Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. If it’s not the slurry of superhero blockbusters, remakes and reboots, then it’s the straight-to-streaming slop. The familiar three-act structure, that is the craft of screenwriting, seems mysteriously missing from even ... See more

The Internet-Personality-as-Art is ephemeral, challenging, and doesn’t even register as a performance to most critics. Most of it is considered throwaway trash by casual viewers. Crucially, many of those viewers would be correct: not every social media personality is well-constructed, and not every example is art, in the same way not every movie is... See more

Once a dominant art form, theater ceded its cultural primacy a long ago. People still produce and even write excellent plays and musicals, even today, but it’s no longer the primary vehicle for cultural expression and innovation. It’s a niche. Similarly, film, fashion, literature, or even music as we once knew them are no longer the primary mediums... See more

Fashion and music, too, are in decay. Trends are still identifiable, but they lack the clear demarcations of previous decades. Based on clothing styles alone, a photo taken in 2013 could be mistaken for one taken in 2019, a creative stasis unthinkable even thirty years ago. Maybe it’s the rapid cycles of fast fashion, or our smartphone-first social... See more

Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate. The challenge lies not in reviving what’s dead, but in developing the language to understand what already exists.

Much has been said about memes as art and the collective labor and imagination that goes into their creation, but it extends further than that. It’s not just memes. Creating mood boards on Pinterest or curating aesthetics on TikTok are evolving art forms, too. Constructing an atmosphere, or “vibe,” through images and sounds, is itself a form of sto... See more

In just under one generation, we moved from appreciating albums as cohesive works to consuming individual tracks, and then to music becoming reduced to muzak: background noise for gaming, viral videos, or endless scrolling. Disappearing is music as an art in its own right, which commands sustained attention and deep engagement. A song’s success is ... See more

TikTok sketch comedy is in the same lineage of theater. It invites a suspension of disbelief from the audience, creators often play multiple characters, rapidly switching between roles with nothing more than a change in voice, facial expression, or camera angle. And importantly, it’s funny. When the whole feed is taken together, it’s almost digital... See more

The dismissal of TikTok suggests another source of confusion: these new cultural forms are challenging our ideas about how culture “should” be created and distributed. The Internet was supposed to democratize everything, do away with gatekeepers and in some cases, craft. We were prepared for that: the masses overtaking the institutions.

But that’s ... See more