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November 2, 2024 - January 1, 2025
Teens use odd clothing styles, trendy dances, and slang (“groovy,” “doobie,” “cheugy”) to erect clear fences between young and old. “For the first time, kids didn’t want to look like their fathers,” writes the journalist Nik Cohn about British postwar youth culture. “In fact, whatever their fathers looked like, they wanted to look exactly opposite.” Youth culture enabled teens to flip the script and create criteria that made them superior to their prim parents. And as the newest members of society, they saw their parents’ norms as arbitrary anyway.
Subcultural style often fits well within the creative-class sensibility. With a premium placed on authenticity, creative-class taste celebrates defiant groups like hipsters, surfers, bikers, and punks as sincere rejections of the straight society’s “plastic fantastic” kitsch. The working classes have a “natural” essence untarnished by the demands of bourgeois society. “What makes Hip a special language,” writes Norman Mailer, “is that it cannot really be taught.”
Artists play an important social role. In the words of the philosopher Henri Bergson, their function is “to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive”—to show “things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness.” 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.
In the eighteenth century, philosopher 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.
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. Most who pick up a paintbrush, even the supremely talented, will never transcend the epithet “picture painter.”
What is art? There is no authoritative answer, and there may never be one. 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. A single, inclusive definition of art is especially difficult because artists push beyond the boundaries every time a definition is proposed.
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 difference between aesthetic and artistic value can be further explained through the concept of conventions. The aesthetic value of an artwork measures how masterfully an artist can use and abuse existing conventions to elicit emotional experiences from the audience.
The sociologist Howard Becker writes, “Composers can create and manipulate listeners’ expectations as to what sounds will follow. They can then delay and frustrate the satisfaction of those expectations, generating tension and release as the expectation is ultimately satisfied.” These aesthetics and their related emotional effects are the way most people judge art: Am I experiencing something? And am I gaining something from this experience?
Artistic value, on the other hand, measures the originality of the artist’s inventions—i.e., how much the proposed ideas break exist...
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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.”
Invention requires “answering” the works of previous artists.
As the painter-theorist John D. Graham wrote in the 1920s, “A work of art is a problem posed and solved,” and at any given time, the art world focuses on a limited set of communal problems artists attempt to solve.
Deep knowledge of art history can be useful in the pursuit of innovation, as it reveals not only previous attempts at solutions but remaining issues to tackle.
Most audiences delight in minor innovations, not major challenges to their preferred art forms.
Elites flock to three particular categories of items that fulfill their needs: rarities, novelties, and technological innovations.
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. 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.
Among professional and creative classes, familiarity with these reviews serves as cultural capital in its own right. For the early majority, on the other hand, entertainment reviews have little influence on their consumption.
Status competition within the media world also incentivizes reporters to hunt for the most distinctive evaluations—i.e., the “hottest takes.” Scoops, exclusives, and early discoveries are necessary to stand out. The sociologist of art Jean Duvignaud writes, “No editor, no gallery director dare admit today to having ‘let slip’ a talented painter or poet, as much for reasons of the prestige which comes with the venture of ‘launching’ as for the immense material benefits which accompany success.”
Critical opinion tends to kill the prospects only of films targeting educated elites.
The fundamental human desire for status continues to direct imitation upward. All that has changed is that the cultural capital of urban, cosmopolitan groups includes knowledge of lower-status lifestyles.
As Derek Thompson concludes in his study Hit Makers, “Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.” The number of audience-friendly songs that could be hits is nearly infinite, but only a few will achieve the broad distribution required for success.
When advertising to the early majority, companies must suggest that their products are in line with social norms—or create the suggestion of new norms. Hoping to nudge middle-class consumers to buy additional cars, the American auto industry ran campaigns in the 1950s proposing the idea of “two-car families.”
Bestsellers such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Jonah Berger’s Contagious have suggested that cultural trends play out like “social contagions”—with ideas spreading from person to person in an exponential pattern until the entire population is “infected.” This framing, however, tends to disregard human agency. We choose to adopt and abandon, and make these decisions based on status value. But there is a bigger issue with the viral metaphor: the measles remains the measles as it spreads through a population, but cultural innovations change significantly on their path to becoming
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For widespread diffusion, signaling costs need to be very low—especially social risks. So far we’ve seen how this happens over time: the mass media reduces information costs, mass manufacturers lower prices and expand access, and the initial adoption by high-status people suggests adoption won’t break social norms.
Mass culture also gains new strength through network effects. The more people participate in a convention, the more useful it will be for interacting and communicating with others. Watching caber toss tournaments may afford individual distinction, but the previous night’s Patriots game works better for office small talk. Mass culture offers the gratification of solidarity—as Baudelaire mused, “The pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of delight in the multiplication of number.” There was a special power in 72,000 people singing Queen songs in unison at Wembley Stadium during
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The cultural critic Chuck Klosterman writes, “You don’t create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year.”
Laggards tend to have very low status. (Even the designation “laggard” is pejorative.) As individuals they are always out of sync with culture, which suggests a lack of social capital, a meager media diet, and, in some cases, a disregard for basic social norms. Therefore, any convention associated with this group has a negative status value.
The more rational means of improving status would be to reinvest money and time into building more stable forms of capital. The acquisition of status symbols may fool others in the short term, but constant consumption resembles a form of addiction: we believe luxury goods are a cure for our status desires, only to realize we must buy ever more.
What is the appeal of historical value? First, there is a survivorship bias: anything that remains with us today is assumed to have greater intrinsic value. Humans are more likely to preserve high-quality luxury goods than cheap kitsch.
As we saw with Old Money in chapter 5, endurance is a powerful signaling cost.
And since Old Money’s preference for patina can provide cachet, older items also gain status value through historical associations, real and imagined.
Rational humans, especially conservative ones toward the middle of the status hierarchy, will choose older forms over newer ones when signaling, and this keeps older conventions in circulation. Conventions with historical value become “durable” in different ways—specifically, customs, traditions, classics, and canonized works.
Meanwhile, classics are “timeless” choices with historical associations stronger than contemporary associations. The little black dress, the Chuck Taylor sneaker, and blue jeans have achieved a “permanent value”—“you can’t go wrong”—despite the fact that many people with lower status have adopted these same items. Button-down shirts endure because memories of Miles Davis and JFK wearing them override the negative status value of modern-day suburbanites in identical garments. Most classic clothing comes to us from hobbies of the affluent: boater hats, deerstalker caps, Norfolk jackets, and
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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. Of the tens of thousands of novels written in the nineteenth century, we only still read about two hundred. The canon thus promises guidance toward the highest-quality and most influential works. Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” and Pitchfork Media’s Pitchfork 500 perform this role for pop music.
To create a canon, academics and critics curate explicit lists or keep certain works in circulation through repeated mention and reference.
Placement in the canon assures enough repetition and common knowledge to compete against newer alternatives—and makes them seem more important.
Modernity opens up another path for forgotten kitsch to rise from obsolescence into near canonical importance: the retro revival.
As poet and playwright Jean Cocteau observes: “Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”
“The wiser historians and critics know,” writes art scholar Renato Poggioli, “that unoriginal work, the mediocre or manqué, reveals the spirit of its own times in a sharp and direct way precisely because it remains a document and not a monument.” Retro is not about honoring lost genius but celebrating the rote executions of dated conventions to convey a feeling of the past.
Why do we change behaviors over time, and why do some behaviors persist? Individual status seeking explains how rapid change occurs in the form of fashion.
We had high hopes for the internet: an infinite reservoir of content, free distribution, a broader canon, and a more diverse creator base, which would inspire more people to make more amazing things. But this “deluge” of digital culture, writes film critic A. O. Scott, “is often perceived as a drought.”
As the economist-blogger Noah Smith quipped, “Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.”
The critic Jia Tolentino writes, “You can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.” And the “main purpose of this communication” is “to make yourself look good.” Opting out of social media, observes the millennial writer Malcolm Harris, “is a deviant lifestyle choice.” Only 5 to 15 percent of American teens are social media refuseniks.
In 2004, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, celebrated the possibilities of infinite cultural choice as “the long tail”: “Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”
Many things we call hits only track the aggressive overconsumption of superfans.
Cultural capital is less valuable in a world of free information, and this raises the relative value of economic capital.
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 French theorist Gilles Lipovetsky writes that our “hypermodern” era involves “a broadening of the ideal of equal respect, a desire for hyper-recognition which, rejecting every form of the contempt, depreciation or sense of inferiority under which one might suffer, demands the recognition of the other as equal in his or her difference.”
