When mass culture meets high culture: reality television and big data at the art museum.

This article analyzes the cultural beliefs surrounding reality television and social media through the lens of the museum installation *America's Got No Talent*, a web-based artwork commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The installation visualizes social media activity on the platform X (formerly Twitter) related to reality TV contests such as *American Idol*, *America's Got Talent*, *America's Next Top Model*, and *America's Best Dance Crew*, arranging this data into an image resembling the U.S. flag to explore connections between televised contests, social media engagement, and U.S. national identity. The article critiques how the artwork collapses differences among diverse reality programs, simplifies television industry practices related to big data, and perpetuates hierarchical notions of taste and class by framing reality television audiences as a homogeneous "mass" often associated with low cultural status and political conservatism. It further discusses the complexities and limitations of using social media analytics as measures of audience engagement and questions the ideological implications of such representations within both media and museum contexts.