At the NY Times, Jason Farago goes on at length about the end of the modernist project, the artistic command to "make it new."
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. . . . 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. . . .
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
This is not at all a new sentiment; back in 2012 I wrote about an article that noted how paltry were the stylistic changes between 2012 and 1992 compared to those between 1992 and 1972, 1972 and 1952, 1952 and 1932, and so on. I mention this essay because Farago has an interesting theory about what is behind this: digital modes of distribution.
The idea is that art and style changed rapidly through the modern period because there was a "hot" in group that established the trends, and people worked hard to keep up with those changing trends because that made you a hipster plugged into what was happening. If you didn't keep up, you were a hopeless square. So the rapid change happened because these avant garde circles had the power to drag everyone else along with them.
Much of the power of those in groups came because they were able to dominate the very limited channels of distribution: the radio, the key galleries, the big city symphonies, the very small world of cutting edge film. But the digital world has unlimited power of distribution, which nullifies the power of those channels and thus the power of the avant garde. Without needing to keep up with the ultra-cool trendsetters, they is no incentive for stylistic or artistic change.
It fascinates me that as far as music goes, there is essentially no generation gap between me and my children. The things they like that I don't span the decades from Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra to The Mountain Goats. Farago notes that the number one single of 2022 was actually released in 2020 but took more than a year to go viral on TikTok. That is because today's music, says Farago, consumer pays no attention to what is "hot" at the moment but cruises thorugh the decades as whim or taste requires.
So, in this telling, rapid cultural change was created by the ability of a small, innovative avant garde to seize control of the key distribution nodes and force everyone to go along with them or be square, and the freedom the internet gives us to see or hear whatever we want, whenever we want, destroys their power and puts us back in a situation where changing a whole immense culture is very difficult.
3 comments:
1/2
I think this comes to a wildly wrong conclusion.
Digital distribution doesn't homogenize things. Corporate mergers and acquisitions did.
Major companies used to be separate, and used to compete with each other. Now only about a dozen corporations own everything, with each one directly controlling dozens or even hundreds of smaller companies and brands, and they actually collaborate more than they compete.
Disney is a great example - look at the size and scope of their operations in the past, and compare that with their unimaginable wealth and influence today. They were resoundingly successful between 1937 (the release of their first feature film, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs) through to the death of Walt Disney in 1966, creating hit film after hit film continuously for decades and leaving a permanent mark on popular culture ever since... but they were still a relatively small company that had lots of competition. They would explode in size and influence in the second half of their century long existence.
Disney's IPO was in 1957.
It took them 13 years to reach a market cap of $1 billion in 1970.
It took them just 17 more years to reach $10 billion in 1987.
It took them just 10 more years to reach $50 billion in 1997.
It took them just 16 more years to reach $100 billion in 2013.
From their IPO in 1957, it took them 56 years to reach a market cap of $100 billion.
They were able to double that to $200 billion by 2015. An amount of growth that had previously taken more than half a century now took little more than three years.
Now, yes - this is just stock value, which is an imperfect indicator. But we're talking about a company that at its peak was earning more net income in a single year than the entire GDP of The Bahamas, and whose total assets have ballooned to absurd levels.
If the Walt Disney Company was a country, it's total asset value of $208.3 billion would allow it to rank #74 out of a total of 175 countries.
@G- I get what you're saying, but consider, say, Britain in the 1950s, where the BBC totally dominated radio and television and a very small group of publishers dominated the book trade, but radicalism throve like never before. It seems to me that if there is money to be made in promoting new art, corporations will leap to make it.
@John
Television and radio and even books still had to compete with things like pamphlets, and magazines, and fliers, and even just good old fashioned word of mouth. Britain in the 1950s had far more cultural impact being introduced via neighbors gossiping over fences than it ever did via the BBC.
Also, "radicalism" spreads in a different way than art, fashion, and entertainment does. Radicalism, by its very definition, is NEVER spread via mainstream media channels. Radicalism doesn't care what the BBC is saying or doing on the radio or television, because it fundamentally doesn't travel via those channels.
You can't compare the spread of "radicalism" and the rate of fashion turnover in mainstream culture, because they're fundamentally different and separate things. Tastes in music and clothing and dancing and all the rest are sometimes prone to rapid change because those are all products being sold - and when there is meaningful competition in the market, creating "the next big thing" before your opponents do is a way to make a lot of money.
In contrast, those exact same products see much less turnover in a less competitive market, because the risk-reward calculations don't favor pushing for change. Why would you take a gamble and devote a bunch of time, money, and resources into making something new that might not catch on, when the payoff if it works won't even be all that meaningful?
Taking risks in a competitive market can be greatly rewarding, gaining you a sizeable edge over the competition, even if only temporarily. But taking those same risks a non-competitive market doesn't have the same payout - whatever edge you stand to gain is far more negligible.
A marketplace with hundreds of small companies all trying to get a leg up is one which sees a lot of risk taking and a lot of new ideas being given chances, which leads to at least some of them catching on and becoming dominant (even if many, many, many others fail and go under).
But a marketplace with a small handful of massive companies - which are so large you can't really get a leg up on them anyway no matter what you do - sees very little risk taking, because at that point it's a game of margins and attrition rather than one of innovation. At that level, companies have everything to lose, and almost nothing to gain, and so they become conservative and cautious, and focus most of their energy on simply maintaining the status quo rather than trying to radically upset the balance of things.
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