The Mandela Effect’s effect on aesthetic Communication

Not to be a cynic, but does anyone else look at a painting today and think, “hmm that looks a lot like this other artist i’ve seen.” Has it happened with a piece of fashion? Or music? I believe that our experiences in a world of hyper-scale communication has transformed how we understand visual expression and the creative process. We’ve standardized so much of our lives its allowed for cultural discourse to become streamlined to the point of mass consumption. Not a bad thing necessarily, just a progression of life. For instance, why is it that every time you think of art it usually is something you can hang behind a sofa or end table? A rectangular object that predicates its value on creating illusions either literally or conceptually. Where did these archetypal understanding come from? Who made that container for art?…Do we need these containers to maintain cohesion around ideas? Does it trivialize them?

At times I feel we are becoming increasingly homogeneous to account for accessibility & interconnectivity. Despite obvious positives, I wonder how we (as a society) will maintain nuance in aesthetic discourse. Perhaps everything has fallen into a veil of consumer level understandings lol. However, we could also be developing a global consciousness that has the utility to abbreviate our most shared value systems through communal iconographies. The nature of derivative expression is simply now a way to reaffirm memories while maintaining a framework for new audiences to quickly trace historical context through an idea’s graphic representations. A system where a school of thought is upheld loosely by ubiquitous signifiers that in turn become echoed by the reimagined “entry points” its audience chooses to create. Thus building on its original legacy.

Although this top layer of visual recall is helpful in quickly setting tone by registering on an empathetic level, it offers a limited understanding of hard facts like amounts, dates, or analytics. This issue is something I believe many have come to refer to as the “Mandela Effect.” Nelson Mandela, who this theory is named after, died in 2013. However, countless people distinctly remember him dying in prison in the 1980s. People understand the legacy of Nelson Mandela through the vast amount content that documents his rise through politics, but I honestly know him best from memes of Morgan Freeman playing him in the movie Invictus. All of these representations are versions of the truth and the compounded retelling of his story magnify his memory while also diluting it to its most iconagraphic and vague understandings. By limiting the details of a narrative it welcomes a wider audience into the narrative, even if it becomes increasingly remixed and obscured. Here are a few examples illustrating moments of recall where viewers can enter into the ethos of a brand or intilectual property while being unsure about specific attributes.

Oscar Mayer

One of the most confounding of all: There's an "A" in "Mayer"?! Honest, thought it was Meyer.

Curious George's Tail

... was never there lol.

'Sex and the City'

While these four women were having sex in the city, the show was actually titled Sex and the City.

The Mandela Effect is a condition that provides a superficiality to aesthetics where we understand the “gist of it” whether the signifier for something is genuine or not. It’s a moment in contemporary art where we use visual design to solve problems, sell products, and connect communities while achieving maximum buy-in. Instead of seeking originality we mirror ideas we like and use our personal lens to add dynamism and quickly communicate our value systems. This is why you see emerging artists treating “basquiat” like a genre within neo'-expressionism. Or why the notion of bootleg fashion is a genre in and of itself. It’s a favorable approach because it allows us to feel represented in iconographies that we have attachments to, even if we don’t totally understand them. I feel this thinking came about with the progression of pop to post-modernist culture. It’s like breaking the 4th wall only here an artists (broadly defined) becomes a genre through their influence on a sub-culture or community. It may be the result of irony at scale. Maybe we’re degrading our ability to discern authenticity but we may also be cultivating our ability to vibe and empathize despite our nuanced interpretations. I guess if you really need to dig into the details, that’s what wikipedia is for. :P