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Reading: Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck, at Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

The idea that culture is stagnating, as Ted Gioia puts it — or that it’s stuck, as Paul Skallas says — isn’t new. Neither is the observation that there’s something different about how bad things are in this particular moment. The cultural malaise is palpable and cross-generational. The complaints are more than just old man yells at cloud. Everyone feels it.^[1]

Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. . . .

. . . If you complain about these trends, the responses you’ll get typically fall into two camps. One sympathizes with you, but offers only a resigned How are you just now noticing? The other dismisses your concerns as a symptom of aging. There’s plenty of great music, movies, literature, and fashion, and if you don’t like it, that’s your inability to keep up.^[2]

Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.

There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.

We just don’t register it as culture. . . . We’re witnessing the rise of new forms of cultural expression. If these new forms aren’t dismissed by critics, it’s because most of them don’t even register as relevant. Or maybe because they can’t even perceive them.

— Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck
Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

1. ^[1][Everyone? Nah. Come on. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][For what it’s worth, this latter is actually the response I’m most often inclined to give when I hear this kind of stock complaints about, say, television and film: I don’t even know what people are talking about, unless it’s just to say that they’re tired of going to the movies and so can’t be arsed to find movies to go see. If you’re tired of superhero movies or Star Wars series or whatever, well, that’s fine; don’t watch that stuff. There’s a ton of weird, non-franchised, stylistically varied and highly idiosyncratic movies and series coming out every year. You don’t have to be some hipster bastard digging through the bottom of search results to find it; just make the effort to go to an arthouse theater or watch the foreign films up for an Oscar this year or whatever. Last year’s Best Picture nominees were wildly divergent, artistically ambitious, ranged from quietly meditative reflections on midlife regret to alt-Victorian Living Dead Girl picaresques and practical-effect atomic bomb explosions, and more or less all were completely different from the sort of genre pictures that the Stuck Culture bellyachers routinely and absurdly claim to be all-devouring and inescapable. I take Katherine Dee’s point in this essay that there’s also a lot of other stuff to look at; but it also just seems like the core complaint about stuckness hardly ever really reflects the real range of activity in the cultural medium alleged to be stuck. It’s not even prima facie compelling after a moment’s thought about what you could find in fifteen minutes’ worth of looking. —R.G.]↩