Art After The Hipster: Identity Politics, Ethics And Aesthetics
by Wes Hill /
2017 / English / PDF
1.7 MB Download
This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the
lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles
Baudelaire’s flâneur to the contemporary “creative” borne from
creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity
of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own
significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary
life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so
central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era
of creative digital technologies, long held characteristics of
art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative
lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global
marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are
the “foot soldiers of capitalism”, the institutionalized networks
that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a
view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative
form-making than a social platform―a forum for populist aesthetic
pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the
concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the
relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of
the dynamics of global contemporary art.
This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the
lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles
Baudelaire’s flâneur to the contemporary “creative” borne from
creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity
of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own
significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary
life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so
central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era
of creative digital technologies, long held characteristics of
art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative
lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global
marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are
the “foot soldiers of capitalism”, the institutionalized networks
that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a
view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative
form-making than a social platform―a forum for populist aesthetic
pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the
concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the
relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of
the dynamics of global contemporary art.
