In defense of: Thomas Kinkade

Why can’t everyone have beautiful things?

Unlike other areas of popular arts — film, music, etc. — where the barriers to entry have gotten lower and the price point has allowed for mass enjoyment, high art remains an area locked away in the homes of the rich and tucked into the sterility of the museum.

I can’t get a Rembrandt or a Rauschenberg to hang in my house, or if I did, it would cost a prohibitive sum. Sure, I could get a poster, but it wouldn’t have the depth or interest of the real thing, or even of a decent copy.

Thomas Kinkade was a philanderer, a hypocrite, and a sanctimonious jackass, but certainly if adultery, hypocrisy, and sanctimoniousness disqualify you for being a great artist, we wouldn’t have many to go around. His art, admittedly, was not the finest of anything — mostly the kind of cozy village scene or sun-dappled coastline that all middle Americans wished their communities looked like: equal parts Dickens, Grovers’ Corner, Hudson Valley School, and pastels (good Lord). It’s a particularly retrograde blend of lens flare and over-luminosity that feels to me like watching a JJ Abrams movie … with glaucoma and a pastel palette.

Yet, the art snobs who look at Kinkade with disdain ignore that Kinkade dedicated himself to a market that they had largely ignored — what the 99 percent actually want. Now, to be fair, Kinkade’s pricing system of tiered “limited editions” definitely created the same kinds of pricing and financing schemes that the housing bubble did, where “investors” believed (and still believe) that their paintings’ value will inevitably rise. But like predatory lenders and developers, he was addressing a demand unaddressed by the broader market — Americans wanted beautiful things that they could show off to people who entered their houses, and they wanted to look at beautiful things on a daily basis.

The art world refused to provide that, focusing on the Venetian Bienniale and “big art,” on skyrocketing prices for Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and their titillating ilk. Much of the great art since the Renaissance was founded on a clientele of the small businessman and the petit bourgeois, from the local merchants who commissioned Dutch masters to paint their portraits to the tiny collectors dotted across Provence who picked up Cezannes and Van Goghs. Today, the art world has returned to the Renaissance-era patron, the super-client rather than the myriad horde.

Matt Yglesias has a schtick about lower-quality goods in higher-quantity, which raise overall utility and satisfaction. I don’t know if I always buy that argument, but in Kinkade’s case, he was producing an inferior good that was able to reach many more people, the store-brand art that you could enjoy in your home on a regular basis.

Kinkade was no saint, but he highlighted a problem with the way that visual arts in particular conceive of their purpose and their audience. Rembrandt and Warhol had no problem churning out work from a factory to give more product to a yearning populace. Instead, the art world of today is largely frozen in private collections and snooty museums, only occasionally glimpsed by the rest of us. Kinkade gave us art in the shopping mall, art through the mail, art a click away. Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein thought they were making mass art, but it was Kinkade who truly brought it to the masses. For that, he deserves our recognition, even if not our gratitude.

P.S. If you haven’t read the Susan Orlean piece on Kinkade, it’s worth the (long) read.

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In defense of: Romney’s time at Bain

OK, this will not be a full-throated defense. Instead, it’s more of a complication of the narrative being pushed by both Democrats and Romney’s Republican rivals. I hate to say that I’m agreeing with Michael Steele here, but I do agree that our moral qualms with Bain Capital and its business may end up implicating a lot of capitalism as a whole. (Unlike Steele, I don’t think this is entirely a bad thing, but let’s start here.)

Bain Capital, Romney’s company, has the M.O. of a lot of private equity firms: they invest in a variety of companies, lay off workers, slim down unprofitable assets, and groom them to be resold.

As with a lot of companies, if they can make more money elsewhere, they will. Capitalism is about making profits for individual companies, and we should expect companies to lay off workers if that makes the more profitable. Industries shift and costs fall elsewhere; that’s just the cost of capitalism. Each entity, acting in its own self-interest, makes decisions that impact the broader web of goods and services. Bain wasn’t playing the system, manipulating currency markets, or performing rent-seeking behaviors per se. Instead, it was just doing what one expects firms to do.

If we don’t like it, we can try to ameliorate these decisions: better education systems, better unemployment benefits, better job retraining, more government jobs to which to shuttle some of these excess workers, etc. We may also build a system that makes companies contribute more to the costs of terminating workers. But the core problem itself — that private equity firms buy up (often failing) businesses, lay off a bunch of workers, and make a profit off of it — is a core problem of capitalism, not just of Mitt Romney.

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In defense of: Hank Williams Jr.

After Hank Williams Jr.’s comparison of President Barack Obama to Hitler (which, honestly, was less idiotic than the things he said afterwards to justify it), his contract with ESPN to open Monday Night Football ended. He promptly complained about his First Amendment rights, and was promptly ridiculed by various commentators.

Steve Benen sums up the overall sentiment:

In a statement, Williams said the network stepped on his First Amendment rights, apparently confusing the right to free speech with the right to an ESPN contract.

Yet, this is more complicated than the immediate facts suggest. Consider the response of country music’s establishment to the Dixie Chicks’ famous “ashamed” comments about George W. Bush. There was a massive concerted effort to crush their success, including radio stations that refused to play the Dixie Chicks’ music and assorted boycotts. The Dixie Chicks lost some endorsements, but not their jobs. And yet, the scrutiny and criticism they received definitely chilled the willingness of others to engage in free speech at a time when it was desperately needed.

Obviously, everyone was well within their rights to do this: endorsers had no obligation to sponsor the Dixie Chicks, and consumers had no obligation to buy their product. But employment rights in particular can often be an important hurdle to active political speech, and the fact that at-will termination exists for almost any job for any speech, no matter the content, creates chilling effects on free speech. If your employer can terminate you for your speech or associations outside of the workplace, even if done privately, you probably won’t feel like expressing certain views. For example, if your employer told you that your attendance of the “Occupy Wall Street” rallies would result in the loss of your job, would you do still attend? There are limited free speech exceptions to the at-will doctrine (notably whistleblower protections), but these are definitely the exception rather than the rule. Your employer in that situation would be almost completely protected. Even without state action, your company’s statement certainly curtails the kind of speech you feel free exercising.

The spirit of the First Amendment right to free speech and association is clear, but its application will always be muddy (the Supreme Court’s wacky jurisprudence on the First Amendment suggests as much). Maybe Hank Williams’s termination is just an example of the hard elbows in the marketplace of ideas. And Williams’s position was somewhat different — he was an independent contractor, and his role as entertainer theoretically put him in a kind of PR role for ESPN that he clearly bungled. But there’s no denying that the threat of loss of employment for one’s constitutional speech outside of the workplace setting can be damaging to the spirit of free speech.

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In defense of: Paul Ryan’s bottle of wine

There’s plenty not to like about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on the policy side, but I find the vitriol on the left (particularly from TPM) over Ryan’s high-priced bottle of wine at a restaurant to be as silly and trivial as the hullaballoo over John Edwards’s haircut.

Even if we accept the premise that Ryan’s wine purchase is normatively bad, we must ask why we find it normatively bad. Should our politicians not be drinking $350 bottles of wine while people are suffering? That seemed to be the original picture-taker’s point of outrage.

“We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. “I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week.”

She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors’ safety net, and she didn’t know whether Ryan or his companions was going to pay for the wine and whether the two men were lobbyists. She snapped a few shots with her cell phone to record the wine purchase.

OK, but let’s say Ryan had instead spent $700 on a big television set or a new iPad/Phone/whatever, what would we care? Maybe there are some things that we assume should be worth $700, and bottles of wine don’t fall into that category. But why shouldn’t they? A $350 bottle of wine may have all the hallmarks of decadence, but it’s hard to pin down what was so decadent about it, when compared to a techno-toy you’ll never use or a piece of furniture.

But maybe there’s some sign of malfeasance here. Representatives should not be accepting gifts from anyone, even a friend, with a high value. Again, though, this seems like relatively small potatoes compared to the excesses of lobbying junkets and the like. Besides, if Ryan split the meal 50-50 including the wine, any sign of malfeasance is slim to nil.

So what is it that’s so bad? The man had a bottle of wine. It was pretty expensive. So what? Plenty of us do expensive things all the time. Even people without much money will buy a lotto ticket every day, or buy a flight home for the holidays. The first thing that societies do when they get a middle class is to start loading up on luxuries, rather than dealing with malnutrition or sanitation. People would rather have a satellite dish than an indoor toilet. Does that make them decadent too?

My point is not to defend the rich for winning the class war. Unfortunately, rather than pointing out the fact that an astonishing number of Congresspeople and Senators are millionaires, or that the Bush tax cuts would benefit almost all Congressmen, etc., a focus on Ryan’s bottle of wine just looks petty. Ryan is reprehensible for his awful budget plan, not his decadent personal tastes. I don’t mind who buys an expensive bottle of wine, as long as he’s taxed through the ass for it.

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In defense of: not washing your hair

Being a scientist, I love to partake in experiments. And I have just finished one: not washing my hair for a month. Now, when you first tell this to people, they initially recoil and think this must be a terrible idea. After all, it must look greasy and gross and smell bad, right? Well, no. First off, I still showered each day. I just didn’t use shampoo, and instead would simply get my hair wet and run my hands through it. On three days during the month I used some conditioner. I’ve asked a few people – begging them to be honest if the answer were unfavorable – whether they noticed if my hair looked any different, and each of them said no.

There was a certain logic behind all this, so let me explain. The idea is basically this: each time you shampoo your hair, a detergent in the shampoo strips your hair of all its oils. Your scalp naturally produces oil, and its response to losing all its oil is to kick into hyperdrive and produce a lot of oil to compensate. And each day you typically continue the cycle, and you know from experience that if you do not, your hair will feel oily and gross. However, if you are willing to suffer through this adjustment period – which varies but might be two weeks or longer – your scalp will readjust, stop overproducing oil, and come into its natural equilibrium.

Various bloggers have tried this, and you can read about their observations here, here, here, and here. Reading through those posts, the results tend to be positive. The positives are that you’re not dumping potentially harsh chemicals onto your scalp, you save money, and some people report their hair being softer, shinier, and more healthy in appearance. The negatives are that it still can feel oily or gross to some people, and the adjustment times can vary a lot. For my part, I didn’t notice a huge difference. Except after I showered. Even now, which I am pretty sure is past the adjustment period, my hair still feels slightly weird/oily when the hair is still wet. However, once it dries it looks normal. Maybe a little shinier or softer, but still more oily than I am used to. Below are some cropped pics from before and then after.

Looks about the same, right? It’s been an interesting experiment. A big reason why people use shampoo – or do anything, really – is because we have been conditioned to our whole lives. It felt somewhat liberating to give it a try, knowing that most people would find the concept disgusting, yet simultaneously knowing that no one else probably knew unless I told them.

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Podcast 6(?): In defense of America

To counteract our regular missives about why America is doing something badly or should be doing it better, Linus and I have decided to do a patriotic podcast in favor of things we love about America.

Enjoy!

God bless America:

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In defense of: performance-enhancing drugs

OK, so this won’t exactly be a full-throated defense.

But with the Tour de France nearly upon us again, I wonder why we hate steroid use so much. After all, the reason that I know that Lance Armstrong was a phenomenal cyclist despite probably using performance-enhancing drugs, is because all the guys he beat were also on performance-enhancing drugs. The guys he beat were all doping, so at that point, it was a fair fight.

So rather than an affirmative defense, I’ll give rebuttals of the usual arguments.

It’s cheating: The rules are the rules; breaking them is wrong. Except when it isn’t. Whole sports have dedicated themselves to playing the refs in one way or another. Every era of baseball had some kind of cheating. Some legendary cheats are even celebrated as great moments in sports.

Plenty of innovations were first viewed as some form of cheat, such as the slam dunk in the basketball (which was then banned for a number of years by the NCAA). And rule-breakers and cheaters, from Bill Belichick to Ty Cobb to Karl Malone, are celebrated for their toughness, will to compete, etc.

Competition is all about finding an edge; why are PEDs any different?

Sure, it’s cheating, but how is it different from all the other cheating? Which leads us to…

It cheats the fans: Does it really? Fans love big hits, long homers, and fast cyclists. The Tour de France never had higher ratings than when a probably doped-up Lance Armstrong beat off his equally doped-up rivals. Regardless of whether or not Manny Pacquiao uses blood-doping, he’s the most exciting fighter in a generation. Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, despite being a confessed steroid user. Additionally, we like watching dirty players — Karl Malone’s elbows and Bill Romanowski’s head hits.

Besides, what about all the other new-fangled training equipment? Is that cheating the fans out of the “pure experience” as well? If a tennis player is using a super-racket or a swimmer is using high-tech fast swim gear, is that cheating the fans, too? Who doesn’t like seeing world records broken?

They’re dangerous for players: This is probably true for most PEDs, particularly anabolic steroids, which have notable health risks. But you know what else is dangerous about high-level competitive sports? Everything.

Football players get hit in the head. A lot. And it causes lifelong brain damage. But that’s fine; we’ll still cheer it on from the sidelines.

Has anyone seen Muhammad Ali lately? Anyone gone to a NASCAR race lately?

PEDs are dangerous for players, but are they notably more dangerous than the sport itself?

But think about the children!: Professional athletes are role models, and therefore, if they participate in risky cheating behavior, kids will too.

But professional athletes do all sorts of things that we wouldn’t want kids to do. Sure, we admonish them for it, but they are still treated heroically. A DUI is way riskier to the general public than an individual use of steroids, and yet, a DUI won’t get you the same kind of suspension.

Maybe it’s the connection with the sport itself that makes it dangerous. Kids want to get better at the sport and will risk their bodies to get there. Again, though, how is this worse than all the risks they take with their own bodies playing the sport. Injury rates for high school sports are quite high; notably, injury rates in competition are much higher than in practice situations. High-school coaches, as committed to winning as anyone, will push kids to work harder and risk their bodies for the game. These rates only go higher and higher as we get to the collegiate and professional levels.

If we really wanted to protect the children, we would direct them away from high-impact high-risk sports and towards low-impact low-risk sports (cross country skiing for everyone!).

But that’s not what we do.

It’s not fair to other players: This may be the most compelling argument to me; after all, what about the other players who don’t use steroids? Isn’t it unfair to them to watch their counterparts succeed while they toil in mediocrity? Indeed, the greatest victim of the steroid era might have been Ken Griffey, Jr., who hit like a machine but had to stay in the shadows of the juicers. This led him to take additional risks on the field, which further led to his series of injuries and decline.

Again, though, players are already doing everything to get an edge: regiments of personal trainers, every supplement short of performance-enhancing drugs, state-of-the-art training facilities, etc. Say a player decided he did not want to get reconstructive knee surgery because of the risk involved, and would retire instead. He would also be choosing not to use a dangerous technology to achieve an edge and stay competitive. What separates him from a player who takes the surgery and continues his career?

Part of being a professional athlete is having a marginal advantage over your opponent. An athlete chooses which risks to take and which to refuse, but PEDs are only one of many such risks that athletes consider. And richer athletes from richer teams tend to have more resources to win than poorer athletes from poorer teams. The inequity of PEDs is just an extension of the inequity of all sports spending.

Then, why does it feel so wrong?: This is the really the question that bugs me. I mean, I hate the juicers too. I want to see strict anti-doping policies. And yet, even in sports with the strictest anti-doping policies, there’s still doping (see: Contador).

PEDs are just a part of the culture of winning. We may not like them, but they are a natural outgrowth of getting the edge to win. And who doesn’t love a winner?

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In defense of: The Rock

What is the nature of the “guilty pleasure”? I have “Through A Glass Darkly” sitting on my DVD player, and I instantly watched “Mars Attacks!” instead. We say to ourselves that we know that the Bergman film is “better” — better critically reviewed, part of Bergman’s existentialist canon, etc. Yet, we can’t resist the clarion call of that which we know is “low culture”: Top 40 pop music, Jersey Shore, and Angry Birds.

Yet, the craft involved in building a great piece of trash is underappreciated. What separates good trash from bad trash? Michael Bay’s career, in conjunction with that of his occasional trash culture counterpart, Nicolas Cage, is a prime example of the tightrope walk of trash culture. Sometimes you get “Bad Boys”; sometimes you get “Pearl Harbor.” And sometimes, you get “The Rock,” the ur-action movie, so rife with cliches and riddled with absurd self-importance that it shouldn’t work. It’s not a giant turd in the way of “Pearl Harbor,” and scored tolerable reviews. And yet, I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the film. It’s not even an ironic “so bad it’s good” viewing. The Rock isn’t a farce by any means; it shows the pleasures of existing in the genre and embracing its formal strictures.

Consider this car chase:

All the cliches are there. Fruit carts being spilled, check. Obstructions in the roadway, check. Everything exploding, check. Civilians in danger, check. Witticisms (“I hope you’re insured!”), check. I half-expected to see two guys walking across the road holding a sheet of plate glass. But there is something joyful about the formula in the scene, the same way there is something joyful about singing along to a pop song. In many ways, the great action movie is more science than it is art.

Compare this scene with another San Francisco car chase:

What is The Rock‘s car chase if not an exaggerated version of the mother text, as it were? The cars are more exotic; the explosions bigger; the dialogue more existent. And yet, underneath the chaotic action sequences, it is still a car chase, evolved from the Bullitt DNA. The film simultaneously believes and mocks its own ancestry.

Another unappreciated aspect of the good trashy action movie is that the acting has to be superb. One assumes that bad material must equal bad acting. And rest assured, the material in this movie is bad, and the self-seriousness and overexplaining that would plague Bay’s future output is already here:

The pornographic embrace of military technology (which would reach a head with the Transformers films, in which the human characters are rendered soulless by the machines), the bombastic score, the Mexican standoff. It’s all so ridiculous that it would be easy to simply read the lines for what they are.

Yet here, all the actors fully commit to their outrageous roles. Of course Nicolas Cage’s Goodspeed can defuse a bomb, go on a car chase, and shoot guns from a minecart, despite his apparent nerd cerdentials. Of course Sean Connery’s Mason can suavely jump off buildings, knock out a giant Marine with one punch, and still look good getting knocked in the back of the head with a rifle. (The guy was only James Bond!) Roger Ebert identifies a winking humor throughout the film, but I don’t think that’s why it succeeds. It succeeds because it’s a movie-lover’s collage about loving action movies (see “Hot Fuzz”).Only by believing your cheesy dialogue can you pull off a line like this:

Action movies are like pop songs in that their appeal comes in large part because of a contradictory combination of shiny novelty and comforting sameness. Now that the sheen of the movie has dulled a bit — today there are bigger bangs, better chases, and a sad series of flops for Cage and Connery — it’s worth wondering where its particular appeal comes from. The joy of the movie is its proper balance of slickness and genre-appreciation. With all the knowing glances to the action film canon, from cheesy one-liners to over-dramatic pontification, it should come as a surprise to no one that Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin punched up the screenplay. It’s so over-stuffed with references that we don’t even notice them. We love to feel the embrace of the familiar, with a new coat of paint. It’s “The Same Ol’ Song” phenomenon that we just need to change the lyrics, even if the tune’s the same.

And so, even as The Rock‘s action film compatriots of the 90s continue to atrophy — Independence Day, Air Force One, even the venerable Jurassic Park, it seems to have the perfect balance within its genre. Just enough humor to befit the old Western one-liners; just enough gunplay to satisfy Die Hard enthusiasts; just enough plot to resolve in two hours. We always want to push ourselves to the new, the undiscovered, the wild. But in the comfort of pastiches such as The Rock, we can fulfill that compulsive urge to hit repeat and watch the same characters, the same plot, the same car chases and gunfights. With The Rock, we really can go home again.

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In defense of… the 2010-2011 Miami Heat

Charles Barkley joined a legion of sportswriters and former players decrying the so-called Superfriends in Miami, in particular Lebron James’s decision to go to Miami through a hilarious Cleveland-crushing hour-long ESPN special.

Much of the criticism focuses on Lebron’s unwillingness to stay with his hometown team, instead strutting around onstage and wiping Cleveland’s nose in its loss. This is fair; although I confess that I was not around for the theatrics, I imagine the spectacle was rather uncouth, considering the understood etiquette when it comes to leaving behind your longtime team.

I find, however, that much of the criticism of Lebron (and Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh) centers on his break with tradition. Magic Johnson sums up the argument:

“We didn’t think about it cause that’s not what we were about,” said Johnson, whose Michigan State squad beat Bird’s Indiana State team in the 1979 National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. “From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird.”

Yet, each of these greats — Jordan, Bird, Johnson — needed superstar role players to help them win! And these role players were easily as good as the comparative Superfriends now assembled in Miami.

In the 1990-1991 Chicago Bulls season, Michael Jordan had a league-leading 20.3 Win Shares. That’s a lot, about as many as Lebron James in his best season. Yet, he also had Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant on his team, each of whom accounted for over 10 Win Shares individually! (For comparison, the WS numbers on Lebron, Wade and Bosh are 18.5, 13.0 and 9.8, respectively.) This means that of the Bulls’ 61 wins, 2/3 of them could be accounted for in just three players. Jordan often insisted that he needed more help, and his fights with Jerry Krause led to better teams with better players. If Jordan had not gotten the necessary help and instead continued to languish in Chicago without Pippen or Grant (or Phil Jackson!), would he have been wrong to abandon Chicago for a contender elsewhere?

Furthermore, although the Heat have three excellent players, there are other teams in the NBA with similar set-ups, and these teams are unsurprisingly successful. LA has Gasol/Odom/Bryant (NOTE THE ORDER HERE); Boston has Rondo/Pierce/Garnett/Allen.

All that James (or more accurately, Wade) did in the offseason was play the role of a General Manager, personally assembling the talent to play on a team, rather than waiting for the real GM to cobble together a deal or series of deals.

To return to Johnson’s argument, then, the reason that Magic didn’t have to join Larry Bird is because he already had players of excellent talent level around him. In fact, almost all of Magic’s championship teams regularly had contributors of ~10 Win Shares apiece, be it Jabbar, Worthy, Scott, or others filling the role. Bird’s Celtics similarly had Parrish, McHale, and Co. Compare this to Lebron in Cleveland, and you see a team of mediocrity surrounding its star. To boot, Lebron would have made a pretty bad GM, insisting on acquiring an aging Shaq for a slightly less aging Ben Wallace, as well as insisting on picking up an always-overrated Antawn Jamison. No one begrudged the Bulls for picking up amazing player Dennis Rodman and adding him to their pantheon of greats for Jordan’s second run; why should we act differently for the Heat?

By assembling the Superfriends, Miami has simply tried a shortcut to the championship, using only free agency to start from a clean slate. Unlike those who think the Superfriends will be bad for basketball, I look forward to some outstanding games next season.

Sports fans are enamored of tradition; sports players generally couldn’t care less. Thus, the real “crime” of Lebron and Co. is shrugging off tradition: the tradition of a storied franchise, of building franchises, of loyalty to a city, of sentimentality, of deference to the status quo.

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In defense of… Hipsters

(Note: Video is NSFW, as if the title weren’t enough)

Hipsters are easy to hate. They look ridiculous. They act pretentious as hell. They are so addicted to style and irony that they have time for little else.

Hipsters have been targeted as the “Dead End of Western Civilization,” which seems a bit histrionic, but underscores the general critical disdain for hipsterdom. Everyone, it seems, hates hipsters, even hipsters. Living in Wicker Park — hipster central in Chicago — I can’t tell you how many times I have heard bearded, skinny-jeaned hipsters discuss how much they hate hipsters.

But what exactly do hipsters do to deserve the hate? To me, a hipster is little more than an evolution/hybridization of many previous existing subcultures. The one that most reminds me of hipsters, however, is the dandy movement of the 19th century. Baudelaire describes dandyism, fairly accurately, as an elevation of aesthetic to a religion. Dandies in their time were decried by many outsiders as well, for their superficiality and snobbery with regards to aesthetics, as opposed to the “real issues” of the day.

To this end, I think much of the hatred of hipsters focuses on the uselessness of their existence. What exactly do hipsters produce? Hipsters are often derided for their lack of economic productivity, funded by their parents to live in overpriced apartments from Portland to Williamsburg. They live for the scene, oblivious to the problems of the world. Yet, I would caution anyone who labels a movement as purely aesthetic or narcissistic, since such movements often have far-reaching effects. Dandyism, after all, produced Benjamin Disraeli, as well as writers such as Wilde, Baudelaire, and Byron. My point here is that a movement that seems driven by superficial aesthetics only appears worthless to a society focused on economic production.

The superficiality of the hipster does differ in some sense from previous counter-cultural movements — the scruffy beatniks, the decidedly unkempt hippies — but has deeper roots in other aesthetically driven subcultures. One need only trace the term “hipster” to its origin in the Bop era of jazz, with its roots deep in musical snobbery (a taste for hot jazz, as opposed to big bands or old-timers) and fashion (zoot suits and black turtlenecks), in order to understand that hipsterdom is an attempt to find the authentic, the “cool” as opposed to the “square.” What modern hipsterdom has discovered, to its own dismay, is that trying to find the “cool” is itself inauthentic — “uncool.”

What does the hipster stand for? Irony, music, fashion, the scene. Thus, hipsterdom is less of a specific ideology, so much as it is a posture, a subculture bent on standing for the meaningless. Perhaps the hatred of hipsterdom comes from its obscurity, its refusal to permit entrance from the “square” world, and its embrace of the meaningless in a world overflowing with meaning. This lack of ideology makes the hipster hard to pin down. If a hippie stood for free love and embracing all mankind, the hipster stands for nothing and knows it.

The hipster has appropriated other subcultures and transformed them into merely so many clothes to wear (see here). A keffiyeh goes from symbol of radical Palestinian solidarity, to a fashion statement. A neighborhood goes from gritty working-class to fashionable (and fashionably overpriced), only to be abandoned for the new “hot spot.” Rather than embracing something as “authentic” or “real,” the hipster continues to focus on the “cool,” shifting from one band to the next, one trend to the next, etc., accelerated and aided by the trend-seeking Internet. Where hip-hop or country music seem obsessed with the question of authenticity — exposing fakes, giving real talk,  etc. — hipsters have largely bypassed the question.

Part of what is fascinating about the hipster hegemony is actually the violent reaction of the non-hipster. A hipster may exult in his own taste, addicted to superficiality and meaninglessness, but where exactly is the affront to the mass? The hipster’s very existence is the affront; the fact that this person exists, refusing to participate in the “real world,” perturbs the dominant culture.

I don’t think we know yet exactly what the hipster aesthetic will create. Hipsterdom shifts too often in its tastes and trends to be examined for its social and political outcomes. But in the same way that beatniks provided a counterweight to the dominating culture of Cold War fear and dualism, perhaps the modern hipster will provide a sort of futile rear guard to our dominating culture of economics and globalization. A movement driven by an aesthetic may not appear productive, but is it less productive than the mass culture of infotainment that we regularly consume?

White, upper-middle-class, urban subculture movements have been around as long as there has been a white upper middle class. Hipsterdom is a variation on a theme, one that bothers us because of its embrace of its emptiness. In some ways, hipsters resemble a more literate Jersey Shore, so ensconced in its own aesthetic that it has become foreign to the culture at large.

As we look back on such subcultures — Victorian dandies, Bloomsbury bohemians, Greenwich Village beatniks, San Francisco hippies, London punk — we see the same pursuit of the meaningless, the same shifting tastes, the same snobbish reaction of mass cultures. And yet, as we look back, these groups are often the ones that produce the most interesting art, the most compelling public figures, the most enduring ideas. I’m not saying that hipsters will write the history of the future, but hipsters, by the nature of their constant shift against the “square,” serve a role as counterbalance, a murky reflection of society’s values at large.

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