Musings Report #20 5-17-14 What's Avant-Garde Now? Social Innovation
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What's Avant-Garde Now? Social Innovation
In the 20th century, avant-garde was a term primarily reserved for the arts: fine arts, music, performance and literature. Avant garde--literally fore-guard or vanguard--challenges the conventions of Status Quo measures of beauty and departs from traditional forms and conceptions of value.
In many cases, the departure is designed to shock traditionalists by flaunting accepted norms; by traditional standards, avant-garde art is "ugly" or disturbing, avant-garde music is atonal and "not pretty," avant-garde theatre flouts conventional narrative structure and avant-garde social movements upend traditional morals and values.
Virtually all design and art fields have been continually disrupted by avant-garde movements, to the point that the conventional consumerist economy now depends on avant-garde (or quasi-avant-garde) to create "the new" that can be sold at a profit to differentiate the "in" crowd from those left behind in outdated fads.
Many forms of avant-garde disrupt "high-brow" conventions of art, music, fashion, interior design, etc. by infusing the medium with "low-brow" influences. Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of comic-book art is one example. In effect, "low-brow" becomes hip until it is adopted by the mainstream, at which point high-brow is re-introduced to offer a consumerist means to separate wealthy sophisticates from the lumpen-proletariat and petite-bourgeois masses.
I suspect that this century-long cycle of disrupting the conventional has reached marginal returns, and this spells the end of avant-garde in the 20th century modernist sense. Now that every convention has been flouted, there is nothing left to disrupt or shock; "the new" is now simply re-hashed "old".
Since consumerism is based on the insecurity of bourgeois aspirations (i.e. the desire to be identified as belonging to the "in" crowd), there must always be something "new" to separate elites from aspirants and aspirants from the masses. This role is now filled by simulacra of avant-garde (quasi-avant-garde, i.e. presenting the appearance of "the new" to sell more goods). Fake avant-garde is the ultimate co-option, as this "shocking new" serves an entirely conventional purpose: reaping profits from selling consumerist sizzle.
Experience itself has been commoditized by the tourism industry, and as a result travel only signifies membership in the "in" crowd if it is self-directed and leisurely, i.e. a form of travel that cannot be attained by conventional workers with two weeks vacation, and/or to exotic locales off the already-commoditized paths.
These 20th century formulas--breaking the traditional modes to be avant-garde, and using the avant-garde to market new products and experiences--have run out of oxygen. As a result, the arts, music and literature are no longer the source of avant-garde; what is truly disruptive are social innovations that upend the consumerist model of constantly marketing faux avant-garde as "the new."
I think this excerpt from the article In
formation-Commodification offers a succinct summary of how social innovation is the true avant-garde:
"Avant-gardes, on the other hand, are always interesting, but they are not really about art, whatever some silly art school textbooks might say. Avant-gardes are about media, about social relations, about property-forms, but they are only ever incidentally or tactically concerned with art. The most interesting ones around at the moment might be about pharmacology or horticulture or even ‘business models’."
What qualifies as true avant-garde? Degrowth qualifies--the rejection of consumption as a measure of "growth," prosperity and advancement. The model of
access not ownership is avant-garde, as is the
no-middleman movement I have described in the blog.
Any movement that serves to market "the new" in conventional consumerism is not avant-garde. The real avant-garde disrupts the "
consumption and ownership as identity" model of aspirational capitalism.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Investing in Ourselves 5/17/14
Bernanke the Sophist: The Deception Behind QE 5/16/14
How Malinvestment Poisons the Entire Economy 5/15/14
Can the Top 10% Prop Up the Whole Economy? 5/14/14
When The Real Cost is Hidden, Making Good Decisions Is Impossible 5/13/14
The Solution to the Declining Middle Class: Destroy Fixed Costs and Debt 5/12/14
I think the idea that manipulating statistics and masking the real costs are self-defeating will become increasingly important.
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A 6-mile (round-trip) hike on the Peaks of Otter, a climb of about 1,600 feet.
Market Musings
The stock market is exhibiting more of the same topping pattern behavior--every sag to a key moving average level is bought while market internals such as long-term MACD and breadth continue weakening. Any increase in shorting (bets on a decline) is soon eradicated by a short-covering rally by skittish Bears.
Something other than more of the same will have to happen before the market rolls over. That "something" could be an external shock or an erosion of internals to an inflection point--for example, the number of stocks holding up the indices decline to the point that they no longer keep the indices unchanged as the majority of stocks slip into Bear territory.
From Left Field
40 maps that explain the Middle East (via G.F.B.)
At Least 6 Chinese Cities Have Bailed Out Their Real Estate Markets In The Last Month - manipulating appearances and masking the real risks.... a strategy that leads to failure...
Cold War Spy-Satellite Images Unveil Lost Cities
Cold War reconnaissance photos triple the number of known archaeology sites across the Middle East
Say goodbye to capitalism as we know it (via Cheryl A.)
The Higher Education Bubble Begins To Pop - creative destruction of high-cost systems cannot be stopped...
My Favorite Heuristic for Evaluating Relationships: The Antifragile Person - fan of Taleb...
The demographic paradox of who bikes and walks to work (via Maoxian) -- the rich and the poor both ride, but for different reasons...but so do old hippies, fitness buffs and non-traditional types of all stripes...
Census Bureau:
Modes Less Traveled—Bicycling and Walking to Work in the United States: 2008–2012
The Collapse of Complex Business Models -- seminal paper by Clay Shirky
Where the Hell is Matt? 2012 (4:52) (via John S.P.) life-affirming dancing--fun....
"Financial inequalities are ephemeral, one crash away from reallocation; inequalities of status & academobureaucrat elite are there to stay." Nassim Taleb
Thanks for reading--
charles.
