... But I Know What I like
And I know what cars like
Research shows that cars parked with paintings are more refreshed and ready to go in the morning.
Two notes:
If you think you’ve missed a post or two, check your spam folder. We understand that some wound up there for some people. Or at least that’s their story.
The sequel to our Boots On The Ground (Part One) post is a few days out yet.
Michelle Goldberg writes some pretty good stuff for the NY Times editorial section. She’s not a striver, like so many of her colleagues. Last week, though, she wrote about a book she read which convinced her, although maybe not on these precise terms, that video killed the radio star, and Sinatra couldn’t carry a tune compared to Bing Crosby.
And Elvis! My god don’t get us started.
Exasperated art critic Ben Davis took exception to both her assessment of culture these days, and her explanation of what fuels the conditions which led to the assessment. From his Artnet (the magazine where he works) piece:
As a piece of criticism, Goldberg’s essay is not as eye-roll inducing as, say, David Brooks’s famed noodlings on the decline of taste. But her foray into the Crisis of Culture genre also doesn’t have anything like Brooks’s sense of purpose either. It’s plodding and meandering.
At one point, Goldberg presents this as evidence of her thesis: “when I go to coffee shops where young people are hanging out, the music is often either the same music I listened to when I was young, or music that sounds just like it.” This is like a parody of leaden cultural criticism. (“When I get my morning Starbucks they are playing Adele—truly, youth culture is dead!”)
When we got to this point in Davis’s piece, which comes early on, we thought, oh, he’s cherry-picking the deadliest bit from Goldberg’s piece. But no.
There is so much recent writing on these dynamics of internet subculture that is much more informative than what we get from this op-ed, from Caroline Busta on creators navigating the “clear net” and the “dark forest” to Josh Citarella’s work on niche political identities on social media to Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and its argument about the role that online cultural spaces play as a “club space for congregation” for queer and trans people.
There are even ways that the removal of cultural barriers online seems to increase the cachet of the remaining signifiers of actually being part of a special scene or club. “It makes more sense for a parvenu to fake a ride on a private jet than to fake an interest in contemporary art,” Goldberg writes, summing up her thesis. But the archetypal parvenu, fake heiress Anna Delvey, actually did project an interest in contemporary art via her Instagram as part of her own attempt to “ascend the social hierarchy.” An art-themed members-only club was her whole gambit.
We’re not sure if Davis realized he had got right to the heart of the matter when he said, regarding Goldberg’s attention to the vast reservoirs of content residing on the internet and the alleged erasure of socialization as an entre to culture, “I mean, sure, you can skim the surface of culture very easily for mood-board purposes.“
Which is exactly the job of full-time editorialists. You can’t write 10 or 15 opinion pieces every month by accumulating a deep understanding of all the topics on your calendar. Sometimes you just run across a book covering a topic where you don’t have a lot of expertise, read it, are wowed, and wind up in print with something that stands up about as well as an easel on two legs. This one says “the internet is flat.”
And that’s okay. Everybody has off days. We’re having one right this minute, which is why we let Ben Davis do all the heavy lifting. And that’s okay.
(Musical contributions to this post include Sonido Gallo Negro, “Paganismo.” If you have any music recommendations, please drop them in the comments. )
Two much culture. I need to diversify.
Except about the music. How is Rap still hear?