metamodernism & the new sincerity

Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a propr

the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful.

I looked up at the looming buildings whose presence I could now sense more than see and wondered how many people were still inside them. Here and there you could perceive a beam moving across a window, a flame, the glow of an LED, but the overall effect was of emptiness. I told Alex I felt fine. For some reason I imagined there were Sabbath elevato

but there is that intimacy of parallel gazes I feel when we stand before a canvas or walk across a bridge.

“I agree it’s a crazy time,” I said. “But I think in times like these we have to try to stay connected to people. And we have to try to make our own days, despite all the chaos. We have to focus on feeling comfortable in our own skin, and we need to be open to getting help with that.” I was desperately trying to channel my parents.

felt all those orders of temporality—the biological, the historical, the geological—combine and interfere and then dissolve.