Actually, it isn't what it is
My fascination with ambiguity goes back beyond even my doctoral thesis, although it was only between 2016 and this year (2026) that I had a dedicated blog on the topic.
Whether or not we choose to admit it, most of life is ambiguous. The main way this comes up for us as social animals is intra- and inter-personal communication: what does that mean. We're constantly second-guessing ourselves and others, searching for ever-better heuristics to help understand the world.
The assumption is that by reducing (undifferentiated) 'ambiguity' in our life we'll somehow find clarity and have more capacity to act. This, I would suggest drives a lot of what is wrong at the world at the moment. It's the opposite of systemic thinking.
All of which is to say that I found this article about 'New Literalism' interesting. It's ostensibly about museums, but frames it as a wider cultural shift, that starts with smartphone-based distraction and, ironically, ends with a lack of media literacy.
Ambiguity invites discomfort, discomfort invites argument, and argument has become a liability. The safest thing a museum can now exhibit is a recognizable image that means only what it appears to mean. New Literalism, then, isn’t a failure of curatorial nerve so much as a strategy: by retreating into superficiality, museums insulate themselves from controversy while chasing the attendance that justifies their budgets. What looks like dumbing down is a deliberate disengagement from the cosmopolitan origins of the museum itself.
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The moment requires institutions that can illuminate fraught ideas, trends, and technologies in ways a public can actually reason about. Communities across the country are absorbing the shocks of AI (data centers straining local grids, jobs disappearing, misinformation eroding any shared sense of what’s real), and almost nowhere can people turn to an institution equipped to help them think it through. This is the work museums claim as their purpose: building the literacy to read a difficult subject and the tolerance to sit with its contradictions. Instead we have Dataland, billed as the “first museum of A.I. art,” a for-profit, techno-utopian venture that propagandizes the technology while acknowledging none of the harm it has caused or the ill will it has accrued. It is New Literalism in its purest form: an unambiguous image of the future that invites its audience to take pictures rather than grapple with the societal changes the technology sets in motion.
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Art has moved on from what museums are willing to present, and instead of continuing to patronize these organizations, audiences have scattered and taken it upon themselves to “do their own research,” as the phrase now goes, for better and worse. If a museum were to seize the moment and reclaim the territory of media literacy and ambiguity, it would be rewarded by an attentive public.
Source: Original article · Are.na block · Finds channel