A Time in History
Everything is bright, colorful, and easy, but all wrong
Ever since I was about five years old, I’ve been searching for the reason I was born in this time period. Some part of me believes there has to be a reason I am living now, and not during some different era (unless of course you believe in reincarnation and therefore have lived in many time periods). I’ve spent many aching moments daydreaming about “what ifs.” What if I could live through the golden age of rock and roll? Of cinema? What would it be like to live during the renaissance? To be a painter? What would it feel like to have never heard recorded music, and then witness a symphony? Was life clearer, easier, more fulfilling? What would I have been like had I been around one or two hundred years ago? Would any of my current values be the same? Would I have had the courage to think differently than my culture? Would I be happier writing my thoughts on parchment in candlelight? Would life have been more romantic, my relationships deeper, or is dissatisfaction a universal?
I was taking a walk in my new neighborhood in West Hollywood yesterday. I walked by a talent agency, a music entertainment company, luxury clothing and furniture boutiques, and an art gallery. I had this realization that what I was seeing was one universal: human creativity existing in a specific time period and culture. All these grand buildings, elegant presentations, they were nothing but a temporary vessel for something much deeper. I had a glimpse of it - of this human realness existing amid all of these facades of importance. There were once cave paintings, and then there was all this. What a strange time in history for the commodification of human creativity. What stories will future humans tell about how we viewed art and how we treated artists? How did art become tied to being cool, being a brand, or being unattainable?
I don’t like to be cynical about the present day, but sometimes I can’t help it. I often tell my friends that I wished I lived in a world where artists had all the money and power instead of the technocrats and bureaucrats who simply enjoy taking advantage of them. Maybe artists have never had all the money and power, but wouldn’t it be better if they did? It would at least show the good in what our culture values.
Machines have changed the value we place on beauty. I currently live in an apartment built in the 1930s. It’s more elegant and comfortable than any modern place I toured or lived previously. It’s all in the small details, the arched doorways, carved molding, rounded ceilings, the art deco heater grates. The new places I saw smelled like plastic and looked like gray boxes, devoid of any humanity. The thing is, it’s not simply because this place is old that I like it, but the fact that almost nobody builds anything that has any craft, style, or individuality anymore.
I can’t help but romanticize the way in which past humans valued craft and creativity. Artists were often elevated because of the quality their creations, not their social media followings, or ability to create within toxic online formats. Not that social pressures didn’t exist, but there were different values underlying them. I don’t think the commodification of art is all wrong, but how and why we commodify it is lacking. What our values around it are. I would rather have quality over quantity in all respects.
This “thing” I’m attempting to write about is even bigger than I can fully express because it has infiltrated all aspects of life, not just art. It is a version of the world where everything is bright, colorful, and easy, but all wrong. All full of nothing. Brief trends and people who are famous for a week. Everything is quickly forgotten. Quality, intelligence, and commitment are seen as elitist or worse, boring. It is a version of Brave New World where ignorance is bliss and truth is painful, and banished from all thought.
I don’t know why I am living now. Was it so I could witness the exponential acceleration of technology? Of the birth of smartphones, social media, the internet? Was it so I could witness the world transforming, and see what is wrong because I have some memories of the “before times?” There has to be a reason I tell myself.