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Artistic value has less appeal to mainstream audiences, which explains the long-running dismissal of abstract painting: “My three-year-old could do that.” But if abstract artists’ work is intended to answer a “relevant question,” no, your three-year-old can’t do that.
This poses a logistical problem for creators: until they are accepted as high-status artists, transgressive behavior may be met with social disapproval and low status. “Matisse and Picasso in 1900,” theorist René Girard reminds us, “were considered incompetent by 99 per cent of their contemporaries.”
Mental disorders that numb the fear of punishment also improve the calculus of risk taking.
In 1964 wealthy symphony patrons not only disliked Atlas Eclipticalis but believed walking out midperformance would better conform to social etiquette than listening respectfully. For classical audiences and musicians alike, open contempt for John Cage was an act of good taste.
Most aspiring artists secure their desired level of status through repeating others’ inventions. But in societies that value originality, influence, and mystery, many people will attempt to attain high status through the creation of subversive ideas.
In Japan, traditional crafts allow a slow-moving, conservative form of change called shu ha ri—protecting the convention (shu), breaking the convention (ha), and then separating into a new convention (ri). But once Western society began to value radically distinct individuals, status rewards went to fierce artistic originality instead.
The modernist poet Octavio Paz stated in the early 1970s, “Rebellion has turned into procedure, criticism into rhetoric, transgression into ceremony. Negation is no longer creative.”
Fashion cycles are clearest in behaviors that offer no practical improvements and that arise within ornamental areas of life: slang, fonts, coffee preparation styles, landscaping, modes of painting, and particular citrus flavorings.
Rogers’s father knew the benefits of hybrid seed corn and could afford to use it, but he stuck to open-pollinated seed corn, worried that the local old-timer farmers he most admired would look down on him for switching over to newfangled methods. Hoping to avoid another devastating crop failure, Rogers’s father finally made the switch to the hybrid seed corn—after eight years of holding out.
But status also plays a major role. By definition, innovations pose a challenge to established conventions—to use hybrid seed corn is a distinctive act when everyone uses open-pollinated seed corn. Thus individuals may worry that switching will lead to social disapproval, even when there are clear practical benefits to doing so.
Nero so loved Tyrian purple that upon ascending to power in AD 54, he outlawed anyone other than royalty wearing garments in the color.
Status also explains why innovativeness is found at the bottom of society as well. Outsiders, exiles, and misfits don’t worry about the social risks of trying new things, because they have little status to lose.
Literary scholar Barbara H. Smith recalls, “As a discriminating young snob, I was predisposed to find the value of any poem inversely proportional to the frequency of its appearance in anthologies.”
Modern elites’ preferences for rarities map to their class strategies: New Money desires obvious luxury goods with high financial costs, while Old Money desires hard-to-obtain and subtle patinated antiques with high time-based signaling costs.
In the Soviet Union, modest foreign goods such as nylon stockings, imported cigarettes, and Parker pens took on cachet, since only the top bureaucrats could travel abroad or secure enough foreign currency to purchase them.
India before 1991 as well
People at the top of their professional fields seek out new tools that can further boost their performance. Hard-core New York street basketball players in the 1970s started a new shoelacing style where the lace went over the first eyelet and then under the others. Other players saw it as a “more vicious style” because they trusted better players’ need for greater functionality.
Elite conventions stay exclusive unless the media expands the common knowledge to people of lower status tiers. The Condé Nast empire of magazines, from The New Yorker to Vogue, ascended in global culture by serving this very function:
For high-end magazines with limited circulation, readers imagine the content will be read only by other high-status people, thus boosting a sense of cachet. Inclusion in the broadest mass media, like USA Today or People, by contrast, suggests conventions known to all, which may diminish status value for early adopters.
(The dada poet Tristan Tzara resented this fact: “Any work of art that can be understood is the product of a journalist.”)
Music publications never took Celine Dion seriously, because, as music critic Carl Wilson notes, “Her voice itself is nouveau riche. It’s a volume business.”
This sometimes results in the creation of false trends—excitement about marginal or imaginary social movements. In 2009 The New York Times reported that the “burgeoning potbelly” had emerged as a stylish look for hipster men.
Critical opinion tends to kill the prospects only of films targeting educated elites.
After media broadcasting, trends reach a new stage of the fashion cycle: the mid-status emulation of high-status behaviors, and subsequent high-status abandonment.
The American lower middle class bought TVs not just to be entertained but to signal economic success, which seems to explain why so many families placed their first TV sets on pedestals in their living rooms.
A conspicuous example is that middle-class white Americans must prove familiarity with Black culture, a phenomenon that drives multiple sectors of the creative economy. When Tommy Hilfiger wanted to sell his brand’s preppy clothing in the early 1990s, he took the advice of the rap impresario Russell Simmons and first targeted African Americans rather than the preppies themselves.
The Duke of Bedford once mumbled that the upper classes “do not want anything from the Common Man except that he should remain common.” This is precisely why elites choose things with high signaling costs in the first place.
For centuries the wealthy took pride in their plumpness, as it signaled easy access to large quantities of food. When this bodily distinction disappeared with the expansion of potato farming and industrial food production, the rich abandoned rounder body types and became obsessed with exercise and nutrition.
Many gloss the term “marketing” to mean selling what a company already makes, but marketers see their own work as understanding what the public wants and producing goods that match to consumer desires.
The first major hip-hop single to break into the mainstream, “Rapper’s Delight,” was not a product of the Black underground, but an intentional effort by an upstart record label, Sugar Hill Records, whose managers cobbled together a group of neighborhood kids and had them rap another artist’s rhymes over the bass line from Chic’s hit song “Good Times.”
stores or otherwise ready for purchase. Companies must win over distribution gatekeepers, who are even more conservative and risk-averse. As low-margin businesses with limited shelf space, grocery stores, movie theaters, and drugstores will stock only products with a potential for high sales. There is also the distribution of information—i.e., publicity.
On the book review site Goodreads, scores tend to go down over time for prize-winning books, as the bandwagon effect brings in readers who may have less patience for literary complexity.
Fashion is a never-ending process of “chase and flight.” Low-status individuals chase high-status individuals by imitating their conventions, which forces elites to flee to new ones.
The famed New York menswear store Brooks Brothers sold button-down shirts in the 1890s in imitation of English polo players, who sewed buttons on their soft collars to prevent the fabric from flailing around during matches.
Today each Scottish clan has a tartan, a practice that originated in the late eighteenth century when commercial weavers named each of their different patterns after a Highland clan or town; descendants of those clans then began to use them as unique markers of ancestry and identity despite no historical relationship.
The term “canon” was first used in literature to describe books that critics and academics recommended for use in instruction. A canon is necessary, scholars believed, because future generations can never consume all works from the past.
Most viral content follows this same pattern of fevered groundswell and quick collapse. Celebrities can spin their viral moments into further celebrity, but when normal people get thousands of shares on a post, there are few rewards or benefits.
We can sing “My Sharona” at karaoke and probably dance the “Macarena” at a wedding after a few flutes of champagne. The Pet Rock was a fad, but it’s now a legendary fad. Viral content, on the other hand, rarely becomes culture with any sense of permanence.
Elites could once easily signal status through knowing certain facts about French cheese or owning a frayed Persian rug. The democratization of information on the internet and the globalization of supply chains have lowered the signaling costs for uncommon goods.
This reached a symbolic peak with the 2020 bankruptcy of Brooks Brothers—a company that made millions over the decades selling Old Money charm to the middle class.
Facebook started as a playground for twentysomething elite college students and, through the years, morphed into a retirement community for elderly laggards to trade photos of grandchildren and right-wing conspiracy theories.
Back to the Future provides a film’s worth of gags based on the significant cultural changes between 1955 and 1985: Chuck Berry vs. heavy metal, ornate Cadillacs vs. sleek DeLoreans, minimalist greasers vs. overly layered preppies. A similar movie today looking back at the nineties would have characters looking vaguely outmoded but not unrecognizable. We don’t watch Friends as a period piece.
By the twentieth century, as historian Paul Fussell notes, the ownership of particular breeds served as class markers in the United States: Labradors and golden retrievers at the top, Scottish and Irish setters in the middle, and pit bulls at the bottom.
Research conducted in the Czech Republic demonstrated that people are twice as likely to reclaim their lost purebred dog from a pound than their runaway mutt.
Based on his mathematical models, sociologist Duncan Watts has discounted the role of “influencers” in diffusion patterns and suggested that trends take off from “a complicated mix of individual choices, social constraints, and random chance.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed inequality was responsible for “a multitude of bad things and very few good things”; Immanuel Kant countered that it was a “rich source of much that is evil, but also of everything that is good.”
In Status Anxiety, the writer Alain de Botton argues that the most notable radical ideologies, from democracy and Marxism to Christianity, are ultimately radical reassessments of status criteria.
