When Vampire Weekend recently blew up, the backlash seemed to come as quickly as the explosive hype. As I watched the mess unfold – the hype, the backlash, the backlash-to-the-backlash – the pattern felt all too familiar: it was perhaps first cemented in the internet age by the massive hype (and backlash) that followed the Strokes and has only gotten more intense and more compressed since then. And today, I came across a very smart article called the “The Hype Circle” via Daily Meh that attempts to the think through some of the reasons for this cycle by focusing on the value of judgement as a status symbol.
The author (whose name isn’t attached to the piece) argues that ‘hype’ places art into a system of exchange in which the work of art becomes a commodity meant to augment one’s reputation. But this isn’t, however, the usual ‘art has just become something to buy’ schtick. Instead, the ‘market’ here is one of rep, of influence, of cultural capital and there are many ways to accrue this precious currency: being first to hype; being first to create the backlash; to claim all art is equal and immerse yourself in pop; or conversely, dismiss all pop and sequester oneself in a room reading Ulysses for months.
The point the article so cleverly makes is that rather than commodifying art, reputation has become an economy (definition: a system of exchange) that “transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value”. Rather than a focus on what art can do to you, there is instead an emphasis on what function art can play in the construction and projection of a person’s identity, a self, a commodity that must be traded on a market that values reputation. This reputation works in relation to possessing knowledge so that s/he who knows not only has power but ‘owns’ the right to speak about what is good and what is bad. Art becomes a mechanism of marking out one’s ownership not only of culture but of cultural capital.
There are problems with the article – I’m not sure what the writer means when s/he speaks of judging a “work’s internal logic” (where does this logic reside? certainly not in the work of art?) – while I’m wary of the author’s suggestion that one’s ‘true aesthetic judgements’ are under assault from the outside (after all, doesn’t one’s ‘inside’ come from the ‘outside’?). But this is truly insightful stuff and let me quote the end of the article to demonstrate why:
“The hype cycle has become the emotional life of capitalism, an internalized stock market of aesthetic calls and puts. It testifies first to the power and then, almost as soon, to the impotence of mere culture. It’s how the public expresses faith in itself, and a still more unshakeable belief in its irredeemability: if we all like something, it can’t be good. The extent of the hype cycle’s corruption of our minds can be measured by the frequency with which you hear people complaining that environmentalism has grown so fashionable, so chic, so trendy. Try to imagine a similar complaint from another political era: “I was totally into democracy—before they extended the franchise. I was all about socialism—but it became so working class.”
That is convincing stuff – and speaks directly to the concern that the impact of capitalism is not simply that it creates financial inequality or is exploitative but that it is co-opting our potential to resist by incorporating the very avenues of resistance (i.e. art) into its logic.
