Why Culture Sucks

Some Thoughts on Formlessness and the Age of Blah

There have been a number of recent pieces expressing ennui about the present state of culture. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg wrote about W. David Marx’s book “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” and why contemporary culture feels so dull: it’s because there’s no longer the same kind of intense competition for social status that birthed compelling art as its fuel. (I haven’t read the book so don’t want to be unfair, but I have to say it sort of sounds like Marx’s book is a rehash of Pierre Bourdieu.)

Goldberg was responding to a May essay by Christian Lorentzen that declared, “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring. All of these industries are averse to risk and chase trends mindlessly. They ignore difficulty. They are humorless. Occasionally they try to make a buck by ginning up controversies, which are also deeply boring and highly repetitive.” For Lorentzen, “The cult of marketing is the reason for cultural boredom.”

Max Read, also responded to this problem on his Substack, asking “Did the internet ruin culture?” and responding somewhat skeptically to the premise that culture is just wallowing in boredom—after all many people are happily consuming what’s being created today and any boredom just might represent the tastes of the bored cohort—but maintaining in so far as the notion has merit it has something to do with the way money is currently being made through cultural production. On the political right, Ross Douthat describes the present situation as “decadence,” a perennial complaint from conservatives that makes things sound lot more fun and sexy than they really actually are. A friend offered, “decadence without glamor,” which sounds about right. Another friend calls it “zero swag,” meaning a total lack of charisma or coolness.

My premise is that something is wrong. There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it. There are refreshing exceptions, of course, but they seem to quickly get counterfeited or compromised. Even mediocre genre movies that would’ve seemed unremarkable in past ages can seem like monuments of a lost civilization today. It often feels like we’re being fed the cultural equivalent of Soylent, a kind of nutrient-rich goo that we’re supposed to believe does the same thing as food. Enthusiasm about “vibe shifts” or the possible birth of a new avant-garde comes partially from the hope that something might actually change.

I’ve tried before to get at what exactly feels off a couple times, one time identifying the problem as “formlessness” and another calling it the Age of Blah, and associating it with the rise of content-mongering tech-bores like Elon Musk and Andrew Yang. I’ve called this “the general glut of the human spirit,” occasioned by overproduction of crap. One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include the spontaneous human capacity to create images that reflect ourselves and the world but are not fully articulable in terms of concepts. Now people seem respond to the products of the imagination in a very schizoid and polarized way: they take them hyper-literally, reacting to every fantasy that crosses the mind as the absolute truth of their self and world, or by totally pathologizing the very existence of the imagination and denying the validity of its products. This is certainly related to the inability to read fiction as anything beyond communicating a series of simple moral instructions.

I believe there’s a root phenomenon behind all these different manifestations of cultural unease. It is partly due to the internet, but it also goes beyond it. It is also behind the feelings of monotony, loneliness, superficiality, and blandness that can sometimes dominate modern life. The best way I can currently articulate this is in terms of Hannah Arendt’s notions of “worldliness” and “world-loss.” For Arendt, “world” refers a stable, shared material context for human activity. As my friend Steven Klein writes in his recent book, “The permanence of meaning comes from the stability of the built material contexts in which we carry out our activities.” None of the objects that can make up this world can be reduced entirely their utilitarian function: they all have an appearance that inevitably points beyond mere functionality and raises aesthetic questions like that of their beauty or ugliness. Works of art are a class of objects that stand apart both from the metabolic and consuming processes of everyday life and the leveling equalization of cash exchange: they are never swallowed up by usefulness or exchange value. They make tangible the capacity for thought.

The Internet—Web 3.0 and its simulacra of both non-fungibility and hopes to recreate a sense of location—never really provides a permanent and satisfying world. It’s a constantly shifting screen: references, concepts, even the way things look have a very short half-life, they are always decaying, being replaced. With computer graphics, it’s easier than ever to represent grand imaginative vistas and maybe that’s why they end up feeling so stale and hollow. In place of art, we have “content,” which in its very conception makes cultural products totally interchangeable, just stuff to fill up space. This is why there is so much nostalgia for the material culture of past eras and a missing part of the fascination with scenes like “Dimes Square,” they communicate a real yearning for a specific place and context.

Works of art in this conception are obviously analogous to the human individual in someway, with the “aura” of the pre-mechanical work of art that Walter Benjamin spoke of having its analog in the charisma of the person: There is something singular and irreducible about each one, they appear outwardly but something retreats from full transparency and comprehension. It’s often said of contemporary people that they are too narcissistic, but in a way there’s not enough narcissism, if we take the word in Freud’s original sense as meaning a type of inner self-satisfaction and self-reliance that a person can possess. In short, there is a lack of character: inwardness that escapes reduction to classificatory schemes. There’s no privacy: the self today is constantly performed and externalized in the hopes this will give provide concreteness and a sense of permanence, but it is instantly recaptured thereby in more abstractions. As such, the sense of mystery and charisma that used to adhere to people often feels absent.

20th century modernist avant-garde movements implicitly understood the experience of world-loss and their projects were often about reinvesting the lifeworld with an aesthetic character. They built world-views as much as artworks, trying to come up with new entire styles of architecture, design, novels, poetry, painting, and sculpture. Even when these were projects were utopian and not feasible, they attempted to meet the needs of the moment: that of preserving a distinctly human world that was not purely that of commerce and consumption. And when they didn’t build entire new worlds, their work critiqued what was missing or deficient in the existing world completely and mercilessly. The only people that still have this modernist spirit are from the world of tech, who for the most part totally lack aesthetic sensitivity and understanding of the artistic tradition and whose products further degrade the world into a characterless void.

I’m not sure how to recover a satisfying world of art, but I think it will involve struggling a long time with material again; working with things that resist our capacity to give it form and thereby make form permanent and lasting, by shaping and reshaping paint, stone, and sentence until they yield real work.