Twenty-five years into the 21st century, culture is markedly different than it was in the previous millennium. Everyday life has never contained more stuff—an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, videos, memes, outrageous statements, celebrity meltdowns, life hacks, extremely talented animals. Yet audiences can sense what’s missing. For all the energy society invests in culture today, little has emerged that feels new, and certainly nothing revolutionary enough to properly outmode the past.Some commentators have argued that cultural progress is at a standstill. In The Crisis of Culture, published in English in 2024, the French political scientist Olivier Roy claims that the canon has been abandoned, subcultures have been reduced to superficial identity groups, and the marketplace has swallowed everything. As a full diagnosis, this seems too pessimistic. In its broadest definition, culture always exists, and subcultures remain—there are just fewer conspicuous ones now, and those have less influence. The canon is not dead; the problem, rather, is that it casts too long a shadow over the present. Kurt Cobain would have wanted the next generation’s musicians and listeners to kill their idols, including him. Instead, they wear his face on T-shirts.
Still, the lingering reverence toward Cobain and other larger-than-life 20th-century artists suggests a deeply rooted collective respect for the agents of radical cultural change. What’s missing now is a veneration of the artistic mindset, which possesses the imagination to reject kitsch—art that trades in well-worn formulas, stock emotions, and immediate comprehensibility—and pursue work that expands the possibilities of human perception. Doing so requires at least some creators in the cultural ecosystem to strive for complexity, ambiguity, and formal experimentation—attributes that power the masterpieces that draw millions of people every year to museums.
Make Culture Weird Again
Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than the boring stuff.