Pete Martin: “concerned primarily with logistics of Fashion”

Really? It’s certainly a major topic around here, but so are music, film, art and old, interesting stuff. One reason I like Coilhouse so much is that it’s refreshingly eclectic.

I disagree that Fashion is the main driving force behind our mechanisms of culture. Economics, historical circumstance and yes, politics all play a pretty damn important role too, and I’d even argue that fashion is instead a piece — though an important one often underrated by many pundits and historians — of a much larger whole.

I think the unwillingness to face the future is driven by fear and delusion instead of “presentism.” You have a point that it stems in part from attempts to micromanage the future (and humanity) growing out of the Age of Reason, but the opposite: the stark foolishness that every idea is equal, that the past is meaningless and that the future will somehow magically take care of itself, is far worse. Yeah, the thinkers of the last 500 years screwed up, sometimes badly, but they also got a lot of things brilliantly right and I do think we tend to forget how many dramatic improvements over the times that have preceded them we’ve seen.

Autonomy and decadence aren’t mutually exclusive after all. The breaking of some of the old bonds has left people with much more autonomy than before, and that can be a very powerful and good thing. But at the same time nature abhors a vacuum. Some new structures will be created that answer today’s needs, and it’s best for today’s individuals to begin thinking about what those might look like: the alternative is that people will fall back to decaying structures or past answers (fundamentalism) that are even worse.

Vivacious G, Jerem, q gauti: Thank you.

Olivia: I hope you found it crunchy and delicious.

Silus: I’m glad you liked the article. Obviously, I disagree on the Chapmans’ work, particularly their Goya defacement. I don’t think it was brave or strong.

Goya was both, he bought forward a vision that was shocking, true and uniquely his, in the process ripping away a great deal of the delusions of his time. He went through hell in his own life and we’re fortunate enough that his work has remained.

The Chapmans are the opposite and their “vision” reverses the equation, instead of being uniquely theirs and hitting a truth (which often are shocking) they’ve embodied one of the worst ideas in art today: that simply by breaking a taboo and being shocking you’re somehow being true.

What really made it even worse than usual was that they didn’t just get a random set of regular prints and do this. No, fantastically rich off their imitative crap, they took one of the original sets and put clown faces all over them. Again, the contrast to Goya couldn’t be more stark. I think it embodies the worst kind of hackery.

Hope: Some of that feeling is around at any time, to be sure, especially among the young. I think you’re off the mark when you say the ’60s resulted in same old, same old. An immense number of things changed afterwards (not all for the better) politically, socially and culturally. The Age of Aquarius didn’t exactly come tromping in, but culture is very different from the era that proceeded it.

Barzun, it should be noted, is split on the era, as am I. On the one hand, he sees the civil rights movement and some of the other changes as one of the last large, non-decadent moments: a time when people were really innovating and ready to fight for ideals. On the other, the era also began trends (especially in academia) and really bought that embodiment of not facing the future, postmodernism, into being. I think the ’60s rebels had a lot more of a point in some ways than Barzun is willing to admit, but I agree with him on postmodernism and a tendency to chuck the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to history.

But I don’t think this is just another “house of cards” prediction this time. Barzun’s decadence has been unfolding for a long time, and no doubt any new beginning will also unfold over a very long span. Who knows, future people may look back (if we’re lucky enough to get a Renaissance) and see the ’60s both as a herald of things yet to come (like the Hussites in the 1400s) and a nail in the coffin. Hell, they may look at our generation the same way. As I said above, there are no guarantees, but it’s worth trying to make something out of tomorrow anyway.

Do you think that this feeling that the house of cards is about to come tumbling down is just a stpale to the youth of any age? For instance, the young people of the 1960′s thought they were heralding in a new era, but it turned out to be pretty much the same as it ever was (albeit with better music). It seems the twenty-somethings of almost any period fancy themselves revolutionaries who will see a culture completely reborn, but as was said, true revolutions are few and far between.

If I were honest with myself, I would like to think this time it’s real — and that things will either fall apart or come together or both in a way that’s new and different. I think it speaks to our nature of believing that it takes big change to really matter. I’m not sure how we can discern if that’s really what we’re building up to or if it’s just business as usual. Does it even matter? I don’t know, but I’m glad you shared this with me.

And I would say it is Fashion more than anything else, more than ever, that provides the mechanisms for culture. The unwillingness to face the future may be more out of Fashion’s requirement for Presentism, and the failure of previous movement who were too concerned with the future that proved to be their downfall i.e. The Age of Reason still ended in bloodshed; Modernism’s break from tradition and “Make it New” never foresaw two world wars, the level of communication and transport technology and globalised liberal democracy.

I cannot see Presentism/Fashion’s relationship to the past as simply as being found once to create the present. Fashion keeps moving, keeps people transcient and keeps asking for more. Individual’s demand for “more, always more” is a hyperconsumption, and that the past is constantly recycled.

The past as a consumable? The anxieties that would give to the individual are paradoxical: no future, meaningless past with no grand narrative and grand idea to follow thats any better than any other.

Decendence? Or total autonomy for the individual?