In May, literary critic Christian Lorenzen published a Substack Newsletter about feeling bored. “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books by major publishers are boring,” he wrote.
Since I was pretty bored too, I paid $5 to read the entire work, but was not convinced by his conclusion, which blamed artistic stagnation on the preeminent position of marketing. The cultural conglomerates’ risk aversion can’t explain why there isn’t a lot of interesting indie stuff emerging. I hope that when the black hole of Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an end, the energy diverted might allow for a cultural boom. So far that has not happened.
One stark warning: I’m a middle-aged white parent, so, by definition, anything really interesting happens out of my sight. However, when I go to cafes where young people hang out, the music is usually the kind of music I heard when I was younger, or the kind of music that sounds like it. One of the best-selling singles of the year was a song by Kate Bush released in 1985. I can think of none of the recent novels or films that have sparked heated debate. The public arguments people have about art – often about appropriation and crime – have become stale and repetitive, almost by heart.
The posts written about the microscopically intrusive Manhattan microscape called Dimes Square that is evidence of a cultural drought; The chroniclers of antiquity were hungry for new fodder. (I’m guilty of writing one such a piece myself.) A lot of people are looking for something interesting and new but don’t find it.
The best explanation I have read for our current cultural unrest is given at the end of W. David Marx’s forthcoming book.”Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion, and constant change”, a book that is not boring and has changed subtly the way I see the world.
Marx saw cultural evolution as a kind of perpetual motion machine driven by the human desire to rise above the social hierarchy. Artists innovate to gain status, and people unconsciously adjust their tastes to signal their status level or transition to a new level. As he writes in the introduction, “The struggle for status promotes cultural creativity in three important areas: competition between socioeconomic classes, the formation of subcultures, and reaction culture, and the wars between artists.”
One of his most resounding examples is the avant-garde composer John Cage. When Cage presents discord orchestral work “Atlas Eclipticalis” at Lincoln Center in 1964, many patrons walked out. The members of the orchestra hissed at Cage as he took the bow; Some even smashed their own electronics. But Cage’s work has inspired other artists, leading “historians and museum curators to see him as an important figure in the development of postmodern art”, thereby making audiences pay attention to his work. (Yoko Ono once divided the history of the music in Before Cage and After Cage.)
“There is a virtuous cycle to Cage: his originality, mystery, and influence have earned him artist status; this encourages organizations to seriously explore his work; Marx wrote. For Marx, this was not a matter of prior pressure. Cachet, he writes, “opens the mind to basic postulates about what art can be and how we should perceive it.”
The internet has changed this dynamic, Marx writes in the concluding part of his book. With so much content out there, it’s less likely that others will make sense of any obscure cultural cues. The art of defiance discredits it. Besides, in the age of the internet, tastes tell you less about a person. You don’t have to join any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage – or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, exotic performing arts, or rare sneakers.
In a way, this is great. People can easily find things they like and waste less time pretending to like things they don’t. Using cultural capital to mark your place in the status hierarchy is snobbish and exclusionary. (Avant-garde art can also be, like Susan Sontag WrittenIt’s pretty boring in itself.)
But people are, obviously, as obsessed with their own status today as they were in the days of rich cultural production. It’s just that people who mark high social rank have become more philistine. As the value of cultural capital declines, Marx writes, it makes “universality and economic capital all the more central in marking status.” As a result, he says, “there is less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate a culture of high symbolic complexity.”
It makes more sense for a parvenu fake a trip on a private jet rather than to fake an interest in contemporary art. We live in a time of rapid change and disorientation in terms of gender, religion and technology. Aesthetically, thanks to the internet, it’s all pretty tedious.
