Primates of Park Avenue: A Spoon Full of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down…

You Can Tune A Piano, When The Heat Is On, But Can You Roll With the Changes, After the Boys of Summer Have Gone?

Back in June, in the run-up to my birthday, I found myself contemplating how much things have changed since I was a kid in the 1970s. Apparently, that sort of pre-birthday nostalgia is a contractual obligation of middle age.

During my formative years, the culture of postmodernity was in its insurgent adolescence (a lot like me). It was steadily chipping away at the hegemony of cultural modernity, but it was not yet the cultural dominant.[1] At least that’s my sense of things now, looking back on it. So the 1970s and the early 1980s existed in a murky transition state, with one foot still on the familiar ground of cultural modernity and the other foot now firmly planted in the exciting possibilities of the postmodern.

Today, things are different. The culture of postmodernity–in all its ironic glory–is fully dominant. And with each passing year, the time-honored roles, categories, and clearly defined conceptual boundaries of cultural modernity (and my youth) have become either residual artifacts of history or hybrid, postmodern jumbles that resemble something familiar from the old days, but seem to mean something different now.[2]

If the culinary metaphor for cultural modernity is a Swanson TV dinner, with each food item placed oh so rationally in its own distinct section on the disposable aluminum tray, the culinary metaphor for cultural postmodernity is a compostable burrito bowl from Chipotle. Or maybe it’s a scoop of rum-infused banana, peanut butter, and chocolate-covered bacon ice cream in an artisanal waffle cone. (“It’s like Bananas Foster on steroids and Elvis Presley’s favorite sandwich all together in a single cone!”)

No more separating things. Now, highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, and no brow all exist on equal footing. For the first rule of cultural postmodernity is this: “Mix it all together, put a big spoonful in your mouth, and savor the weird and wonderful diversity of flavors.”

Curation, as Fredric Jameson has argued, is the highest form of artistic expression in postmodernism,[3] and an embrace of eclectic mixtures has become the ultimate mark of taste and refinement. The person who elegantly creates the most unexpected and far-flung mix of flavors earns the most cultural capital. The remaining capital goes to anyone who enjoys the mix and gets its references and allusions.

As a result, we’ve come to distrust things that feel like the divided sections of that old TV dinner tray. That’s not an interesting mix. It’s hardly a mix at all. It’s a relic from an older and more rigid time and place, an era where cultural relevance filters were typically on the supply-side and cultural elites at the top had disproportionate influence over what sort of stuff made it through the filter and into our ears, eyes, noses, and bellies.

Today, the old supply-side filters feel increasingly like one of those residual artifacts of history I referenced above. They still exist, but they’ve become less and less effective, as we’ve been overloaded with more and more information. This has forced most of us to do a lot more of our own demand-side filtering–quite a wearying experience for many people.

But it has also taught us to question things, like whether fancy job titles and educational attainment really provide the assurances of quality, legitimacy, and relevance that were attributed to them back in the day. For in the age of the Internet, where almost anyone can share their mix of thoughts with everybody, it’s become difficult to predict where meaningful commentary will come from, what it will look like, and who will be offering it. So it pays to take each bite thoughtfully and with an open mind, rather than rushing straight to judgement. Continue reading “Primates of Park Avenue: A Spoon Full of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down…”