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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.
This helped form the stereotype of the struggling and misunderstood artist, sacrificing all immediate human relationships in pursuit of deeper universal truths. Aspiring artists must have a high tolerance for societal rejection—enough self-confidence, perspicacity, faith, or insanity to continue working against the backlash.
The most natural candidates for radical invention, then, are creators who see themselves as having low status. At the bottom of the pyramid, there is little to lose and much to gain.
Other sources of ire include oppressive traditions, rigid pedagogy, capitalist logic, bourgeois value systems, the public’s bad taste, and the timidity of the former generation.
At any time, rebellious artists always have an opening: either offer new solutions to these issues in good faith or cynically exploit the flaws of the established order to justify a new position.
Upstarts propose radical oppositions to the reigning styles, and once they succeed, a new generation of upstarts propose radical oppositions to the previous radical oppositions. This is why the story of art tends to be dialectical.
The more interesting question, however, may be why the public comes to accept these radical ideas. What smooths the path for “irritating” art to win the approval of larger audiences? Again, the answer is status.
creators must also become “exemplars,” which is borne out in imitation by other artists and esteem from nonartists. Anyone can propose shocking ideas; only geniuses gain prestige and legitimacy for them.
Artists don’t anticipate future conventions so much as they create them through the influence process.
“We surrender to music when we listen to it—we allow ourselves to trust the composers and musicians with a part of our hearts and our spirits.” Status plays a role here: we “surrender” only when we “trust” the artistic integrity of the source.
The influence process for radical art is always an uphill struggle: works begin as an esoteric idiolect—symbols and ideas spoken and understood by a single person.
The first esteem that artists receive tends to be from contemporaries as a pure admiration of craft and creativity, especially as they work on solving the same problems. While futurism and dada are examples of organized schools, most movements, such as punk or grunge, develop organically as young artists converge on the same techniques.
Further influence requires broad comprehension of an artist’s idiolect. The poet William Wordsworth believed that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.”
In the early twentieth century, artists often attempted to improve comprehension by laying out their ideas in manifestos and journals. At the same time, artistic geniuses must also be mysterious, which means their work contains ambiguities.
the fastest way for creators to gain artist status is to win over gatekeepers in the art world. For most artists, initial supporters are drawn from established artists, critics, gallery owners, and daring collectors.
Over time, more and more come to appreciate the work—and use appreciation in signaling—so that once-radical ideas become social norms.
Once most audiences expect new art to conform to esoteric ideas, such as silence as music, the ideas are no longer radical but simply conventional. In more commercial fields like popular music, this stage of conventionality entices less ambitious creators to turn formerly dangerous innovations into audience-friendly works.
“Aesthetic expression aims to communicate notions, subtleties, complexities which have not yet been formulated, and therefore, as soon as an aesthetic code comes to be generally perceived as a code . . . then works of art tend to move beyond this code.”
The most ambitious artists never abandon their rebellious spirit and attempt to negate their own conventions on a constant basis.
“They kept [their music] from becoming stale by continually investigating new methods and concepts: beginning and ending songs in the wrong key, employing modal, pentatonic, and Indian scales, incorporating studio-effects and exotic instruments, and shuffling rhythms and idioms with a unique versatility.”
When creators achieve artist status, they kick off a process where the appreciation of their most daring work becomes a form of cultural capital. The structures that encourage distinction can, thus, play a direct role in expanding the population’s capability for complex aesthetic comprehension.
Status-driven cultural invention tends to be rebellious but not revolutionary. Truly radical art forms would not just provide established elites with new status symbols but change which groups are considered elite in the first place.
Beyond more creations and more styles, status struggle also proposes additional sensibilities to appreciate and value existing things in new ways.
Societies that value radical invention end up with more diverse cultural ecosystems, a great abundance of artifacts, and a multiplicity of sensibilities. But there are two downsides. First, radical negation tends to “exhaust” itself by eventually doubling back to the starting point.
Second, the demands for originality pushed many artists to disturb conventions so deeply embedded in our brains that the artworks never found large audiences. Art that rejects aesthetic value in pursuit of artistic value often stagnates as “meta-art”—intellectual exercises with little emotional resonance.
To explain cultural change, we must look at why individuals make the switch. And as we already know, conventions have their own gravity: rewarding conformity with social approval and punishing dissent with social disapproval.
What best explains these swift changes—which can be broadly described as fashions—is status seeking.
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. For all its ubiquity and universality in human life, fashion has long raised the ire of serious thinkers.
These antifashion attitudes originate in the moral expectations that individuals should act rationally, choose for themselves, and be detached from status concerns. Again, this is why we use alibis to explain our personal behavior.
But alibis work well because even we can’t understand the source of our own desires. Our hearts draw no clear lines between functionality, pleasure, and status seeking.
In principle, rational humans will embrace technologies with greater efficiencies as soon as they become aware of them and can afford them. But Rogers had firsthand experience of the contrary.
Rogers thus knew to examine the diffusion of innovations as a social process. Individuals make adoption decisions within the framework of human interaction.
Rogers noticed that adoptions progressed in sequence through five distinct groups, which he called innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
The distribution of this innovativeness is uneven: there are very few innovators, a small cadre of early adopters, most people in the majority groups, and a small batch of laggards. Rogers’s research implies that most people aren’t particularly excited to take up innovations at the time of their introduction.
As seen in the American public’s response to the moptop, the common majority response to innovations isn’t quiet curiosity but “shock, astonishment, ridicule or disgust.” Widespread change takes place only once conservative majorities feel secure that switching won’t damage their status.
Where does a fashion cycle begin? It kicks off exactly where the principles of status suggest it would: among the highest-status individuals.
In needing exclusive goods and practices, high-status individuals are attracted to stylistic or technological innovations, precisely because they emerge, by definition, among a small number of adopters.
Innovativeness—the willingness to try out new things—increases as one moves up the status hierarchy from the middle tiers. Elites have a need to engage in exclusive behaviors, and the privilege to do so.
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.
Rarities are difficult-to-acquire objects, ranging from one-of-a-kind antiques and heirlooms unavailable in the open market to brand-new luxuries requiring vast fortunes to afford.
Rarities tend to be expensive, so elites with less economic capital may seek distinction in novelties instead. New fashion styles, recording artists, musical genres, or films use information as the primary signaling cost, and the creative classes are always the most in the know.
Finally, technological innovations are also a form of rare goods, which happen to offer a strong alibi of practical advantage.
New technologies work well for distinction, since they hit the market at high prices and signal other status criteria, such as rationality, hipness, and exacting standards for product excellence.
The opposite of this phenomenon is also true. Rarities, novelties, and technological innovations fail to take on status value when overly associated with low-status groups.
Elite conventions stay exclusive unless the media expands the common knowledge to people of lower status tiers.
And by indicating which new conventions have cachet, the mass media triggers emulation from the heaviest consumers of media—namely, the professional and creative classes.
The media supports the diffusion of innovations through four key functions: selecting the most appealing conventions, broadcasting them to a large audience, explaining why individuals should adopt, and explicitly evaluating quality.
Broadcasting is powerful as a form of meta-communication: not only delivering messages but implying that many, many other individuals are seeing the same message.
The most important aspect of explanation is naming—identifying new conventions as distinct semantic entities. A name turns vague impressions and feelings into “things” up for discussion.
“Punk” scared away radio stations, so an executive at Sire Records asked radio stations to call aggressive young bands New Wave instead. Americans in the 1990s loathed European “techno,” so Spin magazine rechristened it “electronica.”
