I'm just not keeping up with The Guardian, which is why I missed this article: In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback? (hat tip to On an overgrown path).
The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our art a bit more seriously
That subhead neatly summarizes the argument so we can probably skip reading the article. But yes, speaking as one who never left cultural snobbery, it is always a good time to take notice of cultural things that are not actually crap. Sure, they take a bit more time. Reading Don Quixote takes more time than watching Netflix, but perhaps not if you factor in the time spent trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Thanks to On an overgrown path for the delightful use of the word "enshittified." Yes, the enshittification of culture and, well, social institutions in general, is far advanced.
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Alex Ross posts a tribute to substack:
Of late, an increasing number of voices, some new and some thoroughly familiar, have converged on Substack. Such erstwhile blogging heavyweights as Steve Smith, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, and Joshua Kosman are in residence. The great Paul Griffiths, who has been observing new music longer than most of us have been alive, has launched what music!
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The Atlantic avers: How to Make Music Popular Again. And follows that clanger with an even more mistaken subhead:
The rise of headphone listening has changed us profoundly—and maybe not for the better.
No, no, no, they have it all wrong. If anything, music is too popular, or, more accurately, there is too much popular music. About the only ray of sunshine is the widespread use of headphones which has saved so many of us the torture of listening to other people's music. If only we could make the use of headphones mandatory in all public spaces.
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YouTube paid out $8B to the music industry in 12 months. I guess that's good news. Mind you, I would love to see a breakdown of who got what. If Taylor Swift got seven of the eight billion, well...
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Now for some listening. One cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of the always inventive Joseph Haydn. Here is his Symphony No. 31, nicknamed "Hornsignal" and yes, there are lots of horns.
You also cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Here is the 8th with Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. This clip just appeared on YouTube six days ago.
For our last envoi, not a symphony but a serenade by Mozart. Even when writing music for diversion or background to a banquet, Mozart was simply incapable of writing anything less than superbly beautiful.
5 comments:
The Guardian piece mainly didn't impress me at all. There was an op ed a few years ago complaining that the trouble with horror movies these days is that 1) the monsters aren't even scary and 2) the directors seem to be putting in Jake the Explainer footnotes into their scripts on the subtextual significance of their horror movies as criticisms of patriarchy and late stage capitalism presuming upon the need to signal the relevance of the movie. The author said that older horror movies, even the splatstick of Sam Raimi in the early 1980s, had the simpler idea that you actually scare people first and the subtextual reception history stuff comes later after the movie has, you know, gained and kept an audience.
These days Hollywood could crank out The Howling CLIX : Still Howling After All These Years and some critic would transform that release into an opportunity to talk for a few thousand words about how the possibility of such a release is emblematic of the revenant that the tentpole film has become in late stage capitalism.
I say that in jest but I just read a Boston film critic who quite seriously claimed that a newly released anime is a trenchant critique of late stage capitalism.
Uh, Chainsaw Man is still gonna be Chainsaw Man, okay. Not my jam and I write as a longtime anime fan. The only way such a film could get an American release is because of "late stage capitalism". My brother read the first volume of Chainsaw Man and told me it was a variation on a story concept that was done better in Dorohedoro.
"quite seriously claimed that a newly released anime is a trenchant critique of late stage capitalism"
How is that ridiculous in itself? Since the 1980s, a lot of Japanese anime and RPGs have criticized corporations grown too powerful. It’s a stock trope in the genre.
the ridiculous part isn't cinema critical of soulless technocracy. That goes all the way back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The absurdity is in the "late stage capitalism" jargon.
"Late capitalism" has been a term in circulation since the year of the Scopes trial and 2 years before Metropolis. And yet here we are literally a century later and there's still late capitalism.
Late capitalism and late-stage capitalism seem to be for Marxists and post-Marxists what the End Times timeline has been for Hal Lindsey types within fundamentalist Christianity. There's The Late, Great Planet Earth (still in print) and then there's "late capitalism".
When I see an article at ArtsFuse extolling Chainsaw Man as a critique of late stage capitalism there's three criticisms I have about this: 1) we've had late capitalism for a century now 2) the author treats Chainsaw Man as an alternative to superhero routines when Chainsaw Man itself is basically a superhero (The Punisher or Spawn rather than Superman but I think the point still stands) and 3) late stage capitalism is how a Boston film critic can even write about an American theatrical release of an anime. It's not that Chainsaw Man is bad or anything, it's that cultural snobbery can take poptimist forms as well as elitist forms and yet draws from much the same toolbox.
People perpetuating the meme of “late-stage capitalism” isn’t necessarily Marxist. After all, Marxism was optimistic, it foresaw revolution and communism looming, nevermind how exactly. People using this term on social media nowadays are, on the other hand, often looking at the world with a deep pessimism and believe that the current state of things foretells a return to feudalism that could last many centuries.
maybe, but in a film review from a film critic with a master's degree the iikelihood of the lay meaning coudl be debatable.
Some writers think we're already in techno-feudalism and either like or hate that.
The point about pessimistic usage is a good one, though, and it contextualizes my skepticism about the usage. That a Japanese animated film can get an American release and do decently at the box office (Chainsaw Man has better American domestic box office now than Your Name ever got) suggests that the pessimistic usage of "late stage capitalism" has a range of usage in the pessimistic register that can be a bit ambiguous. If you're educated enough to wield the term on social media then you're literate and wealthy and connected enough to make the usage. The point of a character like Denji, though, is he's so dumb, uneducated and gullible he doesn't necessarily have those levels of opportunity and becomes a free-lance devil hunter to make money.
Marxist optimism is another strand of its apocalyptic nature--it's too easy for people to switch "apocalyptic" with "eschatological" these days and that may be because people aren't literate enough in theological concepts to follow the distinctions. In the sense of revealing the truth about the evils that oppress and dehumanize humans Marxism has always been a secular/materialist variation of apocalyptic literature and in its optimism it retained a variant of the millennialist utopian visionary impulse.
To put things another way, maybe the people who use late-stage capitalism aren't necessarily Marxist but these days I admit I feel like just enough of a curmudgeon to say that they are probably at least a little self-pitying. :)
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