I like this point.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

From The death of uncool, by Brian Eno (via Rick Webb)

It is weird to notice this change because it is happening right under our feet. It’s difficult to tell if it’s simply because we’re in the present right now that all styles seem to exist in the present, or if our sense of time and style and aesthetic has actually moved from being something that moves and changes to something that simply gets wider and wider.

This entry was posted by Buster on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 11:04 pm. It is filed under Responses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.