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You hear the term “slop” a lot now. There’s a good reason for that: A lot of janky internet content is being churned out with A.I., and slop is a handy name for this. But there’s another phenomenon—not unconnected, but a little different—that I also think it’s worth getting a handle on. I’ve been thinking about it as “slurry.”

In the non-metaphorical world, slurry means an unresolved mix of liquid and solid; in agriculture, a thin mixture of manure and water. The word comes to mind with this very pervasive kind of content that’s gunking up my feed, where different content types are running together into one, half-resolved substance. Where everything assumes the qualities of everything else.

A field being irrigated with a tractor and slurry tanker. (Photo by Pieter van der Woude/BSR Agency/Getty Images)

It’s painters having to perform incongruously as influencers to get some attention for their work. It’s audio interviews, auto-transcribed and posted without any editing so that you get not only weird errors but also all the “you knows” and “uhms.” It’s long video essays chopped up into little incoherent bits and posted with gibbering subtitles.

What these have in common is a feeling of clunkiness that comes when something originated in one medium and hasn’t quite been thought through for another. And while this problem is everywhere, slurry rises to the top of my mind right now because a bunch of news stories make me think about the pressures on writing, especially criticism.

Writing in the Slurry

Just this month, the New York Timesremoved from rotation four culture critics, saying that it is looking for new voices who would work “not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos, and experimentation with other platforms.” Vanity Fair also just said it is ending reviews, focusing on coverage “in modern ways, from newsletters to TikTok to new platforms that don’t yet exist.” Everything is multimedia-izing. “No matter if you’re a text-only website, it is now in your best interests to hire camera-ready contributors who will make successful video-podcast clips,” digital media commentator Kyle Chayka advises. “The problem is journalists and critics aren’t generally known for their personal aesthetic appeal.”

Basically, web video is now the most dominant media form, setting the parameters for attention-getting. So, a lot of other things are being sucked into its stream, and in turn having to awkwardly absorb some of its properties, and that amps up the slurry quotient greatly. The “For You Page-ification of everything” that artist Joshua Citarella predicted last year is well underway.

Whether you are an author, or an artist, or a critic, you are an influencer when it comes to promoting your work—which is a problem because that is a separate skill that you are probably trying to graft onto your primary skill. “If we wanted to be in TV, we would’ve gone into broadcast journalism,” one audio-only podcaster told New York mag (she was speaking specifically of the sexist dynamics that come into play). Indeed, a lot of worthwhile creativity and criticality comes from people who feel uneasy with how popularity works, so they turn inward and develop their own ways of thinking and making.

Right now, however, the future of “criticism” being role modeled is stuff like New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica monologuing about songs while driving around in his car, trying to find a TikTok gimmick.

Post-Descriptive, Post-Internet, and Post-Medium

I’m a pragmatic person. Years ago, at an art journalism conference at the Walker Arts Center, I talked about the idea of “post-descriptive criticism.” I said that we still tended to write about art on the web like we were writing for print publications, even though the web had removed both the space constraints and the technical demands that made illustrations scarce. My view then, which seems a rather quaint point to make now, was that you could use photos in a more creative way, to dispense with some (but not all) of the room spent on description, to get to the point, or to illustrate a detail, and maybe better engage the audience. (That’s why I use a lot of photos when I write a review—although, because I am personally no great photographer, I’d admit there’s an element of slurry to them. A better model is probably Jason Farago’s scrollable art explainers.)

There is nothing wrong with cross-media stuff. John Berger is a hero of mine, and his Ways of Seeing (1972) is a great work of criticism as a series of films and as a book, each a little different. Just as not all A.I. content is slop, not all cross-media content is slurry. Truthfully, I think that Caramanica is only slurry-adjacent. This is because, the *Times—*being the Times, and with the resources of the Times—has made something that is well filmed and well edited, so the clip at least feels as if it is doing what it wants to do.

Slurry, like slop, is a phenomenon aggravated by high volume. It’s runoff from the content mills. An oversaturated attention economy means you also have a lot of pressure for one piece of “content” to do double, or triple, or sextuple duty across platforms, to justify the original investment of labor, with a corresponding squeeze on the thought that goes into each specific form that something takes.

Cover of Rosalind Krauss’s A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson, 2000).

In visual art, the art theorist Rosalind Krauss long ago wrote about the “post-medium condition,” the idea that artists had stopped thinking about the specificity of what worked best in one medium and not another, dabbling in this and that, resulting in a sloppy mishmash with no real internal critical standards besides what got attention. She did hold out hope that one could think about “medium” in a more abstract way, one that was more about a way of thinking or working than about a traditional material support. Still, she wrote very severely, “the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art.”

Krauss thought that the arrival of video back in the 1970s was a contributor to the post-medium condition in art. As opposed to film, video felt so immediate and cheap and fluid that it tended to create art that was shapeless, deskilled, and meant to be seen everywhere and nowhere. Artists, she alleged, were tempted to explore the fascination of their own persona and image rather than think intensely about the experiential properties of the video image (the title of her essay on the subject, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” says it all.)

I’ve always thought that Krauss’s view of both video art and the “post-medium condition” was too dismissive and too general. But it does feel newly relevant to return to now. The rapid ascent of trivially accessible short-form video content since 2020 has filled the communications world with high-speed mashups of image, text, and performance. A condition once relevant to only the very eccentric case of art-making has now engulfed media-making of all kinds, including the writing about art itself.

What was dubbed “sludge” content a few years ago—those TikToks and YouTube Shorts where multiple unrelated clips play nonsensically on top of one another for no other reason than to seize your attention for a few seconds more—feels like a symbol: nothing can stand on its own; it always has to be complemented by something more stimulating, whether that something else benefits it or not. Sludge and slop and slurry are all connected phenomena.

Screenshot of a post by @GBBranstetter about “sludge content.”

“A World That’s No Longer Entirely a World”

I know that as a writer, my irritation with slurry is not just about the phenomenon itself. There have always been low-effort versions of pretty much every genre of cultural product. There are plenty of people doing thoughtful work in experimental ways across new media. I watch a lot of video essays.

But I know that what I’m talking about—the sense of so much stuff straining to translate itself into a form that isn’t comfortable or appropriate for what it’s trying to do—bugs me because I associate it with the onset of a truly post-literate culture, where everything has to fit fragmented, ever-shortening attention spans. And as a writer that puts a pit in my stomach.

This is not the place to get into an extended argument about the cultural and political consequences of post-literacy. But I will put in a good word for words, here at the end.

As architecture critic Kate Wagner mentions in a great essay (please, do read it), the reality is that writing is in such a vulnerable state because it has already been so degraded by the wretched demands of the digital economy, which has primed the audience to treat it in such an expedient way. And lately, I’ve had this experience when I actually encounter a piece of text where you can really feel the work that has been done to make it do what writing can do best as writing, availing itself of the tools of comparison and metaphor and style and POV that may not be optimized for quick scanning, but that make writing uniquely good… My brain lights up as if I have just bitten into a piece of fruit. As if suddenly realizing, by contrast, that I have been eating exclusively on fruit-flavored candy for some time. “Finally, something with some nutrients!”

A woman walks past as Untitled (Our people are better than your people)(1994) by Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine South Gallery on January 31, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

That thought came to me reading Fire Season: Selected Essays, 1984–2021, by the late, great writer and critic Gary Indiana. The confident intensity of Indiana’s essay about Barbara Kruger (originally for the catalogue to her 1999 L.A. MOCA show, I believe) pulls me in. It’s not even just that Indiana explains why Kruger’s work is good; it’s that the work becomes good because someone is able to write like that about it. Indiana’s virtuosity in his medium tells you, “this is art for people who are serious about what they do.”

I picked Indiana’s Kruger essay from the collection almost at random. It’s the first essay in Fire Seasonabout art, and I was thinking about art writing. But it occurs to me that Kruger’s famous environments, with their mixture of high-impact text and images, in a style at once destabilizing and precise so that you are made to wonder always, uneasily, “why is this like this?” and “how do I fit this all together?,” is really the perfect object for the matter at hand.

Here is a passage from Indiana’s essay:

Kruger’s rich raw material is this bizarro world of media that surrounds us and gurgles in our living rooms, that makes our choices for us, shows and tells us what reality is supposed to be. According to what, we might ask, but fewer and fewer of us do ask, if you want to be clear minded about it—a theater of death, where the shadows of the dead—us—flicker in Plato’s cave; a theater of unceasing electronic fizz that creates and nurtures the desire to become discorporate, to become a floating, bodyless replica of oneself in a world that’s no longer entirely a world, a figure instead of a body, something ME and NOT ME, YOU and NOT YOU in the same collapsed moment.

That serves as a neat description of the forces of enslurrification now. In the dense and magnetic force of the writing, it also pulls us back from them. God it’s good.