"Make It New" No More
Also: Entertaining ourselves to death, the rise and fall of Ian Fleming, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime terror, and more.
In an essay in the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine, Jason Farago makes two claims: One, culture is not “progressing” like it used to progress; and, two, that’s not a bad thing:
For 160 years, we spoke about culture as something active, something with velocity, something in continuous forward motion. What happens to a culture when it loses that velocity, or even slows to a halt? Walking through the other galleries of the Met after my third visit to “Manet/Degas,” I started doing that thing all the Salon visitors used to do in Paris in 1866: ignoring the paintings and scoping out the other spectators’ clothes. I saw visitors in the skinny jeans that defined the 2000s and in the roomy, high-waisted jeans that were popular in the 1990s; neither style looked particularly au courant or dated. Manet was a fashion maven, and I’d been marveling anew at the gauzy white-striped gown with flared sleeves that Berthe Morisot wears in “The Balcony” to signal that she is a contemporary woman — that she is alive right now. What piece of clothing or accessory could you give a model to mark her as “Young Lady in 2023”? A titanium-cased iPhone is all that comes to mind, and even that hasn’t changed its appearance much in a decade.
To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural birthright. Susan Sontag could write in 1965, with breezy confidence, that new styles of art, cinema, music and dance “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare.” Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. Intellectual property has swallowed the cinema; the Hollywood studios that once proposed a slate of big, medium and small pictures have hedged their bets, and even independent directors have stuck with narrative and visual techniques born in the 1960s. Have you tried to furnish an apartment lately? Whether you are at Restoration Hardware or on Alibaba, what you are probably buying are replicas of European antiques: “contemporary” designs first seen in Milan in the 1970s or Weimar in the 1920s. Harry Styles is rocking in the ’80s; Silk Sonic is jamming in the ’70s; somehow “Frasier” has been revived and they barely had to update the wardrobes.
I don’t particularly care for the breezy generalities that are now apparently part of the house style of The New York Times’s culture pages. “For 160 years, we spoke about culture as something active, something with velocity, something in continuous forward motion”? Who is “we,” and what does “active” and “velocity” even mean with respect to “culture” as a whole? Sentences like these grate, and Farago’s piece has a number of them.
But I think he is generally right that today’s culture—that is, today’s music, film, fiction, poetry—lacks a certain liveliness. There are exceptions, of course, and a lot of great work, but there is also a lot of work that feels recycled.
The turn to politics in art that is a result of a lack of interest in aesthetic problems and confusion about beauty itself hasn’t helped. Using art to make political statements became a way of disguising this lack of interest or confusion and, at the same time, making otherwise mediocre works of art seem “important.” But, in the end, the mediocrity is all too apparent.
Farago blames technology for this lack of liveliness:
The key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense. “It’s still one Earth,” the novelist Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a global collective unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one unmediated plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their dimensions. Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a thing to nibble at, to graze on.
Outside of time there can be no progress, only the perpetual trying-on of styles and forms. Here years become vibes — or “eras,” as Taylor Swift likes to call them. And if culture is just a series of trends, then it is pointless to worry about their contemporaneity. There was a charming freakout last year when Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” went to the top of the charts after its deployment on yet another nostalgic television show, and veterans of the big-hair decade were horrified to see it appear on some 2022 playlists alongside Dua Lipa and the like. If you think the song belongs to 1985 in the way “Young Lady in 1866” belonged to 1866, the joke is now officially on you.
He’s right that technology has flattened time. It has also flattened regional differences, which were always the source, as T.S. Eliot has argued, of new forms of art. The sonnet, bluegrass, the limerick, the epistolary novel—these were born in regions that had a shared language and practices that developed in partial isolation from other regions.
What Farago doesn’t mention as a source of art’s decline is a decline in religious belief. But surely this is also a contributing factor. Religion provides art with ideas worthy of being embodied in beautiful forms. The great works of modern art that Farago praises as being so surprisingly new were themselves still indebted to a religious understanding of art—or to a memory of that understanding. Without religion, art is little more than a stimulus for excitement that has to compete with other stimuli.
Farago thinks that the way to deal with this “stasis” is to simply accept it: “Surely it would be healthier — and who knows what might flower — if we accepted and even embraced the end of stylistic progress, and at last took seriously the digital present we are disavowing.”
Reject the absurd idea of stylistic “progress”? Yes. But “take seriously the digital present”? I’m not even sure what this means? Pretend like the superficial repetitiveness and banal politics of much of contemporary art is OK? Why? Because there are no other options?
What an intellectually unsatisfying—maybe even dishonest—solution.
In other news, half of our waking hours are now devoted to entertainment: “Are you not entertained? If not, you just have yourself to blame. Your neighbors now spend most of their waking hours getting entertained, according to research outfit Luminate. This number has grown 22% in the last year. How is this even possible? Don’t people have jobs? Don’t they have family obligations? Don’t they. . . have a life? Maybe not. But who cares, just so long as the TikTok videos keep reeling.”
Patrick Kurp explains why Samuel Taylor Coleridge was “a brilliant windbag junkie.”
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