous depictions of people in “Supper at Emmaus” (1601). They hadn’t been trained to defer to expert opinion and were able to see things, namely Caravaggio’s gayness and fluid depictions of gender, that many adults were blind to.

Defamiliarization dominates the Internet era. Tumblr, the Dark Academia Tik Tok account, and Instagram meme pages are just digital moodboards. In her Dirt essay on digital moodboard motifs, Colleen Kelsey writes “In the nascent days of Instagram, I followed… a crop of accounts you could say were purveyors of ‘mood,’ posting archival fashion, interiors, and aesthetic content, before the word “content” subsumed all user output and ‘aesthetic’ denoted a genre or a lifestyle. What I was doing all along, unconsciously and then very consciously, was moodboarding.” She argues that image-focused apps both “intensified and made casual” the process of creating stage sets for our lives. Writer Erin Schwartz similarly argues that defamiliarization lets us locate ourselves in ostensibly grander traditions. “In naming aesthetics, you appoint yourself art historian of the mundane stuff that populates your life. It allows you to locate your Squishmallow collection or the dead suburban mall where you used to work in the same taxonomy as Rembrandt or the Bauhaus,” they write. The phone screen’s the retina of the mind’s eye now. People use it to conjure moodboards and aesthetics everywhere.

Tumblr teens post Éric Rohmer stills next to Bright Young Things pictures, “Dark Academia” photos, and Anne Carson fragments to convey nascent sophistication. Homemakers on Pinterest curate their dream houses out of products and beautiful kitchen and library stills. Instagram comedians communicate their discernment and political savvy through absurdist and autofictional meme pages. Twitter intellectuals post pages from books they’re reading between selfies and jokes. People splice the Internet’s particulate matter with their own photos to broadcast their lifestyle and individuate themselves from the herd. Meanwhile, website and proprietary technology owners profit quietly in the background. 

Daisy Alioto writes in her essay introduction to “What is Lifestyle?” that “people collect images like they once collected things” and store them digitally. You might not be able to afford Martin Grant’s 1999 runway collection, but you can show people with your moodboard that you’d buy it. Alioto forms her own lifestyle definition by citing psychotherapist Alfred Adler and sociologist Max Weber’s definitions of it. In his 1929 book The Science of Living, Adler writes “the life style of a tree is the individual expression of a tree moulding itself to its environment.” He argues that people’s lifestyles grow like plants to adapt to the conditions they’re raised in. In Weber’s Class, Status, Party, written shortly before World War One, he argues people express their status by consuming goods. For Weber, you express your lifestyle through a selection of product choices. 

Regardless of who’s correct, lifestyle’s profitable. People buy certain goods, make pilgrimages to Marfa’s desert Prada store, and arrange their lives in certain ways to feel close to something. My friend Rayne sold out her Secrets reading in four minutes. So why do so many of us let other people profit from the lifestyles we create? One of my good friends in New Zealand works as a fashion magazine advertiser in China. She absorbs the moodboards people post for free, fashions her own from them, and sells them as the basis of luxury watch and liquor campaigns. Lifestyle’s profitable and someone’s going to make money off it. Why can’t it be me? 

In My Dinner with Andre, Wallace Shawn’s character says “When I was young, all I thought about was art and music. Now I'm 36, and all I think about is money.” I’m 29 next year and I think about money now too. I want to buy a house one day and get paid enough to write for a living. But I’m my own biggest obstacle to success. I’ve written Substack essays that have gotten tens of thousands of views, have a New Zealand lifestyle people have told me they’re jealous of, and writers I deeply admire regularly ask me to read and edit their work. People reach out to me and asked me to write for The Atlantic, Dirt, Astra (RIP), The Whitney Review, and other publications as a result. I constantly say I’m going to then don’t. I let opportunities to succeed slip through my fingers like sand through an hourglass. I hate myself for this and I’ve really started to wonder why.

Sometimes I’m lazy, but I also think social media’s conditioned us to work towards a feeling of community and forget people make money in the background. In his essay on the Internet’s participatory culture, media scholar Henry Jenkins writes that members have to “believe that their contributions matter” and “feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least care what other people think about what they have created).” Those connections are meaningful, but I still don’t like that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg cash out on the attention I create. I think some people figured out ways to monetize the attention, like the Real Housewives of New York who make money even as we watch them spend it, and I want to study and learn from them. Money is time and I want to buy enough of it back to read, write, and think. 

People have figured out how to do good work and get paid for it in the new world. Daisy founded Dirt and smartly sells merch around its biggest articles. American publicist Kaitlin Phillips figured out how to make people pay her for her taste, Alicia Kennedy built a dedicated subscriber base that pays her to write about food, Gretchen Felker-Martin built one to do the best film writing I’ve ever read, Kate Wagner built one to write about architecture and cycling, and others have found ways to make money writing and curating. In her spectacular Taylor Swift Studies Substack series, B.D. McClay writes that Swift’s successful because she’s “writing songs no one else can write... not because they’re out of the box or avant-garde but because she’s the only one doing these things.” I also want to figure out what only I can do and get people to pay me for it.

War’s on the horizon like a ship in the distance and the sun’s setting on the old world order. I think we, as artists, have a responsibility to take advantage of our moment of peace and put out the work only we can do before the western superstructure collapses. It’s not inconceivable that in the next few years we might have to worry more about finding food and water than reading Goethe. Kate Wagner recently wrote that the ego well-meaningly dismisses rational thought as hyperbole to allow us to function, but the Gulf Stream’s collapsing, genocidal fascists are taking over the western world, and we need to reckon with the fact that our era of unprecedented safety and prosperity is going to end soon, giving way to a future as unclear as a murky pool’s bottom. I want to capitalize on this by getting over myself and working again. I might partially paywall this Substack in the future, but I won’t do that until I can guarantee regular, subscriber-only benefits like Alicia Kennedy does. I’m going to keep writing about things that interest me here but pay more attention to what people like so I can craft and hone a good product. If you have any suggestions for what kind of work you’d pay me for, please feel free to contact me or drop them in the comments. I hope to write more for you soon.