Has The Impermanence Of Globalization Killed Culture?
One British art historian claimed that geographic permanence is the precondition for great culture and today we have neither
I never thought I would live to see the total death of culture. I don’t mean high culture or great culture but even the level of good popular culture I took for granted in my teens and early twenties, which I thought would just continue to reinvent itself indefinitely. I thought that there would always be a steady flow of cinema, music, fashion and fiction, which were absolutely central to life until a decade or two ago. It was what people talked about. It was what ambitious young people dreamed of creating. Every weekend the culture supplements would have something or somebody in the arts to be excited about. There was always a great music act to hear live or a new book by a favorite living author to anticipate. Talking about politics was for a small joyless niche only.
The afterglow of what ever it was that made us create culture seems to have been finally extinguished. The financial models of the institutions that used to create popular culture still exist and so movies, books, clothes are still being made but they’re artistically dead and there is no organic audience or excitement about them. The standards have plummeted. I imagine one of the reasons nobody seems to be admitting this is that the people who are in the business of producing culture or writing about it or facilitating it in some way would be putting themselves out of work in the industries that remain. It also invites the inevitable criticisms of being old and out of touch or just mourning the passing domination of white culture. Today nobody is creating even good quality pop culture and industries worth billions struggle to keep people interested.
There are many possible causes here but I’d like to suggest one, based on Kenneth Clarke’s famous 1969 Civilization series. Near the beginning of the series he stands in front of a great Viking ship, admiring its craftsmanship but he says that the decisive feature that gave rise to great culture was the end of migrations and nomadism and the beginning of permanence.
Civilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power: something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. The wanderers and invaders were in a continual state of flux. They didn’t feel the need to look beyond the next March or the next voyage or the next battle. And for that reason it didn’t occur to them to build stone houses, or to write books…Civilised man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back. And for this purpose it is a great convenience to be able to read and write.
Even the cosmopolitan writers of the past, like James Joyce for example, were directly inspired by and deeply psychically rooted in their home city which they imagined living on far into the future. Today there is no such permanence. We are not rooted anywhere and everything is temporary. There is no continuity with the future to which a love letter can be written. Maybe as a result we just can’t create anymore.
"I thought that there would always be a steady flow of cinema, music, fashion and fiction, which were absolutely central to life until a decade or two ago."
Some trivialities:
- Absurd as it may sound, one of the pleasures I derived from watching old films as a lad was the ability to *date* a picture by its mise-en-scène; the clothes the actors wore, the cars they drove, lighting, camera angles, etc. Without any prior knowledge, one can easily discern that e.g. VERTIGO is late 1950s and THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE is mid-1970s. I first experienced severe aesthetic dissonance around this issue when I saw L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997); the set dressing is impeccably early 1950s, but the cinematography and pacing are echt 1990s.
- Re fashion: The male business suit has remained utterly static for 20 years. Double-breasted jackets made a brief comeback in the 1990s and three-buttons around the turn of the century, but both have since vanished from the racks. The baroque trends of the 1970s -- wide lapels and flared trouser cuffs -- are oft-mocked, but they were at least distinctive.
- If shown a random scene from a contemporaneously set Hollywood film with which I have no prior familiarity, I will be hard pressed to identify it as being from any particular year between 2000 and 2020. There's a flat nullity to mass popular culture now, a sense of being stuck in time, recycling over innovation.
- It's not as if period costume drama ever fell out of fashion, exactly, but the subgenre now seems to dominate especially longform television (e.g. MAD MEN and its successors/imitators). It may be that it's foisted on the viewing public for reasons unknown, but it seems possible also that people are desperate to see anything different from what is around them, something with a concrete sense of time and place.
Interesting thoughts here- I would say there's always good books, music and video being made somewhere, but it's both buried in subcultures and ubiquitous at the same time, making it really hard to sift through all the crap. And even subcultures (or especially them in some cases) are poisoned by politics and ideology as well, if not in the art then at least in the conversations and writing that surrounds it. It's all so suffocating
And there's definitely something to permanence that gives you the space to make art, especially music. When I was in high school, having a band was easy, we were all stuck together! But then college and the idea we all had to disperse as far away from our hometowns as possible just threw wrenches into all that. It's only been in the last couple years being settled down and lucky enough to have like-minded friends nearby that I've been able to pick that up again. Of course being a one-man solo project is easier than ever...but that's so much less fun