Increased levels of chatter

[imomus]

I'm posting this morning to message boards on three subjects.

1. On the Stirling Prize for Architecture:

'The Grauniad has a long piece on the gherkin today entitled A Fine Pickle. Jonathan Jones got me onside in the first half with pep talk about what a nice shape it is and how London needs skyscrapers. Then he completely lost me by saying that contemporary art has lost architecture's vision of Modernism, and that Modernism and the Renaissance have a lot in common, and modern art hasn't yet been understood and therefore can't be supplanted by post-modern art...

'In the end the article just seems symptomatic of the tendecy of Britain to pick up on art movements very, very late and then knock their successors on the head for daring to have evolved somewhere else while the critics were fumbling about, trying to decide whether to jump on the bandwagon or not. When Britain adopts the Euro I fully expect them to start complaining to the European Central Bank 'But why have you changed the design of the notes when the original was so good?'

'In other words, what I really object to in Jones' piece is his need to propose Modernism as a new Classicism.'

2. On Musicians working in genres they have contempt for:


'Coupla points. First, it's an interview cliche for musicians to say they hate the genre their band is associated with, because they've always got a 'Don't fence me in' attitude and an eye on the long game, and genre is very subject to fashion. See, for instance, The Cardigans on 'Easy Listening' or Blur on Britpop.

'Second, all pop musicians nevertheless work in a genre which is, to some extent, contemptible, and that genre is pop music. So it's inevitable that a highly ambivalent mixture of contempt and respect -- held in taut and suggestive tension with each other -- should mark their attitude to their medium. You could cite any pop record ever made and locate contempt/respect ambivalence in it, but just for fun I'm going to cite Beck's 'Midnite Vultures'.

'I'd add that as we get deeper into the post-modern period, one of the hallmarks of pomo -- its refusal to make distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture -- will rob pop music of some of its vital energy, which comes precisely from its contempt for itself. In an era where even the prime minister was in a rock band, where pop music is taught in pop music colleges, where pop music is played by the authorities in 'social control' situations like planes on runways, and where cultural studies legitimizes pop as a serious academic subject, pop can't retain its component of self-contempt, and therefore will start to take on the dead, fusty, respectable, museum-like mantle of classical music or jazz.

'This is an extension of the attitude (which we now laugh at) of Noel Coward, who talked in one of his plays about 'the strange potency of cheap music'. My argument is that the potency is all tied up with our feeling that pop music is 'cheap'. Once pop music starts to feel 'expensive' and 'valuable' and 'endorsed by all the authorities', it loses the potency of its 'otherness'.'

3. (Not unrelated to 2) Marc Almond fighting for life after motorcycle accident:

'This is very bad news indeed. One does not usually make a full recovery from 'head injuries' which are 'critical'.'

Comments

Ambivalent contempt

[fibdemetics.livejournal.com]

Is this ambivalence not precisely (or at least of the same moment as) that "refusal to make distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture?" A refusal which is never quite wholeheartedly believed or enacted?

I imagine it started with the fairly earnest artistic pretension of, say, the later Beatles, and then evolved into the more knowing artistic pretension of, say, New Order.

But even New Order (looking back) was quite sincere...self-contempt has devolved into plain old contempt, and I think that this is another reason why most pop music fails to inspire anyone to anything.

Getting back to the utopian impulse, we should hope that the appropriative machine alluded to above can subsume form much more easily than the sincere content of (de)localized art such as yours.

Re: Ambivalent contempt

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is this ambivalence not precisely (or at least of the same moment as) that "refusal to make distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture?" A refusal which is never quite wholeheartedly believed or enacted?

This is a subtle argument, but it troubles me, because then my argument would be saying that the thing which gave pop its early momentum was the same thing that sapped it of energy later on. It would also postulate that the big vertical cultural differences of the modern era were the same thing, basically, as the horizontal superflatness of the pomo era.

I think I want to keep the notion that there was a radical shift to a new state of affairs in post-modernism, but I accept that a lot of the old ways of thinking persisted. That's obvious in Jonathan Jones' article. They persisted in Britain especially because the class system will never be replaced by any kind of 'superflat' social structure there. All that happened when Britain went pomo (and I date that to the Thatcher period, which makes punk the last modern, subcultural music movement) is that the high / low structures were reversed. There was a lot of inverse snobbery. Suddenly someone called 'Sid' owned shares in the old modernist public utilities, and educated people demonstrated their cultural capital with an encyclopedic knowledge of football, pop trivia and TV comedy reruns. This inversion allowed Britain to retain class distinctions while focusing contempt on refined, intellectual or aspirational values instead of abject ones -- something the country has always been depressingly willing to do.

Re: Ambivalent contempt

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't it that pop is and always has been the progeny of postmodernism and that its exhaustion signals the slow dissolve from postmodernism? It's only a matter of time before the Scissor Sisters make a sincere anti-war record. Personally, I agree with some of the posters above, that pomo will come to be seen as an extension of modernism (itself some kind of flip outgrowth of romanticism).

The class reversal you mention as Thatcherist was THE defining characteristic of 60s British (post)modernism, hence films like Blow Up, lyrics like the Stones Play with Fire (Now she gets her kicks in Stepney. not in Knightsbridge anymore).

Re: Ambivalent contempt

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, there's something in that. 'Classless' was a 60s buzzword, but I think it affected very few people at that time. Maybe the 90s was just the mainstreaming of 60s classlessness. But there's still an inversion, because 60s classlessness was socialist, whereas 90s pomo inverse snobbery was a right wing phenomenon.

I do think that pomo can be dated in Britain from the 'This Is Tomorrow' show at the Whitechapel. That was 1956, the same year Elvis released 'Heartbreak Hotel'. So yes, you have a point.