Moral condemnation replaced aesthetic displacement as culture’s refresh mechanism under omnivorism

Evidence

In a poptimist culture, where revenue streams are paramount, being removed from public life was tantamount to death. Yet few remembered that pop culture had long required the removal of once-popular celebrities. The mechanism had simply been different—cancellation by taste. … For decades, the avant-garde mindset pushed young artists to forge new styles explicitly designed to outmode and devalue the previous generation. Andy Warhol’s pop art made abstract expressionism obsolete. But in the retromaniacal, omnivore culture of the twenty-first century, new aesthetics no longer displaced older artists—nor did young artists even attempt to. The only force powerful enough to remove someone from the cultural spotlight was now moral condemnation: not just for unambiguous crimes and bigotry, but for affiliations with illiberal ideologies. Culture always needs a refresh, and in an era where omnivorism ruled, political denunciation became an effective means to clear out the old. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 473

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier passages in the book about avant-garde outmoding and the death of the sellout; this is the mechanism by which someone is removed in an era with no aesthetic churn.
• SEED: Article angle on how callout culture recycles the avant-garde function of clearing cultural space when aesthetics cannot do the job.