Avant-garde norm-rejection and capitalist market expansion converged on dismantling social norms

Evidence

For over a century, the world’s most creative people have viewed social norms with deep suspicion. Norms were, after all, the foundation of middle-class respectability—the very thing that stifled genius. By the midtwentieth century, to be “cool” meant rejecting convention outright. Capitalists agreed: Customs, biases, manners, and taboos were merely obstacles to greater market expansion. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 853

Categorization

• XREF: This is a core mechanism claim of the book’s thesis — the strange alliance of counterculture and capital — that the reader needs to state accurately to argue the counter-case. — connects to: Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217; The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness rather than defeating or entrenching it — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 232; Capitalism absorbed the 1960s counterculture as a marketing resource — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 593 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that bohemian norm-rejection and capitalism were not opponents but unwitting allies is genuinely counterintuitive and load-bearing for the whole thesis.