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There is, of course, another class-based sensibility of the era, albeit without much influence on the wider culture: the often ignored, increasingly bitter provincial lower-middle-class sensibility of white majorities.
The twenty-first-century economy has skewed media and consumption so decisively toward coastal elites as to be perceived among the lower middle class as a demeaning erasure.
As the lower middle class falls in status, the “conservative” majority appears to have found respect for the Trump version of bling, especially when opulence and excess humiliate the professional classes.
An important counterimitation for the entire group is to “own the libs” by reveling in whatever the professional class abhors: guns, coal, bleak suburban restaurant chains, giant pickup trucks.
The main weapon against extravagance in the twentieth century was symbolically complex cultural capital, but we’ve already seen how the internet conspires against it. And that’s not to mention another major cause of its downfall: the professional class itself has rejected the legitimacy of taste.
Rockist critics wielded “imperial” taste to disparage nonrock music as inferior and, by doing so, propagated white, male, and straight values.
An alternative approach, which later became known as poptimism, would provide a healthier form of critique—an openness to the creative possibilities of all culture, even the songs of teen idols produced by formula in profit-driven sonic laboratories.
Poptimism didn’t just assert a higher moral authority than rockism but better reflected the reality of artistic innovation.
Both poptimism and “let people enjoy things” are part of the meta-sensibility behind postmodern culture: omnivore taste. The virtuous “cultured” individual should consume and like everything—not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated.
The professional-class suspicion of highbrow intellectualism, however, has much earlier roots.
Gen X fused this middlebrow ethos with a predilection for cultural diversity, all under their baby boomer parents’ beliefs that pop culture could and should be transcendental.
Millennials, whose post-1960s parents grew up on arena rock, disco, and MTV, embraced the full poptimist ethos, which also worked as a counterimitation of Gen X pretension.
In many ways omnivorism is the only possible taste left. A singular notion of good taste is unjustifiable in a cosmopolitan world.
By collectively reaching this stage of meta-knowledge, we come to understand the arbitrariness of our own preferences, tastes, and culture.
Omnivore taste is also a precursor to ultraindividualism: for everyone to follow their hearts, all idiosyncratic choices must be tolerated.
For liberals and socialists, preferences for abstract art and uncomfortable sofas were no longer enlightened aesthetics, but subversive class warfare against the poor and powerless.
Outside of politics, taste has also come to seem absurd in a world of hyperspeed fashion cycles.
Today a look can become dowdy within weeks. Righteousness about any particular trend, then, is foolish when we may soon be equally righteous about its opposite. And once we have lived through enough fads, we suspect that every new trend will end up a fad.
We have been cursed to understand the mechanisms of culture too well, making earnest taste nearly impossible.
Omnivore taste can then be used to dismantle the status structures that prevent the equitable distribution of respect.
And any distaste for the preferred culture of status-disadvantaged groups could be interpreted as a form of discrimination.
The most vocal complaint against “the culture wars” is that it channels political energy to changing superficial symbols rather than working toward structural changes to the economy and the law. But everything in this book points to the fact that culture matters for status equality.
In its wake, any negative notions of selling out must go. And art should avoid being for art’s sake when social equity is at stake. Hustling is a virtuous necessity for those without capital; detachment is a privilege.
Aesthetic experiences, believe omnivores, should have no moral superiority over fun. Art is no better than kitsch, because kitsch is exciting, social, and delivers what it promises.
If there is no intrinsic superiority of high culture over low culture, there’s no longer any need to suffer through long, difficult books or boring black-and-white Swedish movies.
As with any value system, omnivorism contains inconsistencies. First, the refusal to erect fences veers toward monoculture.
Second, omnivorism has an inherent hypocrisy. There is no way to accept all conventions, because of their inevitably contradictory nature.
Omnivorism also may have a dampening effect on the cultural ecosystem.
Much great art and culture arose from righteous indignation toward bad taste, commercialist kitsch, and the conservative establishment. By eliminating these as legitimate targets for criticism we create much weaker, less meaningful conventions.
Artist status remains a solid means to move up the social hierarchy, but in a tolerant, omnivore world, “outcasts” no longer need to become artists to find social acceptance.
Radical innovations once caused social angst and then, eventually, delivered glory. Today most inventions are accepted without noise or struggle—and take their place among thousands of other inventions accepted without any noise or struggle.
Poptimism means that elites should commune with these works, as they’re “what the people want.” But money can always fake the veneer of popularity.
By denying taste as a tool and hesitating to criticize popular works, outsider groups and critics have surrendered their primary way of pushing back.
For all the worries about stasis in pop culture, the art world has also become seemingly subsumed under capitalist logic.
The most representative artist of our era may be Jeff Koons—a former commodities trader whose pop-spectacles-as-artistic-statements have turned impish Duchampian and Warholian ideas into piles of cash.
But perhaps pure market logic has seemed like the only possible next step. The twentieth century burned too bright, exhausting most of the obvious challenges to existing conventions.
With artists less reliable to rip up convention, the responsibility for creativity may now fall to youth subcultures. But we seem to be in a “post-subculture” world.
Under the banner of cosmopolitanism, demographically disadvantaged groups no longer have to seek shelter in walled-off mini-societies.
Subcultures may be waning but hard-core fan cultures are stronger than ever. Fierce, cultlike advocates focus their online activity into boosting the profiles of stars they “stan.”
Hobbyist culture has always had two approaches: the highly analytical nerds who use high-culture techniques of textual analysis on low culture, and the otaku (a term first appearing in Japan during the 1980s) who focus on completist ownership of products and unquestioning faith in the creators.
The most potent subcultures of this new century, by contrast, have formed as a reaction to liberal omnivorism—appearing on the right flank of the political spectrum.
A major media channel for the antiomnivore subcultural sensibility has been gaming, where a loud faction of male gamers has pushed back against the industry’s growing diversity. Gaming has arguably replaced music and fashion as the most important medium for youth culture.
Thanks to digitization, consumers in the twenty-first century could “access the immediate past so easily and so copiously” that they became more interested in the “cultural artifacts of [the] immediate past” than those of the immediate future.
In combination with omnivorism, retromania was fun at first, providing us more options to craft our personas thanks to an infinite reserve of older cultural artifacts and styles.
But where the avant-garde aimed to be seminal, retromania was a cultural vasectomy. With so much time, energy, and attention channeled into excavation, fewer seemed to be working toward the radically new.
Improved digital technologies have also enabled creators’ pastiche of the past to sound, look, and feel eerily similar to the originals.
Fifties retro inspired more than just revival acts; its sound quickly evolved into two distinctive new musical genres, glam rock and punk, both of which went on to define the seventies. The popular aughts act Franz Ferdinand, by contrast, very closely re-created the sound of post-punk bands such as Gang of Four. Listeners today hoping to inhabit this sonic world may be more inclined to return to the original than listen to the copy.
In hindsight, retromania appears to have been a response to the plummeting cachet of contemporary culture. Between virality, a destruction of barriers to information and access, the celebration of simple nouveau riche aesthetics, and a rejection of taste, inventions haven’t taken on as much status value as in the past.
Retromania was a particularly Gen X approach to negotiating the internet age, since its members grew up in an era greatly respectful of historical value. The subsequent two generations, millennials and Gen Z, are “digital natives” and have very little firsthand knowledge of the analog age’s slower fashion cycles.
Youth relish in the extremely online, weightless culture of current times—a neomania.
