This is yet another article to which I'm posting a link but which is not worth reading. So why am I posting it? I find this one concept interesting:
"Gen Z can't be its own thing because they have access to too much culture.""Gen Z can't be its own thing because they have access to too much culture."
The author mostly comes off like a grumpy old man (although apparently he's not even that old):
One generation responds to the previous generation. (Hemingway and Fitzgerald were reacting to Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, while Henry James was reacting to Hawthorne and Emerson, and so on and so forth.)
But Gen Z doesn’t experience cultural time this way. They’re reacting to everything that has ever happened.
I don't want to burst guy's bubble, but it is always the case that old people think the youths are just a fake less awesome version of what the old people were when they were the youths.
Gen Z wants to rebel, but its rebellion is entirely a matter of online aesthetics. They reject “millennial cringe” and “stomp clap music,” propounding their own allegedly edgier aesthetic. Some have compared this to Gen X reacting against the Baby Boomers, to punk rock reacting against the hippies. But, given their agoraphobia and preference for marijuana over alcohol, Zoomers tend not to go out and socialize, which stops anything with the Dionysian energy of original punk rock (or 50s rock n’ roll or 60s garage rock or 90s grunge) from ever taking shape. They’re left to LARP and cosplay online, adopting the costumes of prior generations and prior subcultures without finding an authentic cultural relation of their own.
He even quotes that oft-worshipped god of the millennials, Cormac McCarthy:
“I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.”
Art and creation is not like money: it doesn't need to be scarce. Indeed, if your appreciation of art is based on its exclusivity or its scarcity, I suspect you aren't really appreciating art at all. This sounds a lot like the stuffy art gallery culture @plebpoet found so offputting (#1449623).