Complicated Culture

Today we’re resurfacing an October 2023 conversation between Dirt CEO Daisy Alioto and writer W. David Marx about status, culture and taste. Both Alioto and Marx will be speaking at FWB Fest in August 2024. You can learn more about that here. 

Below is a video of the 2023 interview as well as a condensed transcript.

Daisy Alioto: I thought it would be good if we start off with your definition of status.

W. David Marx: I'm using “status” in this 1950s sociological theory kind of way, which is that in every single group there is a hierarchy, and then all of those groups compete with other groups for resources, and there is a hierarchy of who gets those resources. There's a big debate about why humans desire status, but it's first and foremost a very logical, rational thing: as you move up, you get more benefits from other people, you're treated better, you get more access to resources.

When you take those basic axioms, then you can start looking at the byproducts of this competition. At the end of the day, culture is also conventions that form around arbitrary behavior, so if you understand how status works, you more or less understand most of what's going on in culture. So [Status and Culture] is not as straightforward as just saying everybody wants to drive an expensive car to show how rich they are. Status infects all of our judgments.

DA: You and I both believe that this idea that you could abolish taste and then somehow end up with a more equal status hierarchy is false—that if you abolish taste, you really just accelerate the impacts of capitalist logic. 

DM: We've tried so hard to flatten and democratize that it’s ended up only bolstering economic value. I really care about innovation within culture, and I really care about status being flattened from a political point of view. Where those come in conflict—where snobbery or status hierarchy was responsible for interesting culture—is this inherent tension and contradiction. It's not to say, “snobbery was good and we need to go back to snobbery,” but the output of snobbery was that there were certain groups of people who had better ability to understand difficult and complex culture.

One thing I've been pushed back on is “if simple culture is more interesting to more people, shouldn't the goal be to create more simple culture?” But the problem, again, is that every aesthetic experience we have is based off the previous aesthetic experiences. Think about country music; it does not sound the way country music used to sound. It always takes influence from folk and rock and alternative and now trap. Even country music, which has very aesthetically conservative fans—they still want new elements in order to make it interesting.

The whole cultural ecosystem needs some source of innovation. It used to be elites who provided that, so if we're going to flatten it, there has to be some new way to not only have innovation and invention, but to surface it and value it. We don't have that, and we dismantled the status system and we're left with this poptimist, very pro-capitalist world. 

DA: You talk about two extremes in the book: the fetishization of nostalgia and the fetishization of the new, or neophilia. I've been thinking about that a lot with A.I. and how quickly A.I. has progressed in the last six months in terms of offering to any person, any consumer, the ability to generate any image that they want. To me it seems like a battle between neophilia and canon—the idea that context, history, intentionality is important in the generation of any image. Can you talk about how that might play out?

DM: This is another thing, and the same with “status” and “culture.” Art is a really ambiguous word.

DA: Yeah, what is art, David?

DM: If your child's art class is art, and anything on a wall is art, that's such an expansive meaning that, yes, A.I. can make art. If you really get specific about it, there can be aesthetic objects and then there can be art in which the people who make it are venerated as geniuses. I think that's where it really comes down to: does the thing being made lead to someone in real society being judged as a genius. And if you go back to these Kantian ideas of art, they have to do something new and it has to be new in a way that is not easy to replicate. Then it has to diffuse through society and influence other people. 

DA: What about Beeple?

DM: Beeple made this NFT artwork that sold for 65 million, and he is using all these new media forms, but the ideas are ultimately kitschy. And again, what is art? The best way to understand art is as against kitsch. Kitsch is things that are made based on existing expectations of your audience. Usually it appeals to sentimentality because that's a universal aesthetic reaction. But art is something that makes you rethink the act of perception itself. 

A.I. more or less creates a summary of all the art that already exists, and so it automatically is going to make something that is kitsch. If I ask for a photorealistic picture of children on a swing, it's going to go find all the pictures of children on swings and then create some new generative version of that. Then the counterpoint from technologists will be, “we can program AI to figure out what the conventions are and then it will break them in some new way.” But when you look at the way art works, it's all about the context. We know it's A.I., we know it's automated, there's no human thought involved. We will not perceive it as invention. We can be fooled—we can be told that by a human and perceive it differently. But the minute we know it's a computer, it's not real, it's not art. 

What is cool about the Internet in one way is that by taking away so many of these different parts of our cultural experience, we start seeing that they existed.

DA: For the last ten years, most distribution of culture online has been about scale. It seems like we're entering a period where there'll be a backlash to scale in the form of more people understanding that if you try to abolish taste, you actually get a worse kind of cultural environment. How do you think this will manifest?

DM: Obviously the business model of platforms is to try to make as many things be watched as much as possible. On a site like YouTube, things that are more popular bubbled up more, and you could program it in a way where you said, “here's the 100 videos that we think everyone should watch, even if they're not popular.” My sense is that a lot of these sites did try, but I don't know if the curation models worked because at the end of the day, the curation didn't lead to financial reward. 

But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again, the total absorption of capitalist logic, where we can't understand the idea of success that doesn't get paid out. 

Lowest common denominator is boring. So how can we make the people not bored? You have to have some dynamism, and it’s going to come from outside of the scalable cultural platforms. I’ve been thinking about restaurant reservations quite a bit in that they became a status symbol. Amanda Mull has done a great article for The Atlantic about this—why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the opposite of the Internet. 

DA: I want restaurants to exist in cities that I'll never visit because the idea of the restaurant is powerful as something that's not fungible. It’s just like I want magazines to exist that I'll never read, in languages I don't speak, on topics I don't care about because that upholds the health of the idea of magazines. 

We have to have people critiquing things that aren't super popular numerically if we want to have people critiquing things that are popular. The writers strike is, I think, a hopeful moment, realizing the limitations of beauty, realizing people's ability to realign their notions of what's art and what's kitsch in real time. We can develop discernment in real time, and our discernment can move at the rate of technology. 

DM: But discernment also requires some sort of standard. It's very easy to go through your day just being entertained. If that's all you're asking from culture or entertainment, you're fine. If you don't invest in supporting the innovation and invention that is happening, then at some point you will wake up and be bored and no one will help you. We need you to do these things that will pay off in the future, but now will just be a gigantic pain. And that's not the way culture organically moves.

But if no one's using complicated culture for status reasons and there's no other organic reason for people to support it at scale, it's not going to rise. I haven’t exactly hit upon what the solution to this whole thing is, but I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the world gets more interesting because we'll just let capitalism figure it out.