This is stretching the world "culture" to fit almost any human activity. If you can't spot the difference between a novel and shit-posting, then you're already compromised. The types of "art forms" described in this piece are not descendants of the more serious art we are losing. These people are, if anything, the pamphleteers and street preachers and con men of our times. They are not new Melvilles, Tarkovskys, Woolfs, etc.
Vaudeville is a great comparison. Vaudevillians were generalists. They could dance, sing, play piano, do magic, act, and sometimes do acrobatics, all semicompetently. They didn't have great talent in any one area. Their greatness was their protean flexibility, their ability to take any situation and convert it to good entertainment with a narrative.
I think I’m agreeing with you when I say that I’ve lived through quite a few of these cycles already, and I find that the apologists for the new always overrate the current landscape, while the bellyachers always miss what is interesting and vital about the current landscape.
Even though I’m most excited about older culture, a lot of my favorite stuff is stuff that many people my age hated when it came out. I mean, I prefer music from the 1920’s but I’m also fascinated by Aphex Twin. (Not the most contemporary reference but I really like Aphex Twin.) And over in the world of “avant garde” music that most people having this debate from either side don’t know about, there’s a real renaissance going on. Also— a lot of people yelling at clouds don’t know shit about, say, the films they’re making in other countries.
I’ve been dismissive of current culture since I was a teen in the 80s, but there’s been interesting stuff happening in every era. Usually it took me a while to recognize this. And I recall reading McLuhan books from before my teen years that had made the same kind of point you’re making even earlier, back in the 60s.
This piece is a good example of why I subscribe; reading you is a good way to keep my cultural prejudices in check.
I am a book and movie lover (I usually make it to the theatre at least twice a month), but some of the most interesting and deeply creative works I have seen over the last few years have been short form and created for YouTube. I get more excited about new Brian David Gilbert works now than I do about new stuff from most established film directors. (I have also been terminally online since 1993, FWIW. Still not a huge fan of TikTok outside of B. Dylan Hollis, though.)
This is a sincere question: I take what you’re saying here to be true, that the cultivation of an internet persona across various platforms (a writer’s novel, for instance, existing to bolster the online identity as opposed to the other way around) is itself a work of art. But can this kind of art achieve what (I think) people have traditionally gone to art for: beauty, awe, wonder, transcendence that can speak across time, that will last forever? Or is that not the goal of this particular style of art?
Have people gone traditionally to art for awe and transcendence though? A lot of what we’d consider art through history has been for entertainment (music, theater, dance), function (architecture, fashion), or propaganda.
Even the most mindless entertainment offers a vision of how we should and should not relate to others. It's a human tradition that stretches back at least 30,000 years that is being disrupted by these new forms, not just movies or books.
I meant to add “always” in the first sentence. Yes, people have gone to art for the things you mentioned, but not everyone, not always and not all art.
I agree with that completely. But all of those forms you mentioned at least have the capacity to bring about the beauty, transcendence, etc. And it has been in the mind of many of the great practitioners of those arts to achieve those very things, regardless of how they were received. What I’m wondering is, in the influencer/TikTok/internet world, are those things even on the table? And if so, I’d love to be pointed in their direction!
(also want to clarify that i don’t mean that in snarky way. this is just something i’ve wondered about for a long time and wanted to ask about but was worried i’d get screamed at)
I didn’t think it was snarky at all!!! ❤️I love these conversations about art. I’m not ready to fully embrace influencers as artists, but I’m also not ready to entirely dismiss the notion of some creators as making performance art. It is an interesting proposition and refreshing to say the least. I don’t really consume influencer content, but I’m always curious to understand why so many people flock to certain types of content. I also want to find a way of hope in all the doom and gloom about culture/art-making, which seems to be one of Substack’s specialties, it seems.
I find the argument that culture is not stuck to be convincing, but that argument is not incompatible with decadence.
In short, if hypothesized that i find forms of culture largely shaped by social media algorithms aimed to capture attention to degrade the range of cultural appreciation that we, and i include myself in this, are capable of.
I did find this piece to be a useful piece of appreciation that gives me better tools to understand what i do appreciate about my own niche of YouTube personalities and such. Not covered in the piece, but consistent, the board game and roleplaying game scene have had years of growth that i do find positive and were encouraged by some social media phenoms that reinforced what is typically a small group activity. (For me boardgame review sites like No Pun Included or Shut Up and Sit Down are cathedrals i appreciate and i suppose a form of consumerism).
That said, with the rise of generative AI and algorithms taking the role of human critics, editors, and marketers, i still consider these shifts in culture to be a net loss that should be resisted by consciously attempting to revitilize longer attention-span in one sitting forms of art, albeit using the tools and afgordances of our present era.
This is extremely insightful—and I often think about the ways 20th century art forms (film, television, which were themselves historical anomalies for their ability to reach the masses and for their reliance commerce and technology) are going the way of theater, becoming niche, after commerce and technology marches past them.
Now it seems this new paradigm (culture born from the intersection of money + tech) is where the magic is, and that doesn’t make the culture any less vital, important, and human than culture past eras. In the future people will look back and realize this was the case.
Given that the Internet Archive and Google cache are going the way of the dodo bird, the ephemera of internet culture from this period will disappear into the ether. “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies…”
I think that most cultural evolution is driven by technology, and the stagnation of a form or its decline are because of a lack of new technologies or that a technology allows another form of art to appear.
Opera, choral and orchestral music are all from the era before amplifcation. Once you have amplification you get bands and musicals. Pop music has really been going nowhere for 30 years because there's been no tech since then. Any pop you hear today could have been made then, which was not true of some music in 1990. Which means there's a glut of supply of music. What are you going to do that's going to sound fresh?
Fashion's development has been around machinery, dyes, synthetic fabric. The invention of elastene allowed for pantyhose to be made, and this led to the miniskirt.
As for cinema, it's evolving. The independent and foreign film sectors are where the most exciting films are being made right now. Digital, streaming, marketing via word-of-mouth have opened this up. Godzilla Minus One cost $13m to make and it looks like a $100m Hollywood movie. You're not going to stay in business making something for $100m if others can do it for $13m
Fantastic article. I think I also got stuck in this thought process of us not having new subcultures, but something not taking the form of past culture, doesn’t mean it’s not a culture. We fail to make that distinction.
I found this at least somewhat enlightening. But I think the bigger problem we have today is not in how we express ourselves culturally, but that many have no recognizable center. People are vehemently 'for' and 'against', yet have little sense of individual identity.
My writing, as my pseudonym suggests, centers around individuality in contrast to social conformity. I belong to a writer's workshop. It is devoted to fiction writing. Personal philosophies are not the topic of discussion, but they show themselves in our writings. I thoroughly respect my peers in that group and take their criticisms seriously. However, they generally don't understand what I'm getting at when I depict a character breaking with the norm and setting their own direction. It's not that they object to it, they just don't get it.
People *absolutely* have much weaker identities than they did fifty years ago, if only due to the massive increase in # of children raised by a single parent.
The story of an oddball finding their place in the world is more compelling than the story of a normie finding their own direction. The former is about returning and belonging, the latter is about leaving home and atomization.
"People are vehemently 'for' and 'against', yet have little sense of individual identity."
Tbh I can see somewhat where you're coming from, even though we'd probably disagree on a lot. But that's kinda the purpose of universal education/ideology/parties/etc to begin with; to homogenize people, and culture (which ends up transcending borders) aids in that as well. Individualization as it used to occur - that is through family, community, common ethnicity/local culture/etc - has changed and the influence on a person has massively expanded; everything is being outsourced.
As an example, this both results in various fringe communities - consider those into true crime, or for that matter those into serial killers/school shooters about which Katherine has written about recently - but it also leads to assimilation into the dominant (now international) culture, determined primarily by who dominates various mediums - social media, movies/tv shows/gaming and journalism. Tumblr and its past influence is a good example as well, especially as it's not contained within the US.
This is stretching the world "culture" to fit almost any human activity. If you can't spot the difference between a novel and shit-posting, then you're already compromised. The types of "art forms" described in this piece are not descendants of the more serious art we are losing. These people are, if anything, the pamphleteers and street preachers and con men of our times. They are not new Melvilles, Tarkovskys, Woolfs, etc.
Correct.
Vaudeville is a great comparison. Vaudevillians were generalists. They could dance, sing, play piano, do magic, act, and sometimes do acrobatics, all semicompetently. They didn't have great talent in any one area. Their greatness was their protean flexibility, their ability to take any situation and convert it to good entertainment with a narrative.
I think I’m agreeing with you when I say that I’ve lived through quite a few of these cycles already, and I find that the apologists for the new always overrate the current landscape, while the bellyachers always miss what is interesting and vital about the current landscape.
Even though I’m most excited about older culture, a lot of my favorite stuff is stuff that many people my age hated when it came out. I mean, I prefer music from the 1920’s but I’m also fascinated by Aphex Twin. (Not the most contemporary reference but I really like Aphex Twin.) And over in the world of “avant garde” music that most people having this debate from either side don’t know about, there’s a real renaissance going on. Also— a lot of people yelling at clouds don’t know shit about, say, the films they’re making in other countries.
I’ve been dismissive of current culture since I was a teen in the 80s, but there’s been interesting stuff happening in every era. Usually it took me a while to recognize this. And I recall reading McLuhan books from before my teen years that had made the same kind of point you’re making even earlier, back in the 60s.
This piece is a good example of why I subscribe; reading you is a good way to keep my cultural prejudices in check.
I am a book and movie lover (I usually make it to the theatre at least twice a month), but some of the most interesting and deeply creative works I have seen over the last few years have been short form and created for YouTube. I get more excited about new Brian David Gilbert works now than I do about new stuff from most established film directors. (I have also been terminally online since 1993, FWIW. Still not a huge fan of TikTok outside of B. Dylan Hollis, though.)
"The present is always invisible."--Marshall Mcluhan
These new-fangle novels are just brain rot and we need to get back epic poetry. Preferably in Ancient Greek Dactylic Hexameters.
@Clinton Ignatov
you capture ideas in such vivid clarity this was a joy to read :)
Thank you!
This is a sincere question: I take what you’re saying here to be true, that the cultivation of an internet persona across various platforms (a writer’s novel, for instance, existing to bolster the online identity as opposed to the other way around) is itself a work of art. But can this kind of art achieve what (I think) people have traditionally gone to art for: beauty, awe, wonder, transcendence that can speak across time, that will last forever? Or is that not the goal of this particular style of art?
Have people gone traditionally to art for awe and transcendence though? A lot of what we’d consider art through history has been for entertainment (music, theater, dance), function (architecture, fashion), or propaganda.
Even the most mindless entertainment offers a vision of how we should and should not relate to others. It's a human tradition that stretches back at least 30,000 years that is being disrupted by these new forms, not just movies or books.
I meant to add “always” in the first sentence. Yes, people have gone to art for the things you mentioned, but not everyone, not always and not all art.
I agree with that completely. But all of those forms you mentioned at least have the capacity to bring about the beauty, transcendence, etc. And it has been in the mind of many of the great practitioners of those arts to achieve those very things, regardless of how they were received. What I’m wondering is, in the influencer/TikTok/internet world, are those things even on the table? And if so, I’d love to be pointed in their direction!
(also want to clarify that i don’t mean that in snarky way. this is just something i’ve wondered about for a long time and wanted to ask about but was worried i’d get screamed at)
I didn’t think it was snarky at all!!! ❤️I love these conversations about art. I’m not ready to fully embrace influencers as artists, but I’m also not ready to entirely dismiss the notion of some creators as making performance art. It is an interesting proposition and refreshing to say the least. I don’t really consume influencer content, but I’m always curious to understand why so many people flock to certain types of content. I also want to find a way of hope in all the doom and gloom about culture/art-making, which seems to be one of Substack’s specialties, it seems.
I find the argument that culture is not stuck to be convincing, but that argument is not incompatible with decadence.
In short, if hypothesized that i find forms of culture largely shaped by social media algorithms aimed to capture attention to degrade the range of cultural appreciation that we, and i include myself in this, are capable of.
I did find this piece to be a useful piece of appreciation that gives me better tools to understand what i do appreciate about my own niche of YouTube personalities and such. Not covered in the piece, but consistent, the board game and roleplaying game scene have had years of growth that i do find positive and were encouraged by some social media phenoms that reinforced what is typically a small group activity. (For me boardgame review sites like No Pun Included or Shut Up and Sit Down are cathedrals i appreciate and i suppose a form of consumerism).
That said, with the rise of generative AI and algorithms taking the role of human critics, editors, and marketers, i still consider these shifts in culture to be a net loss that should be resisted by consciously attempting to revitilize longer attention-span in one sitting forms of art, albeit using the tools and afgordances of our present era.
This is extremely insightful—and I often think about the ways 20th century art forms (film, television, which were themselves historical anomalies for their ability to reach the masses and for their reliance commerce and technology) are going the way of theater, becoming niche, after commerce and technology marches past them.
Now it seems this new paradigm (culture born from the intersection of money + tech) is where the magic is, and that doesn’t make the culture any less vital, important, and human than culture past eras. In the future people will look back and realize this was the case.
Except that it's not magic.
Given that the Internet Archive and Google cache are going the way of the dodo bird, the ephemera of internet culture from this period will disappear into the ether. “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies…”
We're not the first to lose parts of our culture and we won't be the last
But is it a culture if it is so ephemeral?
In most stories, there are no true winners.
——The Kite Runner(written by Khaled Hosseini)
I disagree with this but it was worth reading and I'm gonna let it percolate
Thank you
genius
I think that most cultural evolution is driven by technology, and the stagnation of a form or its decline are because of a lack of new technologies or that a technology allows another form of art to appear.
Opera, choral and orchestral music are all from the era before amplifcation. Once you have amplification you get bands and musicals. Pop music has really been going nowhere for 30 years because there's been no tech since then. Any pop you hear today could have been made then, which was not true of some music in 1990. Which means there's a glut of supply of music. What are you going to do that's going to sound fresh?
Fashion's development has been around machinery, dyes, synthetic fabric. The invention of elastene allowed for pantyhose to be made, and this led to the miniskirt.
As for cinema, it's evolving. The independent and foreign film sectors are where the most exciting films are being made right now. Digital, streaming, marketing via word-of-mouth have opened this up. Godzilla Minus One cost $13m to make and it looks like a $100m Hollywood movie. You're not going to stay in business making something for $100m if others can do it for $13m
Had the same thought but you said it much better than me.
Fantastic article. I think I also got stuck in this thought process of us not having new subcultures, but something not taking the form of past culture, doesn’t mean it’s not a culture. We fail to make that distinction.
Yes!! I wrote a piece about that earlier this year
I found this at least somewhat enlightening. But I think the bigger problem we have today is not in how we express ourselves culturally, but that many have no recognizable center. People are vehemently 'for' and 'against', yet have little sense of individual identity.
My writing, as my pseudonym suggests, centers around individuality in contrast to social conformity. I belong to a writer's workshop. It is devoted to fiction writing. Personal philosophies are not the topic of discussion, but they show themselves in our writings. I thoroughly respect my peers in that group and take their criticisms seriously. However, they generally don't understand what I'm getting at when I depict a character breaking with the norm and setting their own direction. It's not that they object to it, they just don't get it.
I'd actually push back on this -- I don't think people have less of an individual identity in the present day.
People *absolutely* have much weaker identities than they did fifty years ago, if only due to the massive increase in # of children raised by a single parent.
The story of an oddball finding their place in the world is more compelling than the story of a normie finding their own direction. The former is about returning and belonging, the latter is about leaving home and atomization.
"People are vehemently 'for' and 'against', yet have little sense of individual identity."
Tbh I can see somewhat where you're coming from, even though we'd probably disagree on a lot. But that's kinda the purpose of universal education/ideology/parties/etc to begin with; to homogenize people, and culture (which ends up transcending borders) aids in that as well. Individualization as it used to occur - that is through family, community, common ethnicity/local culture/etc - has changed and the influence on a person has massively expanded; everything is being outsourced.
As an example, this both results in various fringe communities - consider those into true crime, or for that matter those into serial killers/school shooters about which Katherine has written about recently - but it also leads to assimilation into the dominant (now international) culture, determined primarily by who dominates various mediums - social media, movies/tv shows/gaming and journalism. Tumblr and its past influence is a good example as well, especially as it's not contained within the US.