The End of Cultural History (and Open Thread)

 

"Hard to Be" - David Bazan

(The post title is not a comment on the song, which I quite like and was intrigued to see was filmed in the living room of someone in my hometown.)

I am finding it difficult to comment much more of the dynamics of the Republican race until such time as we get a clearer indication that the Gingrich phenomenon is genuine.  If so (and it appears to be), it will violate so much of the conventional wisdom -- especially the need for a good "ground game" to win in Iowa.

In the meantime, I found this article by Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair to be really interesting.    In it, Andersen ponders the seeming lack of aesthetic change -- in terms of fashion, music, art, architecture, and literature -- over the last twenty years, noting how anomalous that really is.  He asks you to think about for example differences in dress and style if you went from 1912 to 1932 to 1952 to 1972 to 1992.  I think we would all agree that the clothes, hair styles, cars, buildings, movies, novels, and music between say 1952, 1972, and 1992 were all markedly different.  I tend to agree with Andersen that you would not notice all that much difference with respect to any of these things between now and 1992.  

It used to be that twenty years was a huge amount of time in many matters cultural and aesthetic -- here are the top musical LPs of 1958 -- they were followed nine years later by Sgt. Pepper's, which in turn was followed  nine years later by Never Mind the Bollocks.     In 1992, Nirvana released Nevermind and Dr. Dre released The Chronic, neither of which would sound dated today.  Or look at the American films of the late 1950s say versus those of the early 1970s.  It was like several coats of paint were removed from the country's surface during those years.  Again, I don't see the same kind of change between the films of 1992 and the present.   

Andersen posits a few theories for this, although I think it is a really difficult question to answer.  He notes that the main changes between the present and twenty years ago are largely technological rather than artistic -- that is, there was no internet then, no blogs, no ipods, no youtube, no twitter.  But this represents a change in media rather than a change in aesthetics -- we communicate and consume differently, but it does not seem that we create all that much differently.

What do you think?  Do you agree with Andersen's premise?  If so, do you have any persuasive reasons for why this is so?

Add anything else that's on your mind. 

Comments

[oddjob]

especially the need for a good "ground game" to win in Iowa

It would seem to do that, but I can also imagine a national figure who's been around for decades being someone who could pull that off.

(After all this time how many likely Iowa GOP caucus goers are going to feel the need to get a better understanding of Newt by seeing him in person? It's not like he's an unknown, even in the way that a successful GOP governor from a different region of the country would be.)

[Gene O'Grady]

It's a lot less than twenty years. My family has a game of guess the date, and for the typical Hollywood movie from 1925 to 1950 or so we are rarely wrong based on hair style, lettering on stores, clothes, furniture, design, you name it. Also tends to work on buildings when we travel -- I hit a large fraternal order's building in The Dalles within one year using its resemblance to the old college library in Amherst. Couldn't do that once brutalism came in.

[big bad wolf]

i think anderson is not wrong about a certain degree of stasis and i also think that he is not wrong about much of that stasis being capitalism stressing images, though thomas frank nailed this part of anderson's critique long ago in "the conquest of cool." then again it may have taken anderson longer to notice than frank, since anderson lives in new york. new york has enough wealthy people and enough striving people to churn the trends in a way that isn't possible in much of the country. new outfits each season---not really something we do here in the hinterlands, mostly cause we're poorer and older. hell, we can't even get new bands in town. change for its own sake, the new for its own sake, is not necessarily a virtue, and no culture, despite how it likes to present itself is sophisticated just for chasing the new; sometimes it is correct and sometimes it is just silly. luckily for them the silly tends to be forgotten, while the correct is immortalized (if often laughably; see sean wilentz's notes to dylan albums). we can't all be avant-garde, yet trend chasing seems to require that we all think we can be. not possible. or even desirable, since the silly/substance ratio of even the avant-garde is high.

i think some of anderson's examples are silly. i'm not an engineer, but i think the reason we don't see much variation in cars over the last couple of decades is that fuel standards and aerodynamics favor particular shapes. tail fins, large hood ornaments, and big hoods don't cut it in that world.

i also think he overstates the literature case. the modernists broke strongly stylistically and in forthrightness with the late 19th century novelists, including those like james who wrote into the 20th century, but the differences between hemingway and heller are, i think, less than anderson suggests. i doubt there is a catch-22 without the sun also rises. the emptiness that war creates just takes a different form in the latter book, but the willingness to say it aloud in the vernacular isn't so much different. what's more important, i think and anderson doesn't acknowledge this at all is that the sense that novels could matter is what has changed. it's not at all clear to me that a new catch-22 would matter much at all in most of the world. the idea that a change in presentation or even subject of the novel mattered could only exist in a smaller world. similarly, i think that is why there is no new bob dylan or the beatles. the shift anderson is looking for might be evidenced right where he (over)looks---in t.v. a new sopranos or the wire matters much more than a new dylan or sinatra. and those shows are different in style and subject than tv shows of twenty years ago. now, me, with my older aesthetics, i tend to find even the most acclaimed t.v. shows, tendentious or, at least more obvious than literature, music, or paintings, but, whether i am right or wrong (doesn't matter) the shift is toward viewing t.v. shows as the revealing, important medium. that's a big shift.

i think anderson may be looking in the wrong places for change and underestimating some of the ones he acknowledges. tattoos, for instance. i don't like'em, but i understand them as a significant aesthetic and communicative change. so too facebook and the general (and to me shocking) change in what people think of as private, or more accurately, in what people do not consider private or even seem to understand why keeping them private would be a value to some people. these type of things may be the cultural change anderson is looking for, but he may be missing them because he is looking for change in the things that changed when he was a young man.

finally, i find this from anderson incomprehensibly strange: "And yet, on the other hand, for the first time, anyone anywhere with any arcane cultural taste can now indulge it easily and fully online, clicking themselves deep into whatever curious little niche (punk bossa nova, Nigerian noir cinema, pre-war Hummel figurines) they wish. Americans: quirky, independent individualists!" So, anderson thinks caring deeply about a subject and immersing one's self in it is a thing to mock as faux individualism because it keeps us from changing hairstyles and pop music and lapel widthes? i guess i never will understand the cool new york folk who write funny magazines and surround every issue in the name of their public radio shows

[Paula B]

Wow, bbw, you gave us a lot to think about. I think you're on the money about tv/video being the new literary medium. We've just visited a whole bunch of 30-somethings and not one had books in his or her bookcases, only videos. All college-educated, all young parents, all homeowners, all very plugged into the latest trends in parenting and home decorating/remodeling, which means they are mucho aware of where their generation places its capital. Hint: not in dead-tree lit, new or old.
As for individualism, it seems to me the very definition would preclude tapping into fads of any era or continent. Maybe that's what Anderson was saying? Dunno.

[nancy]

With not a cloud in the sky, we were up before dawn and spent about an hour watching a total lunar eclipse happen. It was visible in the western U.S. (not sure how far west). When the earth's shadow block was complete, the moon glowed red for a number of minutes. Viewed through binoculars, it was even more spectacular. I've never seen this phenomenon before -- a little stargazing certainly offers a welcome bit of perspective. City lights make it difficult to manage often which is really too bad. People who live maybe thirty miles from me, where darkness is dark, get treated to a northern lights show pretty regularly. Having never seen them, we're putting a plan to 'attend' in the works.

I think I'm going to put off thinking about twenty-year trend and four-year election cycles for another day.

This was what the show looked like.

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

Very cool. as you note, one of the downsides of being a city dweller is that there is not much chance to star gaze. We have a pretty limited set of visible stars in the sky here.

bbw,

Like a lot of Andersen's work, this piece has its share of both insights and bullshit. It's a pretty big topic for such a short piece, so I suppose it's not surprising that his explanations are not fully satisfactory.

Still, I thought it a pretty provocative idea and the central observation -- the amount of stasis on many matters aesthetic struck me as true. This is not to say that good art isn't being produced -- merely that there does seem to be less innovation and the kind of transformative generational changes that once seemed very natural.

[big bad wolf]

SC, i do not know enough to say whether transformative generational changes were actual or natural. they may have been largely a narrative construction of age-group explanation or a popular form of reading the near-past. or there may have been, for technological or socioeconomic reasons (improvements in health or leisure time, loosening social restrictions that let people who would not have been heard, be heard) a genuine wave of transformative generations from say 1905 to 1975. or it may be that mass and easy access to a wide variety of aesthetics (radio, albums, downloads, the movie house, rentable movies, downloaded movies) has entrenched particular aesthetics for lifetimes. in this situation, what seems to be stasis may be a slow lava flow---big bands and westerns, nat king cole and andy hardy, early rock (even elvis ain't nearly what he used to be in the culture) and private detective noirs drop off into the sea, but they do so over a long time, coexisting for a significant span with all that comes after. we may still change more than at most times in human history, but our ability to retain what we liked aesthetically about the past has been raised, by technology and relative affluence, to a level never before attained.

i don't know. i make all this up as i go along.

in music, i think that something corvus mentioned a few weeks back has resulted in stasis. that thing is technological ease. you don't need a plunger to hold over your trumpet; you don't need to over power the cassette player that you are running through a tiny amp the way keith did for sounds on let it bleed. you just press a button. can't sing, buy autotune. but i think it is accurate to say that one learns by doing and trying and making mistakes. pushing buttons to fix "wrong" sounds or to make interesting ones is not particularly likely to lead to taking risks or being genuinely innovative---the program is what is "innovative."

having said that, i also think that, paradoxically, we overvalue originality. it may not be that there is nothing new under the sun, but it is certain that people have been building on old stories and old art and old music for millenia and much of the "new" came from that. we seem the last three decades or so to have forgotten that and to have placed an undue emphasis on originality. i think this can be unhelpful both to artists and those of us who interact with art. it may be that why cable t.v. has prospered in the past two decades is that it can tell the old stories in a different format (60-minutes, sequential but feeding the created need for the next picture story quickly, still moderately exciting in that you still can't say or show that on broadcast t.v.). by contrast you could say or show it all in song or on film or in a painting years ago.

[Paula B]

re: overvalue originality?

Since we are what we eat (or read or hear), there really is nothing original, is there?
Can any generation build a meaningful library of cultural knowledge on a base as thin and young as video/tv/film?

[nancy]

Paula -- Maybe. Depends on whether there is material worth archiving, analyzing, interpreting and passing on in classrooms. imho. The mediums are making us uncomfortable, but that doesn't negate the messages. Jane Austen used a quill pen and very slow motion publication. Radiohead does an on-line announcement of a freely and instantly available artistic release. I think we have to get used to it. Dickens was in 'serial' release. As were the Federalist Papers. Interesting questions, no?

[big bad wolf]

nancy, is the question whether the material is "worth" archiving, analyzing etc or whether there is interest in archiving, analyzing etc? i lean toward the latter and think that if there is interest by a professor or two who can get it funded, then it will become "worth" it because a justification (which i don't intend to be pejorative, a justification can be entirely valid, either broadly or within its own parameters) will then be created explaining the knowledge we are deriving from this archiving, analyzing, etc. maybe we are deriving it, maybe we are not. it can still be a valid intellectual pursuit, and exercising those intellects is a good, though mistaking the products of our exercises as too deep or to real is a danger.

but i understand paula's question, perhaps incorrectly, to concern not whether something can be studied but whether it can be, on a more generalized level, learned from and made part of what sustains a larger ongoing culture and society. that is, i think, a different concern and one that we will find out about as we go along. breaking bad may can be broken down, but it may or may not offer anything more. perhaps we are past the point of needing anything more, or perhaps it will turn out that we all muddle through because that's what we always do and the future will tell what ended up mattering

cultural change: the future of privacy forum

[corvus9]

Though I have basically reverted back to lurker status, I love when I get mentioned and so wanted to chip in to say I agree with bbw that the advances in recording technology have paradoxically held back the advancement in music. You can't create a new form until you have mastered older ones, and technology nowadays allows people to create art before they reach that level.

I haven't read the Anderson piece, since it sounds like everyone here thinks its not actually very good, but I do agree vaguely with the premise. One possible influence on this relative stasis that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that the level of cultural change and discord over that last twenty years has not been as extreme as previous periods. I mean, the last major riots in this country were the LA Riots in 1992, right? Stuff like that used to happen all the time. Also, in 1992 there was already a sizable population that believed in things like LGBT rights, that sexism was wrong, that racism was anathema (if still widely practiced). The last 20 years have felt like a period of slow, steady encroachment whether than one of violent social upheaval. It's definitely not a coincidence the that period of the most politically turbulence in the last half century, 1964-1972 abouts, was also one of the periods of the vibrant artistic innovation (Not just in music either, that's when you had Vonnegut kicking ass, and the start of really good American cinema). Maybe the relative calm of the period has tamped down on the urge to innovate artistic form, since the old forms have actually continued to fit our times quite well.

[nancy]

bbw -- i think my word choice was poor. worth, of course can be a little too subjective in these matters. and by classroom, well, workshop, blueprint, catalog, score sheet, would serve as well. using an example from dance which might illustrate Paula's 'meaningful library' query: trendy little bits that come and go are likely to stay in the choreographer's and dancer's mental notes. but a piece created that deserves archiving in order to be passed on (we usually know them when we see them) used to need to be translated with labanotation, a laborious process of coding movement into a language on paper. i suspect with the advent of technology that has become something of a lost art. but if someone wanted to recreate, say gene kelley's tap dance from 'singin in the rain', there it is living on in celluloid.

corvus -- i think you're right about the climate. although i'm about to see 'inside job' which i'm told would change that climate if everyone in this country saw it. and not entirely unrelated -- i'm also told by my resident musician that without doubt, if mozart were alive today, he'd be using a synthesizer. :)

[corvus9]

Yup. Just like Dylan and Lennon went to rock and roll. If either were kids today, they'd be rapping.

[Paula B]

Great discussion. Nancy, i think if Mozart were alive today SHE'd be a filmmaker.

[Crissa]

It's decided to be cloudy since, so while it was beautifully clear that night - clouds crept in and stayed in.

Phoo.

I think the prevalence of recording and the extension of copyright plus boomers have given us a large number of reasons to be stagnant.

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

Don't just lurk my man -- jump in.

I actually think Andersen's piece is worth reading even if it isn't necessarily correct in all of its particulars.

[nancy]

bbw -- also re your future of privacy link: good lord. i remember when part of the rationale in our library systems for moving quickly toward bar codes and magnetic 'check-out' was to eliminate the history trail left behind in library books by check-out cards with signature and date. i thought it a bit of a stretch at the time, but now -- who in their right mind, would allow their film choice borrowing history to be posted publicly?

remembering the history of the 20th century in this regard? joseph mccarthy would have had a field day with that much information at his fingertips. stalin. hitler. dick fucking cheney. karl rove.

netflix stockholders should come to regret this little gambit.

[Paula B]

bbw and nancy---yes, I was thinking ahead to the distant future or as what bbw calls the "larger ongoing culture and society." And, I'm not only concerned with the value of content but the drawbacks of technology present that could make it difficult (or even impossible) to study original referents. At least in the 20th century, we could track back to the story of Odysseus after reading On the Road or Joyce's Ulysses, using dead-tree technology and our eyes. There were libraries. When dead-tree libraries become too expensive to maintain, how do we hold on to the bases of culture? If we're starting today at square one, we damn well better have something good to push ahead. (I like your image of the slow lava flow of culture and knowledge, bbw, with cultural icons dropping off "into the sea ...over a long time, coexisting for a significant span with all that comes after."
And, whatever we put forward must be preserved in media that will outlast wars, floods, population shifts and other catastrophes similar to those that occurred over previous centuries yet did not cut us off from the beginnings of western culture.

>>perhaps we are past the point of needing anything more, or perhaps it will turn out that we all muddle through because that's what we always do and the future will tell what ended up mattering

I hope you're wrong on the first or at least right on the second thought, bbw.

[oddjob]

I'm not only concerned with the value of content but the drawbacks of technology present that could make it difficult (or even impossible) to study original referents.

That makes me very uncomfortable, too. Paper (properly treated) can last a very long time. All the paperless stuff is fine and all,

but what happens if/when the power goes out?

[Paula B]

Here's a folo to that story we discussed a few days ago about a blogger not protected by shield law: http://nyti.ms/rr4MpV
Well, not exactly.

[big bad wolf]

nancy, i recoiled from that movie-title sharing story. even as i was reading it though, i could think of people i know, and not inexperienced kids, who would think it was a fun and good idea. that is unfathomable to me.

crissa, i think that, particularly with popular music, intellectual-property law has slowed things down. popular music has always borrowed, rearranging the familiar to greater or lesser degrees.

paula and oddjob, me too. we need paper.

[nancy]

Paper. I could actually make an argument in favor of maintaining the library card catalog. Harken and all that. :) Paper card entries filed by subject and sub-topic. I'd lose that argument, but that's OK, I could make it. Hell, the actual library argument is a hard one to win these days in a lot of cities. They are the first to go on the cutting block. Disclaimer: I remember the Bookmobile.

I think we lost something vital when we let the beckoning drawers of the carefully-maintained catalog lapse. What they taught was a way of thinking and finding related materials easily (know your ABC's?) by letting your 'fingers do the walking' through the card entries, then on to the stacks. Using a card catalog opened gates to the curious and the explorer, as well as 'show me exactly the book I need' -- (I get that in the sciences, probably now useless.) Schoolmarm rant now over.

Once, when I was trying to help some kids gather material for a study project in a public library that had gone all electronic, I found that the only response they could get to their chosen topic of Crazy Horse led them to Neil Young. Hey. Try to explain that to a bunch of 9 year-olds.

[big bad wolf]

nancy, whether you lost that argument or not would depend on who was judging.

obviously the ability to find information quickly and easily is very useful and we don't want to give it back, but, i agree that the habits of mind created by having to do it the old, slow way served us well, more for everyday things than getting a particular answer, most of us are not going to solve a scientific puzzle, but we do need to think our lives through. because of that, i think it is important to nurture those habits. also because, being less of an optimist than i am supposed to be, it's not clear to me that we always progress and that things can never get worse. which is so silly, cause, like, now that we have iphones, we'd just get an app to fix for a new dark age or some climate change-y thing.

that crazy horse story is wonderful. out of the blue and into the black

[Paula B]

Nancy, I remember how upset I was, too, when the card catalog disappeared. On the other hand, I would not want to give up search engines, which employ a totally different line of thought -- associative v. linear, or somesuch.
Here's something interesting: I read recently that brick-and-mortar bookstores are upset because so many people visit their stores, peruse their stock with mobile devices in hand, then order from Amazon, often while they're still in the store (!). The point is, shoppers value book covers. They like to handle the books, thumb through them in the same way we liked card catalogs. I suspect they also like to see what's on the same shelf, which may take them to a totally different topic. Again, it's more like thumbing through the A authors in the heavy wooden drawers, than searching for a particular genre online at B&N, associative v. linear thinking. You may know better terms for this contrast than I, but that's what I call it.
There's a story in today's NYT about people returning to brick and mortar in droves, in spite of record sales of e-readers. That may say more about an uptick in reading than a preference over how to do it.

[nancy]

bbw -- love the clip -- what an audience. i saw him the next year on his first solo tour, right after 'harvest moon' came out. wish i'd seen this one too. he could do no wrong as far as i'm concerned. and hey. it's been archived new-style. here's the setlist.

[big bad wolf]

nancy, i have never seen neil. i foolishly passed on him and sonic youth at the seattle arena on the lame excuse that i couldn't afford it. that was really, really, reaaly dumb

[big bad wolf]

paula, that story about folks going to bookstores and then ordering from amazon depresses me. i'm not anti-amazon or ebook, but if you can afford it and if you can bother to go to a physical store, you owe it to the proprietor and the owner not just to be a bargain hunter. as some union guy said when sam walton died: his stores were the kind of place where you need three jobs to afford the cheap wages and prices they offered. many works of art that form our cultural history tell us that story. we never quite learn it.

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

I, too, have never seen Neil (nor the Rolling Stones) -- two gaping holes in my concert going resume. I keep vowing that I am going to go out to San Francsco some year and see the Bridge School benefit concert.

Paula,

Because I am blessed with one of the finest bookstores in America, Politics and Prose, within a block of my house, I refuse to order anything on Amazon. I buy everything at P&P, even if it's more expensive. When I think of the pleasure that I have gotten from that store, the extra ten or twenty percent I might pay for a book seems a small price to pay.