Brian D.'s Profile

1/22/2014

Yelp is useful. When I'm in a new neighborhood and need a bite to eat I always open my Yelp app and search for a good local spot. I've found great places through Yelp that I'd never have found by accident--a Himalayan restaurant above a nail salon in Queens, a homey mom-and-pop café in a LA business center. But even more than the useful of Yelp I like its funny and cool. Yelp will publish anything, and people write some really weird stuff. Once I came across a Yelp page for a subway station where one girl had written "I like this station because it's right near my house." Good for you. I also like to read reviews of places like Burger King or CVS. why would anyone yelp them? No one goes to BK without already knowing what to expect. The brand managers of a big chain make sure the customer experience is consistent and predictable no matter what location you're in. That's what we expect of them--sameness. And yet for all the apparent sameness a Yelp review of Dunkin Donuts can be really fun and interesting to read. Because the reality of life is that every experience is unique. And Yelp--as a place where any brand that isn't Yelp has no power to manage the consistency of its image--reveals that truth.

I'm into art, so even though I've been using Yelp for years I didn't start my own Yelp account until I happened upon a Yelp page of a gallery while googling and it occurred to me that I too could Yelp about art. I hadn't thought it through at the time but since then I've come to realize what appealed to me is this expression of subjective experience rubbing against the sameness of the art world. The Guggenheim is like Burger King. You don't go there because it got good reviews on Yelp. You go there because you know the brand. You've been to museums before, if not the Guggnheim, and you know what it will be like. The Gugg is similar to what you get at the Whitney, and though all the galleries in Chelsea have their own name they all belong to the global brand of "contemporary art." And that brand strives for consistency as much as BK. How galleries show art is totally standardized, white walls purifying space around the art, and how they talk about art is standard too. Museum wall texts or gallery press releases have a uniform scholastic style that can be unreadable. And they don't account for all the ways art can be in the world--the way art looks in a studio or a home is very different from a museum and the way people experience it there is different too. Going to galleries you come to assume that that's the only way art can be--but its not true! I like reading art reviews on Yelp to be reminded of this and I write them for the same reason.

The weird thing about Yelp is that even though it's a platform for a diversity of voices it also obscures them by averaging them out in one rating and just publishing an unreadable number. if I'm trying to choose a satisfying restaurant I'll look at some positive reviews and some negative ones to see what vibes with my own tastes and judge based on that. But the vast majority I'll never read. So visibility of difference ends up as invisibility. It's not a person's opinion that matters but Yelp's aggregation. People have tastes, Yelp has authority. It's not enough for a business to say "People love us." It's "People love us ON YELP." Yelp's the critic. Which is interesting because the critic--of art or of food or whatever--has traditionally been a human with feelings like any other but a superior skill for articulating these feelings through rational argument. That's what public discourse of newspapers holds in esteem--reason. But Yelp as a corporate entity or software app takes the burden of reason away from us humans. It calculates value for us, leaving us with our subjective human feelings. And it needs us to have them. It's not enough for a business to say "Yelp says we are good." It's "People LOVE us on Yelp."

Maybe I'm taking this too far but I see this as a reflection of what's happening politically. The critic appeared around the same time as representative democracy and the appearance of Yelp as a critic seems to coincide with a post-democratic governance, or whatever you'd call it. "Corporations are people" now and the government serves those corporate people with the nominal default approval of the humans born on its land who don't bother to leave. There are polls for measuring how people FEEL about govt performance but no real means of DOING anything with those feelings. Measurements of public opinion have nothing to do with real power--citizenship is the same kind of visible invisibility available on Yelp. As citizens we're like users, powerless even when active or "elite," giving the corporate people license to do what they want just by continuing to live. So I see Yelp as a model for how society works now. And that's what makes Yelp interesting If a little frightening/depressing. As a tool for understanding how things are in the world, it's useful.