Post-2008 culture remains dominated by pre-crash aesthetic forms

Evidence

The current Hirst retrospective at the Tate should now look like a reliquary of bygone world, but it merely highlights that art and culture have yet to come to terms with the traumatic events of 2008. Our imaginations are still dominated (or stultified) by work which emerged from the cocaine-buzzy mixture of hedonism, cynicism and piety which governed art and politics in the 1990s and 2000s. Hirst is the Warhol of capitalist realism, but he has none of Warhol’s blank charisma. In place of Warhol’s android awkwardness, Hirst offers a blokish bonhomie. Warhol’s studied banality has become the genuinely ultrabanal. Or, rather, the Hirst phenomenon typifies the way in which, in late-capitalist art and entertainment culture, the ultrabanal and the super-spectacular have become (con)fused. … For all its fixation on death, this is work that, in its bleak immanence, repudiates negativity, and leaves no space for commentary. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1595

The current Hirst retrospective at the Tate should now look like a reliquary of bygone world, but it merely highlights that art and culture have yet to come to terms with the traumatic events of 2008. Our imaginations are still dominated (or stultified) by work which emerged from the cocaine-buzzy mixture of hedonism, cynicism and piety which governed art and politics in the 1990s and 2000s. Hirst is the Warhol of capitalist realism, but he has none of Warhol’s blank charisma. In place of Warhol’s android awkwardness, Hirst offers a blokish bonhomie. Warhol’s studied banality has become the genuinely ultrabanal. Or, rather, the Hirst phenomenon typifies the way in which, in late-capitalist art and entertainment culture, the ultrabanal and the super-spectacular have become (con)fused. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1595

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ch35’s claim that apocalypse is felt as already underway and ch91’s neoliberal-use-of-crisis claims. — connects to: Complaints about losing historicity coexist with culture obsessed with dead past styles — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 626; Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 382; Contemporary culture has naturalised retro-anachronism as its standard form — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2308 (+7 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1595

Broader Connections

• Contemporary culture has naturalised retro-anachronism as its standard form #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2308
• Complaints about losing historicity coexist with culture obsessed with dead past styles #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 626
• Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future #corroborates (0.85) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381
• Postmodern culture mirrors anterograde amnesia, clinging to old certainties while newness stays unnavigable #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 122
• The postmodern present recasts all prior art as nostalgia and cultural stereotype #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 395
• In the nostalgia mode, the history of aesthetic styles displaces real history. #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 84
• Cultural paradigms replace previous aesthetics entirely when they shift #contradicts (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 382
• Contemporary art exhausted stylistic innovation and collapsed into speculation and irony #qualifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 725
• Realist and modernist traces persist within postmodern culture. #qualifies (0.70)
• Capitalist circulation velocity drives cultural immediacy as an aesthetic style #complicates (0.70) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 50