Yesterday I spent some time reading up on expert opinions as to the new work that authors like Tao Lin and his circle in Brooklyin’ or the Based God and his supplicants (see: Steven Roggenbuck), and found that very few of the critics spoke to or about what I feel is the most important idea behind this contemporary movement in art, and try to talk a little bit about how it may reflect on the “status” of my generation (e.g. Romanticism as the status of youth during Industrialization, Hemmingway’s “Lost Generation,” the Beatnicks etc).
There is the macro-theory about Literary Movements that each new one is born from some rejection of the past one. Another way to state this is that when a new movement is born, it eventually becomes part of the status quo, and a “new” movement must therefore reject that status quo, otherwise it’s not new, sort of definitionally. Working with this theory, I will start with modernism: modernism rejected the assumption of almost all the movements before it that art was founded on certain forms of expression which were seen roughly as Platonic moments of beauty, such as the sonnet in poetry. (Obviously this is not a hard and fast rule, and I don’t claim it is, but this sort of idea was held and is well documented within artistic “instruction” of the day. Also note that artists who did not follow this idea such as VanGoh were famously unsuccessful.) Instead modernism said that the artist can construct new forms to match his intent and thus create a work as a totally unique expression of his worldview. This came along with developments in philosophy, especially in Idealist philosophies such as Existentialism.
Next came the Post-modernists, who further rejected the assumptions of previous movements. Exactly what they rejected is somewhat abstract, but can be understood as a result of the “post-structural” Hermeneutical philosophies which were being developed. The central idea was that language was not simply a mode for conveying information, but had information encoded in its structure. What this meant was that by restructuring the way you chose to look at the language of a work, you could entirely change the meaning thereof. Faced with this unlimited interpretative framework (which, by consequence, denied the author any true control over what his work ended up meaning) authors reacted by removing from the “communication” from their work. While Modernism maintained that the work was an expression of the authors feelings or ideas, Postmodernism did not. The specific ramifications of this are that lots of people neither like nor understand Postmodern works. Why? Because there is no intent for them to be understood. The author creates them with some irrelevant intent which may or may not have anything to do with the reader at all, and then the reader approaches the work, and, as he does with every other work, assigns it some arbitrary meaning, or even assigns it meaningless based on the context of his own life experience and mood at the time (is how Postmodernist thought goes). Out of this tradition (Beckett and the other absurdists) came mid-century novelists like Pynchon and David Foster-Wallace and even to a certain extent less dramatic formal experimentation such as in the magical realism of people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as all the weird stuff you see in “Modern” Art Museums.
Which brings me to right now, which I view as a sort of critical moment for new artists. Why? The answer, as with almost every revolution happening now, is the Internet. But before I examine that, I would like to state explicitly what I believe is happening. There is a sort of idea out in the literary world that you can’t go “further” than Postmodernism. That is, Postmodernism fundamentally allows you to make anything and say here is my text, it has meaning, and the claim that “it doesn’t have meaning” cannot be made. In that context, what sort of literary movement could reject this idea. In a world where “all” assumptions are malleable, where “all” manifestos are accepted, what could lie “outside.” The answer, I think, is what we are seeing today.
So what are we seeing? A rejection of the idea of “good.” See, Postmodernism still held itself accountable to the social conventions of the art world, and said that art is “good” if it sells, because that is what “good” art means. This is something you can see in the traditions of artists like Andy Warhol or his contemporary Japanese counterpart Takashi Murakami. They commoditize their works, because the consumption of a work is what makes it important, given that “meaning” is completely indeterminate. And thus, although there was nothing you could do per se about what your work would end up meaning, you could try and make something that would sell, you could try and make something that people would like, or would consider “good” or “important.” (Artists who did not like Pynchon and Foster-Wallace I think were on the forefront of the new movement we see today; however, simply looking at how long and intricately structured their novels are, I think it is plain to see they had some intent of applying literary “skill” to their writing.)
What we are seeing now is a rejection of the assumption of technique, that there is some “skill” which makes a work “good,” which, although not a tenet of Post-Modernism’s philosophy, was a part of it’s enaction in the art world. What does this mean? It mean’s artists making works with literally no process of craft, no idea of making it “better” over time. They make works which are actually “bad” in that they don’t appeal to any cultural sensibilities at all. Many people take this as “irony” or “commentary,” a sort of gimmick to achieve shallow meaning, and like or dislike it based on this interpretation, but I think this analysis is wholly incorrect. You can see in the works and intense internet based self promotion of Tao Lin not an attempt to poke fun at the literary world and it’s standards (if that is what he’s trying to do, he is doing so in a very drawn out and flaccid way), but rather a complete disregard for it at all. He, like Lil’ B and Steven R., is making works with no regard for editors or publishers or even some abstract concept of “good”-ness. He writes all simple sentences with little description and spaztic, almost lyrical imagery which has no apparent relevance to topics at hand. Who would wan’t to read such incomprehensible mush? That’s not the point. Tao Lin wanted to read it, so he made it.
This is, as Lil’ B calls it, “Based” art, it is held to no standards except the artist’s. It is literally whatever the artist wants to do with no qualifications. Such art may have existed before, but it could not be considered “real” or “important” or “good” because it could never get exposed and consumed, and so it was disregarded based on the capitalist standards which Postmodernism assumed. Now, with the internet, an individual can commoditize himself by himself out of his own self interest. What before might have been some horrible rap recorded over an old Raffi cassette tape never heard by anyone but the closest friends and relatives is now on Youtube getting 1000 views per day because it’s “so bad it’s funny” or because “I believe in Based God” or because “I hate those mainstream label rappers” or whatever; the point is it’s out there being sold and bought. The Postmodernists who want to protect their status as “skilled” and “important” artists cannot stand on capitalist claims anymore. If they do, they must accept this new breed of creators circumventing their entire distribution structure, or they must violate the fundamental law of their movement: that anything goes.
If we choose to read new literary movements as a window into that era’s youth zeitgeist, what sort of conclusions can be drawn about “my” generation. From my own experience and in my conversations with other people around my age, there is a feeling that the idea of society as a whole has let us down. It is sort of the general condition one of who’s specific results is low voting rates among young people. I myself have this sort of feeling, which I might categorize as an absolute disenfranchisement: it is a disenfranchisement with the idea of the franchise. On the surface, this appears as a form of relativism, sort of the idea that “anything goes,” but that is actually a step behind. What is found in these works is more the concept that “nothing goes.” Success has nothing to do with experimentation, or concept, or statement, or purpose, or politics, or even “art society.” All it is is money and notoriety, and if you get those things, then you’re done, according to the world. This art movement is exposing this emptiness by garnering success with nothing — selling “stock” in an unwritten book; marketing “rare” self-footage as your own paparazzi; monetizing your life and living off it.
That is my feeling around these works: I look and I see self promoted success undermining all the ideas about success; the ideas upon which our society is founded. It captures an exhaustion with cultures of expectation: relativism, pluralism, fairness, liberty, skill, effort, all these things we are told we are supposed to hold dear, and yet at the same time are completely up for question and hold no real value but are nonetheless the only real good things in life, as long as you acknowledge that you don’t really know. It’s like being told: go explore and find out for yourself, but don’t bother anyone else with it when you do because you’re wrong anyway. These artists say, “No, I won’t look, I won’t find, I will just do nothing and make it, because I can, and who will stop me?”
And that’s the real point. No one will. They’re “making it.” On the backs of nothing “good.”
So either there was nothing “good” in the first place, or that’s not what “making it” is all about.
