The King in the most recent episode of House of the Dragon said he was "being punished by the gods for his overindulgence". He was hungover. It was a good line.
I saw a Reddit comment along the lines of "I can't wait to use that when I am hungover. I wish there was a gif."
It seemed like such a perfect encapsulation of "content" and how it is viewed. It seems to only exist to consume so you can share jokes/gifs with other people to show how you're the type of person who watches it.
I don't know. It was such a banal comment but it made me feel such despair.
I don't know how to put all of this together in a satisfying way, but I get the sense that this blah-ness of culture has a lot to do with the concepts of alienation and identity formation in online spaces that you discussed in https://johnganz.substack.com/p/its-really-not-that-badright. The notion of creating loyalty to a brand by encouraging your audience to identify with it, once heralded as the key insight of modern advertising, has now been totally co-opted by popular culture as the line between the two continues to fade.
Because an authentic public sphere in the world is narrowing and increasingly being replaced with a series of synthetic online spaces organized around consumption habits and ad targeting, this mode of content creation is easier than ever. The name of the game today is to encourage reflexive self-identification between audience and entertainment product on two levels: audience identification with the characters as aspirational ideals devoid of any nuance or specificity and audience identification with the show itself as a marker of taste, personal distinction, and membership to a select in-group. Starting from these two premises will get you most of the way towards understanding why the creators and purveyors of mass media do the things they do, from writing 16th century berserkers who quip like 21st century redditors to underwriting and promoting the creation of fandoms which then create free advertising for your creative project and purchase IP-based paraphernalia.
I agree that the Marx book sounds like a re-hash of Bourdieu for those unfamiliar with that work. I should add that I was never a fan of Bourdieu's work, so I won't bother with Marx.
I think that the rise of the internet and interactive media has some limited explanatory value in terms of the endless mediocrity of cultural production today. But there are larger issues at play, many of which precede the rise of the net.
In the visual arts, which is the area I know best, I think that the crisis has been decades in the making. I'll refrain from discussing the reasons I think Modernism succeeded for nearly a century—succeeded as a system that produced many generations of new and interesting art—and note only that the first big crisis arose in the 1970s, as the system seems to exhaust its possibilities. The response was post-modernism, which claimed that it was more pluralistic and democratic than Modernism. But the more significant change, I think, was that whereas Modernism had always exhibited profound ambivalence about the capitalist system that drove the art world, post-modernism declared that such an attitude was simply bad faith. We should all just accept and embrace capitalism. And bit by bit that has happened over the past five decades. The art world has entered into its own Monopoly Capital phase. Five galleries have established themselves as multinationals and have cornered the market on the most successful (eg., best-selling) artists. At the same time, the rise of the international art fair has resulted in the art-world equivalent of Davos Man: the same collectors, dealers, and artists travel from fair to fair. A certain sameness has taken over. When I published my book on the Los Angeles art scene of the sixties, I was invited to contribute a think piece about L.A. and NY today as opposed to 50 years ago. My argument is that nothing like the L.A. scene of the sixties would be possible today because of financial pressures on small galleries and because of the sameness of art in a globalized age.
I think something similar happened to movies and to music. The social, discursive, event-oriented dimension to movie-going and record buying disappeared long ago.
As for writing, I will simply repeat what has become a fairly common refrain—to wit, the proliferation of MFA programs in writing has produced generations of technically skilled writers who have very little to say. (A problem in the art world as well.) Meanwhile, the highly concentrated publishing world is fairly risk averse. If you are a TV star with a memoir of challenges overcome—bipolar disorder, a parent who was either too close or too far, crooked teeth, whatever—you can find a publisher. Otherwise, good luck.
Another problem I feel I must point out in closing is the triumph of the identitarian "left." There are stated and unstated rules about who can say what, portray what imagery in visual art, play what roles in movies, plays, TV shows, etc. Artists internalize these news codes of behavior and police themselves. The effect to kill surprising and challenging works before they can come into being.
In the end, I suppose, my point is that while the internet and related developments have played a part in the deadening of culture, there were already powerful social and economic forces that had gone a long way in that direction even before the internet came along.
I think the sense of stagnation--not that there isn't good work being done but that there's very little that feels formally new--comes from a couple factors. Some of it is that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. After a century in the wake of modernism pushing various mediums to the breaking point, it's not clear where else there is to go. This is in a sense a reflection of the Bohemian reactionary posturing of something like Dimes Square: now that so much culture is a rejection of tradition, the thinking goes, the "edgy" thing to do is flirt with and convert to traditional ideology.
But a lot of it is also I think technological. The last few generations have grown up on heavy pop cultural saturation with works and products that have become increasingly easy to hold onto and pull up at any time. As a result nostalgia is much more pervasive than previously, since so much of it never went away and doesn't need to be recreated, leading to incumbency and monopolization among IPs and companies that control them and conservative (safe) programming. It's also harder for artists to approach even experimental work freely when an internet search can tell them that it's been done before.
I think there are digital media, namely games, that still have a lot of untapped potential, but they are more beholden to conservative corporate interests than any of the others.
Insightful! I too read the Goldberg essay, but I'm skeptical that David Marx is saying anything that Adorno or Guy Debord haven't said already, about culture, consumption and spectacle. I do love your comment about Musk and Yang though (and there are subterranean currents leading from here to Thiel and Yarvin etc): the libertarian world-hatred that you imply here can also be seen in callow fantasies of rule by tech-caesars, other-planetary colonization, and so on. It's all ridiculous, of course, and yes boring. There are a few glimmers, however: I know next to nothing about contemporary film or TV but places like Bandcamp offer a pretty cool (and non-boring) place to learn about new music.
Not sure if this applies to other art forms, but as a work-a-day gigging/recording musician (well, at least until the eminently rational but financially devastating covid restrictions on venues ate us alive) I think it’s hard to overstate the impact of technology as a creativity and skill-sapping juggernaut.
In a word, much of music production now is done by people who know a lot about technology but very little about music - by that I mean the *craft* of music, learning an instrument to a high level, understanding how harmony works, practising your ass off to be able to execute a performance without the cushion of knowing that an engineer can fix even a totally botched performance with some mouse clicks (Pro Tools can fix practically anything in the studio now and has made nearly obsolete the art of live studio recording).
Probably to be expected that when an art form gets handed over to programmers, it’s going to sound…like an art form handed over to programmers.
That said, there is of course a great deal of imaginative music and skilled musicians still out there, but the number of venues is shrinking, d.j.s are cheaper and usually don’t drink or smoke or bitch as much, and musical creativity or experimentation (or even elevated technical skill and good writing) tend to stay on the margins and not move into popular culture. The Beatles or Zappa or Bowie would probably still be out there making music now, but they’d likely just be some guys on YouTube. Too many chord changes, too many notes, too many musical surprises, and programmers and marketers hate that shit (I mention them just to illustrate how more complex music can also be very popular; jazzers, even or especially the very best of them, have always been mostly under the popular radar). With a bit of theoretical baggage, it’s pretty easy to analyze popular music production these days, and most of it is four or five-note repeated pentatonic riffs that would barely make up eight bars of a post-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles tune.
I hope these remarks come off less as nostalgia and more as observations on the craft and skill of just learning music and how to play an actual instrument, and that the relative non-presence of those skills in popular music might have something to do with some of the blah-ness referenced.
The latest True Anon, "City Authentic," also gets at why we feel like culture is boring and stale right now. Hard to articulate in a sentence, but the episode connects how the internet and cities sort of function in similiar ways, and draw on Hegel's idea of how modernity draws out this void in us. Am not explaining this very well but anyways, felt like this read is a good companion to the episode for those interested:
Thanks for pointing out the obvious fact that Bourdieu (and other sociologists) have trampled the ground that Marx apparently(?) claims to have discovered. Distinction is a wonderful, dizzying mess.
But what of Marxism? How about the changing political economy? Or the institutional upheavals in the culture industries? The shift to television from film (and within film away from mainstream studios and exhibition) as the place for innovation is a mix of political economy of the means of production, technology (streaming and upgrades in the home viewing experience), demographics, shifting from advertising to subscription, etc. Similar stories taking place in music, where it's even less possible to make money from recordings than before but it hasn't stopped a remarkable array of music being produced -- just within niches or available via streaming or distributors like Bandcamp.
I subscribe for your crankiness! I love love love it!! But lots of good stuff out there, and as someone older than you I can report that these complaints are endemic among broad "cultural critics," and existed even about periods that you would now wax poetic about. The tired cliches of nostalgia for some lost sense of culture, so easy to deride in Douthat, don't become you, especially if you're just going to talk about culture without tying it directly to the economic and institutional structures that structure its production.
There's a certain sameness to cultural production today, in particular it rarely seems like something is new in a way that couldn't have happened in 2000. Meanwhile, as was mentioned by another commenter, everything produced in that time span is available instantly.
The cultural changes of the last 20 years seem to be very resistant to depiction in art. Consider how no one wants to make a movie where everyone is looking at their phone all the time. This already existed with TV but has definitely gotten worse as people spend more time looking at screens. As an example, the new JK Rowling mystery supposedly has pages and pages of tweets, which sounds terrible. But also many people spend a huge part of their time and intellect on twitter. How do you make art about people tweeting?
Everyone is now, more than ever, able to curate their own experience, which both has consequences for artists in terms of consumption but also has consequences for us. We're now constantly given the option to craft a world where we don't interact with something. This might be behind some of the recent trend to conflate "I don't like this thing" with "I don't like art which depicts this thing" because now we can banish all of that thing from what we consume.
“The only people that still have this modernist spirit are from the world of tech, who for the most part totally lack aesthetic sensitivity and understanding of the artistic tradition and whose products further degrade the world into a characterless void.”
Max Frisch described technology as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” It makes sense that when the world-building/critiquing function is ceded to techies life feels aimless and blah. I am v tired of reading about e.g. “what the new LOTR show means for Amazon and the future of streaming”
I think the timing of all this is interesting. Digital production has made any visual or sonic stimulus a human can perceive feasible to create from your bedroom. That’s been responsible for an incredible boom in creative output over the past ~40 years, but I don’t think it’s coincidental that this cultural malaise has set in right around the time that the pioneers are hitting late middle age and the first generation to spend their entire childhoods immersed in that boom are in their 20s and supposed to be taking over the leading cultural edge.
All the boundless space that computers gave us access to has been at least cursorily explored for a while. It’s still possible to create good and interesting art of course, but there’s no wholly new territory to push into, really. It’s the first time in generations that the kids don’t have a new genre of music that’s radically distinct from what their parents were into.
Compounding the issue, we’re also *aware* of that lack of space because of how easy it is to access the cultural products of recent generations, or at least pictures of them. As great as it is to be able to experience that much good art so easily, it’s oppressive to always be conscious of how well trod the ground is.
I hope you’re right about there being a way forward through serious reckoning with material and modes of production that require genuine effort and skill again. The whole 2010s obsession with ‘artisinal’ shit seems like a stab in that direction, although one that was hopelessly compromised almost instantly, and I suppose Dimes Square and the anti-woke/trad gen Z movement is too.
Maybe (cribbing a bit from Benjamin) the absolute reproducibility of most modern production is involved: I know that I can not listen to podcasts with the same intention and intensity with which I (say) used to listen to the "Hour of the Wolf" very early Saturday mornings, not able to record it and no station archives at all.
(It's almost enough to make me tolerate the 'death gives meaning to life' crowd. Almost.)
Boy, look at me commenting here on the daily like it's a Xenogears message board circa 1998.
I really think you're onto something with this "form" thing, which makes me think of Adorno--not so much his many, extremely difficult and elusive comments on form in the Aesthetic Theory, but his take on mimesis there, and in the Culture Industry essay. Er, let's see if I can reconstruct this: art history starts when civilization puts a taboo on mimesis, so, when a shaman wearing bird feathers isn't literally a bird any more. Since then, mimesis is an archaic residue in art, a kind of silliness, imitation, play, that becomes a counterpoint to the instrumental rationalism of the administered world.
That said, art is always *failed* mimesis, since what's decisive to art is the fact that it's non-identical with reality, that's what makes it art., and that's why it contains an element of rational enlightenment. The culture industry is nothing but wall to wall mimesis, not just in its endless copying of itself, but also in the identity it encourages between the consumer and the art object.
It seems to me that, as the material conditions for the art object have been totally destroyed by the internet, which was kind of the coup de grace, after a century of the "democratization" of art and the cultural class distinctions that created an audience for the art object in the first place, the mimesis of mass culture just washed over what was left of the artistic public sphere, so that we don't really have a mode of engagement with the art work any more that isn't this totally regressive pure identification.
That said, as a German studies dude, I feel like culture also just goes dead for decades at a time? The whole early 18th century--pretty bad time for culture in Germany! The 1820s-1840s? Just awful. the 1870s-1890s? Awful again. At some point, the material conditions are bound to change, as material conditions do, and then... we'll see, I guess. I
n any case, invoking Adorno here again, and echoing your conclusion, John, I think that precisely because artworks come out of their own interior logic that's not identical with the logic of the social world, if you want to make things, you have to start from the art work itself. It can't be deduced directly from social conditions, which means you can't lick your thumb to see which way the wind is blowing before you start. You just have to go ahead and do it.
The King in the most recent episode of House of the Dragon said he was "being punished by the gods for his overindulgence". He was hungover. It was a good line.
I saw a Reddit comment along the lines of "I can't wait to use that when I am hungover. I wish there was a gif."
It seemed like such a perfect encapsulation of "content" and how it is viewed. It seems to only exist to consume so you can share jokes/gifs with other people to show how you're the type of person who watches it.
I don't know. It was such a banal comment but it made me feel such despair.
I don't know how to put all of this together in a satisfying way, but I get the sense that this blah-ness of culture has a lot to do with the concepts of alienation and identity formation in online spaces that you discussed in https://johnganz.substack.com/p/its-really-not-that-badright. The notion of creating loyalty to a brand by encouraging your audience to identify with it, once heralded as the key insight of modern advertising, has now been totally co-opted by popular culture as the line between the two continues to fade.
Because an authentic public sphere in the world is narrowing and increasingly being replaced with a series of synthetic online spaces organized around consumption habits and ad targeting, this mode of content creation is easier than ever. The name of the game today is to encourage reflexive self-identification between audience and entertainment product on two levels: audience identification with the characters as aspirational ideals devoid of any nuance or specificity and audience identification with the show itself as a marker of taste, personal distinction, and membership to a select in-group. Starting from these two premises will get you most of the way towards understanding why the creators and purveyors of mass media do the things they do, from writing 16th century berserkers who quip like 21st century redditors to underwriting and promoting the creation of fandoms which then create free advertising for your creative project and purchase IP-based paraphernalia.
I agree that the Marx book sounds like a re-hash of Bourdieu for those unfamiliar with that work. I should add that I was never a fan of Bourdieu's work, so I won't bother with Marx.
I think that the rise of the internet and interactive media has some limited explanatory value in terms of the endless mediocrity of cultural production today. But there are larger issues at play, many of which precede the rise of the net.
In the visual arts, which is the area I know best, I think that the crisis has been decades in the making. I'll refrain from discussing the reasons I think Modernism succeeded for nearly a century—succeeded as a system that produced many generations of new and interesting art—and note only that the first big crisis arose in the 1970s, as the system seems to exhaust its possibilities. The response was post-modernism, which claimed that it was more pluralistic and democratic than Modernism. But the more significant change, I think, was that whereas Modernism had always exhibited profound ambivalence about the capitalist system that drove the art world, post-modernism declared that such an attitude was simply bad faith. We should all just accept and embrace capitalism. And bit by bit that has happened over the past five decades. The art world has entered into its own Monopoly Capital phase. Five galleries have established themselves as multinationals and have cornered the market on the most successful (eg., best-selling) artists. At the same time, the rise of the international art fair has resulted in the art-world equivalent of Davos Man: the same collectors, dealers, and artists travel from fair to fair. A certain sameness has taken over. When I published my book on the Los Angeles art scene of the sixties, I was invited to contribute a think piece about L.A. and NY today as opposed to 50 years ago. My argument is that nothing like the L.A. scene of the sixties would be possible today because of financial pressures on small galleries and because of the sameness of art in a globalized age.
I think something similar happened to movies and to music. The social, discursive, event-oriented dimension to movie-going and record buying disappeared long ago.
As for writing, I will simply repeat what has become a fairly common refrain—to wit, the proliferation of MFA programs in writing has produced generations of technically skilled writers who have very little to say. (A problem in the art world as well.) Meanwhile, the highly concentrated publishing world is fairly risk averse. If you are a TV star with a memoir of challenges overcome—bipolar disorder, a parent who was either too close or too far, crooked teeth, whatever—you can find a publisher. Otherwise, good luck.
Another problem I feel I must point out in closing is the triumph of the identitarian "left." There are stated and unstated rules about who can say what, portray what imagery in visual art, play what roles in movies, plays, TV shows, etc. Artists internalize these news codes of behavior and police themselves. The effect to kill surprising and challenging works before they can come into being.
In the end, I suppose, my point is that while the internet and related developments have played a part in the deadening of culture, there were already powerful social and economic forces that had gone a long way in that direction even before the internet came along.
I think the sense of stagnation--not that there isn't good work being done but that there's very little that feels formally new--comes from a couple factors. Some of it is that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. After a century in the wake of modernism pushing various mediums to the breaking point, it's not clear where else there is to go. This is in a sense a reflection of the Bohemian reactionary posturing of something like Dimes Square: now that so much culture is a rejection of tradition, the thinking goes, the "edgy" thing to do is flirt with and convert to traditional ideology.
But a lot of it is also I think technological. The last few generations have grown up on heavy pop cultural saturation with works and products that have become increasingly easy to hold onto and pull up at any time. As a result nostalgia is much more pervasive than previously, since so much of it never went away and doesn't need to be recreated, leading to incumbency and monopolization among IPs and companies that control them and conservative (safe) programming. It's also harder for artists to approach even experimental work freely when an internet search can tell them that it's been done before.
I think there are digital media, namely games, that still have a lot of untapped potential, but they are more beholden to conservative corporate interests than any of the others.
Insightful! I too read the Goldberg essay, but I'm skeptical that David Marx is saying anything that Adorno or Guy Debord haven't said already, about culture, consumption and spectacle. I do love your comment about Musk and Yang though (and there are subterranean currents leading from here to Thiel and Yarvin etc): the libertarian world-hatred that you imply here can also be seen in callow fantasies of rule by tech-caesars, other-planetary colonization, and so on. It's all ridiculous, of course, and yes boring. There are a few glimmers, however: I know next to nothing about contemporary film or TV but places like Bandcamp offer a pretty cool (and non-boring) place to learn about new music.
Not sure if this applies to other art forms, but as a work-a-day gigging/recording musician (well, at least until the eminently rational but financially devastating covid restrictions on venues ate us alive) I think it’s hard to overstate the impact of technology as a creativity and skill-sapping juggernaut.
In a word, much of music production now is done by people who know a lot about technology but very little about music - by that I mean the *craft* of music, learning an instrument to a high level, understanding how harmony works, practising your ass off to be able to execute a performance without the cushion of knowing that an engineer can fix even a totally botched performance with some mouse clicks (Pro Tools can fix practically anything in the studio now and has made nearly obsolete the art of live studio recording).
Probably to be expected that when an art form gets handed over to programmers, it’s going to sound…like an art form handed over to programmers.
That said, there is of course a great deal of imaginative music and skilled musicians still out there, but the number of venues is shrinking, d.j.s are cheaper and usually don’t drink or smoke or bitch as much, and musical creativity or experimentation (or even elevated technical skill and good writing) tend to stay on the margins and not move into popular culture. The Beatles or Zappa or Bowie would probably still be out there making music now, but they’d likely just be some guys on YouTube. Too many chord changes, too many notes, too many musical surprises, and programmers and marketers hate that shit (I mention them just to illustrate how more complex music can also be very popular; jazzers, even or especially the very best of them, have always been mostly under the popular radar). With a bit of theoretical baggage, it’s pretty easy to analyze popular music production these days, and most of it is four or five-note repeated pentatonic riffs that would barely make up eight bars of a post-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles tune.
I hope these remarks come off less as nostalgia and more as observations on the craft and skill of just learning music and how to play an actual instrument, and that the relative non-presence of those skills in popular music might have something to do with some of the blah-ness referenced.
The latest True Anon, "City Authentic," also gets at why we feel like culture is boring and stale right now. Hard to articulate in a sentence, but the episode connects how the internet and cities sort of function in similiar ways, and draw on Hegel's idea of how modernity draws out this void in us. Am not explaining this very well but anyways, felt like this read is a good companion to the episode for those interested:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-248-city-71563463?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan
Thanks for pointing out the obvious fact that Bourdieu (and other sociologists) have trampled the ground that Marx apparently(?) claims to have discovered. Distinction is a wonderful, dizzying mess.
But what of Marxism? How about the changing political economy? Or the institutional upheavals in the culture industries? The shift to television from film (and within film away from mainstream studios and exhibition) as the place for innovation is a mix of political economy of the means of production, technology (streaming and upgrades in the home viewing experience), demographics, shifting from advertising to subscription, etc. Similar stories taking place in music, where it's even less possible to make money from recordings than before but it hasn't stopped a remarkable array of music being produced -- just within niches or available via streaming or distributors like Bandcamp.
I subscribe for your crankiness! I love love love it!! But lots of good stuff out there, and as someone older than you I can report that these complaints are endemic among broad "cultural critics," and existed even about periods that you would now wax poetic about. The tired cliches of nostalgia for some lost sense of culture, so easy to deride in Douthat, don't become you, especially if you're just going to talk about culture without tying it directly to the economic and institutional structures that structure its production.
Here are 3 thoughts:
There's a certain sameness to cultural production today, in particular it rarely seems like something is new in a way that couldn't have happened in 2000. Meanwhile, as was mentioned by another commenter, everything produced in that time span is available instantly.
The cultural changes of the last 20 years seem to be very resistant to depiction in art. Consider how no one wants to make a movie where everyone is looking at their phone all the time. This already existed with TV but has definitely gotten worse as people spend more time looking at screens. As an example, the new JK Rowling mystery supposedly has pages and pages of tweets, which sounds terrible. But also many people spend a huge part of their time and intellect on twitter. How do you make art about people tweeting?
Everyone is now, more than ever, able to curate their own experience, which both has consequences for artists in terms of consumption but also has consequences for us. We're now constantly given the option to craft a world where we don't interact with something. This might be behind some of the recent trend to conflate "I don't like this thing" with "I don't like art which depicts this thing" because now we can banish all of that thing from what we consume.
“The only people that still have this modernist spirit are from the world of tech, who for the most part totally lack aesthetic sensitivity and understanding of the artistic tradition and whose products further degrade the world into a characterless void.”
Max Frisch described technology as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” It makes sense that when the world-building/critiquing function is ceded to techies life feels aimless and blah. I am v tired of reading about e.g. “what the new LOTR show means for Amazon and the future of streaming”
I think the timing of all this is interesting. Digital production has made any visual or sonic stimulus a human can perceive feasible to create from your bedroom. That’s been responsible for an incredible boom in creative output over the past ~40 years, but I don’t think it’s coincidental that this cultural malaise has set in right around the time that the pioneers are hitting late middle age and the first generation to spend their entire childhoods immersed in that boom are in their 20s and supposed to be taking over the leading cultural edge.
All the boundless space that computers gave us access to has been at least cursorily explored for a while. It’s still possible to create good and interesting art of course, but there’s no wholly new territory to push into, really. It’s the first time in generations that the kids don’t have a new genre of music that’s radically distinct from what their parents were into.
Compounding the issue, we’re also *aware* of that lack of space because of how easy it is to access the cultural products of recent generations, or at least pictures of them. As great as it is to be able to experience that much good art so easily, it’s oppressive to always be conscious of how well trod the ground is.
I hope you’re right about there being a way forward through serious reckoning with material and modes of production that require genuine effort and skill again. The whole 2010s obsession with ‘artisinal’ shit seems like a stab in that direction, although one that was hopelessly compromised almost instantly, and I suppose Dimes Square and the anti-woke/trad gen Z movement is too.
Loved this piece and will be quoting it extensively
Maybe (cribbing a bit from Benjamin) the absolute reproducibility of most modern production is involved: I know that I can not listen to podcasts with the same intention and intensity with which I (say) used to listen to the "Hour of the Wolf" very early Saturday mornings, not able to record it and no station archives at all.
(It's almost enough to make me tolerate the 'death gives meaning to life' crowd. Almost.)
This is really good, John. I’ve been feeling this unease for a while as well and wondering what breaks it outside of potentially dangerous politics.
makes it sound things sound
--> makes it sound
xor
makes things sound
s/Now people seem respond to/Now people seem to respond to/
Please delete if corrected.
Boy, look at me commenting here on the daily like it's a Xenogears message board circa 1998.
I really think you're onto something with this "form" thing, which makes me think of Adorno--not so much his many, extremely difficult and elusive comments on form in the Aesthetic Theory, but his take on mimesis there, and in the Culture Industry essay. Er, let's see if I can reconstruct this: art history starts when civilization puts a taboo on mimesis, so, when a shaman wearing bird feathers isn't literally a bird any more. Since then, mimesis is an archaic residue in art, a kind of silliness, imitation, play, that becomes a counterpoint to the instrumental rationalism of the administered world.
That said, art is always *failed* mimesis, since what's decisive to art is the fact that it's non-identical with reality, that's what makes it art., and that's why it contains an element of rational enlightenment. The culture industry is nothing but wall to wall mimesis, not just in its endless copying of itself, but also in the identity it encourages between the consumer and the art object.
It seems to me that, as the material conditions for the art object have been totally destroyed by the internet, which was kind of the coup de grace, after a century of the "democratization" of art and the cultural class distinctions that created an audience for the art object in the first place, the mimesis of mass culture just washed over what was left of the artistic public sphere, so that we don't really have a mode of engagement with the art work any more that isn't this totally regressive pure identification.
That said, as a German studies dude, I feel like culture also just goes dead for decades at a time? The whole early 18th century--pretty bad time for culture in Germany! The 1820s-1840s? Just awful. the 1870s-1890s? Awful again. At some point, the material conditions are bound to change, as material conditions do, and then... we'll see, I guess. I
n any case, invoking Adorno here again, and echoing your conclusion, John, I think that precisely because artworks come out of their own interior logic that's not identical with the logic of the social world, if you want to make things, you have to start from the art work itself. It can't be deduced directly from social conditions, which means you can't lick your thumb to see which way the wind is blowing before you start. You just have to go ahead and do it.