Playing Consumerism:
The Stunningly Nightmarish Spectacle of Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart

Playing Consumerism: The Stunningly Nightmarish Spectacle of Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart is an exploration of the maximalist installation, Omega Mart, created by the Santa-Fe-based artist collective, Meow Wolf. Founded in 2008, Meow Wolf’s mission is “to inspire creativity through art, exploration, and play so that imagination will transform the world.” Their 52,000 square foot installation housed in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a feat of artistic ingenuity with an interactive narrative component. Visitors who choose to participate in the storyline uncover a thinly veiled narrative for the horrors of capitalism and the responsibility of the consumer to dismantle the system at play.

This essay explores Omega Mart as a branded experience and a key example for understanding a larger popular art form: immersive installations. Walter Benjamin said in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “Art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks wherever it is able to mobilize the masses” (2). At the time, Benjamin was referring to film. Now, multimedia interactive works that feel spectacularly out-of-this-world have arguably assumed this role. Throughout the essay I examine the physical presence of the installation, the interactive storyline, and the digital circulation of the work online. By doing so, I uncover the way the installation resonates with– and how it fails to uphold– the company’s mission of producing innovative art spaces to transform the way individual consumers think and the way they interact with the world at large. By using Omega Mart as a case study, we may consider how and if these forms of multimedia installation and post-internet art can critically interrogate capitalism’s control over our social relationships, as the line between self and consumer disappears through our obsession with commodities.

To accomplish this, my thesis examines art history, media studies, branding, and theories of play in art to contextualize Omega Mart, drawing upon theories of spectacle and aura in Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle (3) and Walter Benjamin’s, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (4).

By analyzing the space, commodities, and digital circulation of Omega Mart, I explore how this compelling and beautiful installation is embedded with frightening, real secrets and consequences through a fantastic allegory of how capitalism values profits over people to extreme ends. Omega Mart is a fundamentally contradictory work of art that makes use of neoliberal business approaches to branding, temporary and youth labor, while also capitalizing upon the coolness of anticapitalism. At the same time, the work defies easy summation into a predetermined set of meanings, given the nuances of visitor choice in the work’s interactive gameplay. Although Meow Wolf is ultimately the game master, each visitor has a very nuanced experience and interpretation of the work based on how they choose to interact with it, and the consumer becomes the game changer.

Notes:

1. “About.” MeowWolf.com. Accessed 1 March 2022. meowwolf.com/about

2. Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 40.

3. Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1994. Accessed March 26, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.

4. Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Brigid Doherty, Michael W Jennings, and Thomas Y Levin, eds. Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).