More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Because alternative status groups can never actually replace the masses, they can achieve influence only through being imitated. But how do their radical inventions take on cachet? There are two key pathways: the creative class and the youth consumer market.
Thomas Frank notes that psychedelic art appeared in commercial imagery not as a means of pandering to hippie youth but rather as the work of proto-hippie creative directors who foisted their lysergic aesthetics on the public. Hippie ads thus preceded—and arguably created—hippie youth.
The primary sites for subculture/creative-class cross-pollination have been art schools and underground music scenes. The punk community, in particular, arose as an alliance between the British working class and students in art and fashion schools.
Similarly, New York’s downtown art scene supported Bronx hip-hop before many African American radio stations took rap seriously.
Hipness could be valuable, because the obscurity and difficulty of penetrating into the subcultural world came with high signaling costs. Once subcultural capital became standard in creative-class signaling, minority and working-class slang, music, dances, and styles functioned as valuable signals—with or without their underlying beliefs.
Middle-class radical chic, however, tends to denature the most prickly styles. This makes “radical” new ideas less socially disruptive, which opens a second route of subcultural influence: the youth consumer market.
Before radical styles can diffuse as products, they are defused—i.e., the most transgressive qualities are surgically removed. Experimental and rebellious genres come to national attention by means of softer second-wave compromises.
Mass media, in needing to explain subcultures to readers, defines the undefined—and exaggerates where necessary.
This simplification inherent in the marketing process lowers fences and signaling costs, allowing anyone to be a punk or hip-hopper through a few commercial transactions.
As subcultural/countercultural conventions become popular within the basic class system, however, they lose value as subcultural norms. Most alternative status groups can’t survive the parasitism of the consumer market; some fight back before it’s too late.
There is something obviously untoward about majority entrepreneurs profiting off the inventions of groups they otherwise oppress. Black artists invented jazz, rhythm ’n’ blues, and funk, only to see white majorities imitate, defuse, and profit from them.
The rise of liberation ideology in the late 1960s helped curb the wholesale thievery of Black culture. Making authentic reggae and hip-hop requires firsthand accounts of racial oppression and close knowledge of life in Black neighborhoods.
However, what complicates any analysis of subcultural influence on mainstream style is that the most famous 1960s groups often reappear as revival movements.
We shouldn’t confuse these later adherents, however, as an organic extension of the original configuration. New mods are seeking comfort in a presanctioned rebellion rather than spearheading new shocking styles at the risk of social disapproval.
Lower-middle-class white subcultures can also epitomize the depths of conservative sentiment rather than suggest a means of escape.
Without the blessing of the creative class, major manufacturers won’t make new goods based on such subcultures’ conventions, preventing their spread to wider audiences. Subcultural transgressions, then, best find influence when they become signals within the primary status structure of society.
The most important contribution of subcultures, however, has been giving birth to new sensibilities—additional perceptual frames for us to revalue existing goods and behaviors.
As camp diffused through twentieth-century society via pop art and pop music, elite members of affluent societies came to appreciate the world in new ways.
As much as subcultural members may join their groups as an escape from status woes, they inevitably replicate status logic in new forms—different status criteria, different hierarchies, different conventions, and different tastes.
If punk were truly a genuine expression of individuality, as John Lydon claims it should be, there could never have been a punk “uniform.”
But as society has become more tolerant, there is reduced friction between subcultural rebellion and capitalism. Defiant symbols generated in outsider groups provide business with an invigorating “renewal” of styles to sell in the commercial marketplace.
In the end, subcultural groups were perhaps an avant-garde of persona crafting, the earliest adopters of the now common practice of inventing and performing strange characters as an effective means of status distinction.
Artists achieve these effects by tinkering with the deepest conventions in our brains—exposing our cultural assumptions, pointing out contradictions in our customs, creating new symbols, and expanding the meaning of old symbols.
And since conventions provide us with our meaning, values, and perceptual frameworks, forcing us to adopt new ones, even temporarily, literally alters our minds. As we absorb and accept these aesthetic experiences, our perception is forever changed.
Immanuel Kant asserted three still authoritative criteria for artistic genius: (1) the creation of fiercely original works, (2) which over time become imitated as exemplars, and (3) are created through mysterious and seemingly inimitable methods.
These Kantian requirements also match the most advanced status criteria of our era—namely, originality, influence, authenticity, and detachment.
Kant’s criteria also explain why most creators never make it past lower tiers. Hacks only copy. Folk art closely follows custom. Other than exceptions like Rousseau, naive artists and outsider artists tend to be uninfluential. Commercial artists work in well-known methods for a paycheck.
Whatever its potential benefits, art remains a high-risk path toward status. The most original artworks violate norms, and if they fail to attract critical notice, artists can fall to very low status.
This is why most creators take a less risky, entrepreneurial attitude toward art: harmonizing others’ radical inventions with more established conventions to expand the potential market.
Hedging, however, is taboo for the true artist, who must stay detached from any status concerns. Only hacks make art for money and power.
But nearly every artist pursues a specific kind of status: artist status. Unless society considers a creator to be an “artist,” his or her artworks won’t receive serious consideration, interpretation, or evaluation.
The existence of artist status, then, allows two ways of looking at the creative process: (1) how status logic manifests in the art world; and (2) how the particular status structure of a society changes the way art is made and diffused.
The philosopher Noël Carroll examined the primary definitions of art—art as representation, art as expression, art as form, etc.—and found that most collapse once the category “art” must include twentieth-century avant-garde works such as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made urinal sculpture, Fountain.
We need only to think about why people consider certain works to be art and, based on those judgments, provide the creators with artist status. There are two definitions of art that work quite well for this narrower mission: the institutional definition and the narrative definition. In the institutional definition, art is whatever the art world deems to be art.
In the narrative definition, art is whatever makes it into the story of art.
The clearest short-term strategy toward achieving artist status, then, is to win acclaim from art world institutions. The narrative definition of art offers an additional, long-term path: posthumous recognition of works as important moments in the story of art.
The most ambitious creators attempt to bend the arc of history toward themselves, but since no one can predict the direction of art, no technique guarantees future success.
In her lifetime Hibel’s work may have even brought more pleasure to more people than Rousseau’s. But the institutional and narrative definitions of art imply that the quality of execution and responses from mass audiences are less important in assigning artist status.
Artist status requires achieving artistic value, rather than aesthetic value, and others can assign this value to artworks whether the artist intended these solutions or not.
The aesthetic value of an artwork measures how masterfully an artist can use and abuse existing conventions to elicit emotional experiences from the audience.
Artistic value, on the other hand, measures the originality of the artist’s inventions—i.e., how much the proposed ideas break existing conventions and suggest new ones.
In the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s famous line, “The chief task of genius is precisely to invent a stereotype” (emphasis added). To create within the framework of someone else’s stereotype makes the creator an epigone, and their work is mere “taste.”
The need to solve problems of an era means that artistic value is always contextual—a set of parameters that bind the creative process. There are perhaps an infinite number of potential problems in art, but to gain artist status, artists must solve the agreed-upon problems of the current moment.
Genius inventions must, thus, fit into the “unbroken chain” of problems and solutions across art history.
Some may counter that the importance of serendipity to the creative process offers an escape from the binding requirements outlined above.
Artists, however, never blindly accept the fruits of serendipity. Happy accidents go through the same filter as all other artistic choices; random discoveries must align with particular strategies or they’ll be eliminated.
The twentieth century’s successful artists often pursued artistic value to the detriment of their work’s aesthetic value.
But this expertise, writes the literary critic Barbara H. Smith, often causes its own “provincialism” where “we become less and less like anyone else, and thus less able to predict anyone else’s responses on the basis of our own.”
Most audiences delight in minor innovations, not major challenges to their preferred art forms. The most broadly accepted form of artistry is virtuosity—“possessing an ability to perform brilliantly the creation of others.”
When artists cut too deep into standard conventions in pursuit of artistic value, audiences often renounce the changes.
