21st Century Dark Age: will the elision of advertising and entertainment kill art?

Notes from Ancient Greece.

As you’ll note from this post, I’m on holiday. I love going on holiday, as does my partner. If you’d like us to be happy, please consider taking out a paid subscription to Future Proof.

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Last weekend, I was at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (this is not an attempt to write the holiday off as a tax deductible). It turns out that the Cyclades – an island group in the Aegean sea, to the south of the Greek capital – were home to some distinctive early art. Little sculptures, whose flat faces and angular features inspired artists like Modigliani and Brâncuși. Some of these strangely modern pieces date back to a time thousands of years BC, making it one of the birth places of the Greek artistic customs that would lay the foundations of the European tradition. This is culture in its most ancient form, preserved now for British tourists.

As I walked through the exhibits in the museum, I was struck by one of the information boards. “Greek societies,” it proclaimed, “were so poor during the 11th and 10th c. BC that some scholars have nicknamed the period the Dark Ages.” It went on to say that “there was very little material wealth, commercial contracts were sporadic, and art was confined to the decoration of vases with plain geometric motifs.” Ever the Gonzo journalist, I snapped a photograph of this board, and started to formulate this blog as I was walking through the rest of the floors (and then over an eye-wateringly sweet homemade lemonade in the cafeteria).

You see, it tapped into something my partner had said to me, as we disembarked the plane at Eleftherios Venizelos Airport. She had noticed the person in the seat in front of her spending the whole flight scrolling through Instagram reels, Meta’s short-form video content paltform. This was a young woman, and each of the videos that popped up appeared to be an outfit try-on or a product review. My partner observed that her feed is perhaps 25% content like this; for the woman on the plain it was closer to 100%. The thing is, these are, substantively, adverts. Reels or TikTok might seem like entertainment platforms, but a large amount of the content amounts to little more than an inducement towards materialism. Is this product any good? Will I look nice in it? Will it make me happy? Who owns it already? How expensive is it? What social status does it connote? These are the questions of consumerism, disguised, increasingly, as impartial entertainment.

Of course, all culture is fundamentally consumerist. We consume art, just as we consume content (whether that’s consuming journalism or consuming pornography). Delineation of materialism by virtue of tangible or intangible – pretending there’s some moral boundary there – feels foolish. There is no real ethical difference between spending £10 to buy synthetic eyelashes, and spending £10 to stream Citizen Kane.

But what we’ve relied on previously is a balance, where the commoditisation of art is offset by the commoditisation of everything else. As my partner observed of the Gen Z woman scrolling through reel after reel of product placement on the plane, we (millennials) used to tolerate advertising during a TV show because sitting through it meant that we could get to the good stuff. We’d find out who was perpetrating the disorder on Scooby-Doo (would it actually be a ghost this time?) or what hijinks the S-Club 7 members would get up to in Miami. But now, we’re watching adverts not to get to that good stuff (that sales content is supposed to be paying for), but in lieu of it. Adverts have gone from the price we pay for entertainment – the necessary evil (or boredom, in the eyes of the average 10-year-old) – to the entertainment itself.

In part, this is driven by the systemic collapse of the advertising market over the last few decades, as digital disruption drove down prices. Premium TV offerings – like HBO – began to rely on a dual revenue stream, both subscription and advertising. But platforms that were entirely reliant on advertiser bucks – who had been pumping out content in an era of heady but sustainable consumerism – were decimated. Outlets closed, budgets were slashed, art became refined to bankable securities. The incentive to take risks – always a fragile thing in art – became non-existent. Think of how art, in 11th century Greece, was “confined to the decoration of vases with plain geometric motifs”. Easy to produce, sure, and what putz salesman can’t flog an amphora? This is no different to the endless stream of Marvel and Star Wars dirge that currently fills our screens. Because if art isn’t going to be subsidised by its relationship with business, it has to become a business in itself.

But the commoditisation of art needn’t be such a bad thing. Direct sales platforms – like Netflix and Spotify – might not provide a sustainable ecosystem for creators, but at least they engender a clear ethos amongst their users. “Access to art costs money,” they say, even if it is not enough money to adequately remunerate creatives. And people do value art. 2025 polling from YouGov of the UK’s most popular activities shows how essential cultural pursuits are to people’s leisure: watching movies at home (84% popularity), watching TV (82%), listening to music (81%), reading books (79%) etc. Really, consuming art is second only to communing with other people, in terms of its value to the British public. In terms of what make humanity a half-decent ride, it is clear that people think it’s community first, and art shortly thereafter.

The fact that people think these things are important, however, doesn’t mean that they understand their position in the fragile economic ecosystem. I’m sure that 11th century Cycladites knew they liked looking at paintings, and didn’t consciously fail to strike “commercial contracts” that stymied their production. But the commoditisation of culture has grown hand-in-hand with an entertainmentisation of advertising. The lines which were so well drawn – you watch 3 minutes of commercials for McDonalds or the Carphone Warehouse, and then return to Byker Grove – have been blurred or erased. Would a 10-year-old, watching a clip on TikTok about the “sickest” (or are they still saying “illest”?) new skin on Fortnite, understand that they are watching an advert? Do teenagers, reeling in haul after haul of try-on and GRWM videos, fully understand the relationship between consumer, creator and manufacturer? Do people watching my crappy TikToks about which TV shows you should, or shouldn’t, watch, even get the relationship between me, my employer, their audience, and the producers of the TV shows? In a world where ‘everything is content’, as late-00s digital analysts proclaimed, an awful lot of that is sales.

The elision of a clear barrier between advert and entertainment acts as an amplifier of the Dark Ages effect. In an economically challenged time – when Western audiences are increasingly reluctant to shell out for cinema trips or buy hardback books or pay, directly, for an album – entertainment products are going to feel the squeeze. But the fact that they’re also being cannibalised by advertising itself – which was, historically, the most sustainable funding mechanism for good art – exacerbates this decline.

And perhaps, thousands of years from now, there’ll be a Museum of Late Western Art, where a billboard will proclaim (via hologram or something) that “Society was so poor during the 21st and 22nd centuries AD that some scholars have nicknamed the period the Dark Ages… there was very little material wealth, commercial contracts were sporadic, and art was confined to movies about the same eight superheroes saving the world, again and again and again.”

Postscript:

I’m still in Greece, on the beach of an island in the Ionian sea. Thanks to some obstreperously sniffling American tourists on the plane from Dubrovnik to Athens, I am also sporting an eye-watering cold. (Since arriving for my early summer European jaunt, social media algorithms have been serving me a lot of content about how much Europeans hate noisy American tourists, something that the past couple of weeks have, personally, born out). Yesterday, rather than sea swimming and cocktails under the cabana, I lay in an air-conditioned room, trying to clear my sinuses and scrolling, manically, on Instagram. At one point I realised that I’d spent almost a full hour of my main, annual holiday, watching videos of a man “adding organic material to a bowl until [he] creates life”. Each day, by popular request, he would add something – banana, grass, cream, etc – to a smouldering bowl of rot. And for almost an hour I watched this, watched the bowl subtly changing its shade of brown, gradually attaining a thin patina of mould.

I bring this up because clearly this is not an advert for bowls of decomposing matter. But what it is is an attention game. The longer you watch, the better for the creator. The more they build an audience, the more they can sell. It is the ethos that now governs social media creation – keep people watching for as long as possible – so that even where you are not explicitly shilling a product, you are, ultimately, selling social media addiction. Every video on Instagram Reels deliberately crafted to keep people watching for 30 seconds, a minute, longer, is an advert, effectively, for Meta. There is no escaping the quicksand.