Activity

The fifties boom is a clear example of the cultural phenomenon we call retro, defined by the music critic and historian Simon Reynolds as “a self-conscious fetish for period stylisation (in music, clothes, design) expressed creatively through pastiche and citation.” Where customs, traditions, class…

Mass media and mass manufacturers, however, do speed up fashion cycles by ensuring we become aware of trends beyond what we can directly observe and by removing the obstacles to participation. This quickly turns little-known conventions into broad social norms. Companies are able to make this happe…

The career of Glenn O’Brien demonstrates the crucial role of the mass media in moving trends through the cultural ecosystem. Elite conventions stay exclusive unless the media expands the common knowledge to people of lower status tiers. The Condé Nast empire of magazines, from The New Yorker to Vog…

The influence process for radical art is always an uphill struggle: works begin as an esoteric idiolect—symbols and ideas spoken and understood by a single person.

To create within the framework of someone else’s stereotype makes the creator an epigone, and their work is mere “taste.”