Omnivore taste flattens the past into an accessory and prevents new culture from emerging

Evidence

Postmodernist theory had long predicted a heightened interest in retro. The past, flattened into yet another aesthetic ingredient, became an accessory for the present. Omnivore tastes, in embracing everything—mainstream, niche, exotic, and familiar—extended this inclusivity to long-dismissed genres of yore. Seventies rock fans had once derided disco; by the twenty-first century, those critiques were reexamined as racist and homophobic, prompting a collective reassessment of thousands of songs. But there were opportunity costs for these revaluations. As Reynolds observed, “Nothing seems to wither and die. This hampers the emergence of new things.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 387

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes ‘omnivore monoculture’ — retro flattening is the mechanism by which omnivore inclusivity collapses into homogenized access.
• XREF: The disco revaluation as a moral reanalysis of old music echoes the moral-panic lens of the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ frame — how revaluation narratives get retroactively moralized. — connects to: Taste registers historical experience because the individual is itself a historical product — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 167; Eclecticism of contemporary culture signals a general slackening of taste — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 486; Omnivore poptimism replaced critical taste with permissive eclecticism. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 744
• SEED: Could fuel the counter-case essay: ‘Nothing dies’ as an artifact of insufficient historical distance rather than genuine stagnation — past decades also thought their culture was frozen.