Completely agree with your comments about the cultural dominance of pulp, nerd culture/fandom and the collapse of high brow art consumption. I am old enough to remember going to the cinema with film major friends and watching “art house” - all those beautiful, often slow-paced, subtitled, atmospheric films that pulled ideas and emotions out of me I’d never anticipated. And sitting in record shops with muso friends, looking for rare vinyl and digging up the bands that had influenced your current favourites, or discovering a new band none of your friends had heard of. There was so much cachet in loving something no-one else had discovered yet!
The trickiness has been stripped out of cultural consumption. With everything on-demand, people are used to being effortlessly pleased. I agree the answer is to start to make, but to keep it small and local to establish some of that special exclusivity that barely exists anymore. I tell my kids: make your own scene, and guard it from the mainstream. Treat it like the old free parties, all word of mouth and secret locations so it has a buzz and all the fun, but can’t be churned out far and wide to anyone with a bit of FOMO (which is now everyone.)
Completely agree with your comments about the cultural dominance of pulp, nerd culture/fandom and the collapse of high brow art consumption. I am old enough to remember going to the cinema with film major friends and watching “art house” - all those beautiful, often slow-paced, subtitled, atmospheric films that pulled ideas and emotions out of me I’d never anticipated. And sitting in record shops with muso friends, looking for rare vinyl and digging up the bands that had influenced your current favourites, or discovering a new band none of your friends had heard of. There was so much cachet in loving something no-one else had discovered yet!
The trickiness has been stripped out of cultural consumption. With everything on-demand, people are used to being effortlessly pleased. I agree the answer is to start to make, but to keep it small and local to establish some of that special exclusivity that barely exists anymore. I tell my kids: make your own scene, and guard it from the mainstream. Treat it like the old free parties, all word of mouth and secret locations so it has a buzz and all the fun, but can’t be churned out far and wide to anyone with a bit of FOMO (which is now everyone.)