NP art sensibilities vs NJ art sensibilities
- Thread starter Nautilidae
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"Magnificent Bastard" / Ren's Counterpart
- Jun 26, 2017
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I usually consume art which has an aesthetic I aspire to actualize.
Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
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"Magnificent Bastard" / Ren's Counterpart
- Jun 26, 2017
- 12,749
- 50,519
- 3,276
- MBTI
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I enjoy the band too. For me they represent the excesses of the 80s, which, in my opinion were always with us and never went away.
There is an ambitious side to conspicuous-consumption that isn't talked about often. To consume the highest quality goods and services, it takes a coveted position that excludes most human beings.
Advertising is art.
I agree fully.
One thing I'm not enjoying very much currently is the 80s revival in contemporary art. I don't see it as flattery or nostalgia. I see it as anxiety detached from perspective. It lacks the joyousness and optimism of what it borrowed from. I'm not picking on the artists or being curmudgeonly about a younger generation. I think the reason that 80s art aesthetics are being repackaged as well as why it has a different mood to is is because we've come full circle about neoliberal capitalism.
I view the 1970s disco-era decadence as occuring against the grain of normal life. It wasn't based on newness, but rather, it was the death rattle of the old normal New Deal version of Keynsian Liberalism. The onset of the Reagan/Thatcher era was an actual sea change in policy terms. Anything new has a leg up on becoming a positively charged potentiality for art, but once the newness subsides and management turns it into a norm, art turns away and looks elsewhere. Art doesn't normally reassess its home until the strength of its perceived ability to remain structurally sound begins to dissipate. A system's perceived pending collapse then becomes the new inspiration, the new newness. So in a weird way, the modern 80s revival only sounds and looks a bit like the 80s. The feel is more like that of 70s era of cocaine and disco dancing against the backdrop of oil crises, and the start of real Middle-East political failures after years of not being able to complain about Vietnam.
The late philosopher Mark Fisher has a great idea about this that he called the, “slow cancellation of the future” wherein the ideas introduced in the early 1980s happened to be uniquely well suited for translation into highly invasive narratives and once it had come to dominate all contexts, it strangled the public's capacity to even see ideas outside of its norm. The erosion of an ability to imagine futures in individuals has a high correlation with depression and anxiety. I was reminded of this recently while reading Johann Hari's Lost Connections. In the book, there's a segment that covers a study which compared the psychological perspectives of people suffering with anorexia to those of people who were major depressives. The anorexics had no problem with envisioning futures for either themselves or the world. The depressives showed a marked lack in capacity and/or speed about imagining potentialities playing out.
It's oddly beautiful how we are technically living in the same policy framework as the 1980s, but the public's sheer time spent living in it is what produced a break in cultural epochs we'd call Neoliberalism vs. Capitalist Realism.
I think most of the 80s "revivals" are more self-aware than that--not trying and failing to copy the 80s, but trying to address the 80s' dark side, or perceived dark side. Stranger Things is heavily 80s-inspired, but showcases how the 80s dream wasn't meant for all people equally, for instance.
That said, my favorite 80s revival is Gunship, which does more of what you're saying.
