A lot corresponds to an aesthetic stagnation on top of the political and economic stagnation in that the amount of creative risk people could take in previous generations was proportionately more. That was mostly because the wage floor was high, the cost of living was low, so the total amount of decommodified time you could spend 25-30% just making punk music or doing your weird art practice; and you never have to worry if you sell that album or painting, experiment the joy of creating stuff, aesthetic pleasure and so on.
And as society has become more privatized over the course of neoliberalism, the total amount of free time that people have to pursue creative practices is basically disappeared from contemporary life.
It’s created is this hyper commodified sphere of art where the only art that is worth making or is or is possible to make, is art that is successful financially or does numbers to be immediately successful.
The economy allowed you to do two things. Work at a cafe and create art for a specific group of people after work.
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Pop culture political theorist named Mark Fischer whose famous book Capitalist Realism written in the fallout from 2008, explores this problem of the 21st century of not having a political alternative; socialism was defeated and capitalism is here on, forever…what Fischer is writing about is the developmental arc of neoliberalism, lost futures–a perpetual nostalgia for the 80s.
- hauntalogy;slow cancellation of the Future
- Capitalist Realism (2009)
- neoliberalism