Consensual Art (ii)

Consent is a hot, fraught topic. One particular application of the concept tends to command most of the attention, trailed at a distance by a panoply of more esoteric concerns and abstract legal theories. Consent is subject to willing, knowing violation, and it is subject to unwitting misreading based on differences of culture, irrational desire, and so on. Positively establishing consent is usually possible but often cumbersome. In most arenas it is thought better to abandon or postpone the undertaking in question if consent cannot be positively established. It is in this latter respect which artists are constantly tempted to depart from ideal social practice. Thus it is easier to dodge a subpoena than a flash mob. But are the stakes of consent really as high in art as they are elsewhere? If not, then on what basis can access to art be called a necessity of life or a basic human right?

For the TSA, the blunt legal question of consenting to screening is resolved via "implied consent." A sign informs travelers that by entering the screening area they are consenting to screening; if you don't want to be screened, you have the perfect freedom to stay out, and presumably to find other means of transportation. Of course this is a coercive, agenda-laden version of consent, but it has managed to survive and prevail for a good long while now. Having been in the belly of the beast myself, there is nothing checkpoint screeners can do to me that would in and of itself affect my decision whether or not to fly; but nor do I think, based on this same experience, that there aren't good reasons that a minority of travelers would have to think twice about flying for reasons having nothing to do with criminality. So, here is yet another blunt majoritarian compromise, a little white violation of consent rather than an outright repressive one. Travelers' choices are neither totally free nor totally dictated. A gob of security is paid for with a pinch of liberty. Is there any other realistic option under the circumstances?

The TSA's well-known flaws notwithstanding, their merely symbolic role ("security theater") is actually quite functional in precisely the ways it is intended to be by its architects. To keep people flying, we make flying look as safe as possible while the gory details of actually making it safe are hashed out at glacial pace behind the scenes. The checkpoint is a sort of didactic theater production staged where its target audience literally cannot avoid it; and to be sure, there are few such productions issuing from the institution of theater proper which can claim anywhere near this level of didactic success, as evidenced by the quick recovery of the industry and the ongoing massive demand for their services. Not even the architects of this recovery, however, can dispute that it represents a messy compromise imposed by force majeure rather than by mature legislative deliberation.

At atomic social scale, meanwhile, it is far easier for us to nip such difficulties in the bud, at least where we are aware of the potential for them. If disasters reliably bring out the worst in our institutions, it has nonetheless become pop-axiomatic that they bring out the best in us, and we then wonder why it takes a disaster to reimpose common decency. Every artist thinks they have a message to deliver which is of paramount importance, but we ought to more carefully consider the difference in meta-messaging between the concert hall and the checkpoint. The pitfalls of museumization have been discussed to death, yet museums are just about as consensual as the artistic transaction ever gets. That is one thing we can learn from them even now.