The ongoing reverence for Cobain shows longing for genuine artistic iconoclasm

Evidence

In his 2022 book, The Crisis of Culture, French scholar Olivier Roy argues that we have reached the end of cultural progress—what he calls the “deculturation of cultures.” The canon is abandoned, subcultures are reduced to mere “codes of communication,” and the marketplace has swallowed everything. The history in these pages bears some of this out, but as a full diagnosis, it feels too pessimistic. Culture in the anthropological sense will always exist, and there remain subcultures—just fewer of them. The canon is not dead; the problem is that it casts a long shadow over the present. Kurt Cobain would have surely wanted the next generation to kill their idols, including him. Instead, they wear his face on T-shirts and call it “preppy.” Still, the lingering reverence toward Cobain suggests a latent respect for the agents of radical cultural change, even in capitalist-realist times. Deep in our hearts, however subconscious, we know that artists—not skilled commodity merchants or financial manipulators—should be our true heroes. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 845

Categorization

• XREF: Cobain’s canonization as ‘preppy’ T-shirt icon is a vivid instance of the flattened omnivore monoculture the reader is tracking.
• SEED: Counter-case seed: the very fact that Cobain-worship persists is itself a distinct 21st-century signature — reflexive worship of past iconoclasm rather than fresh iconoclasm.