The Death of Cool

Brian Eno thoughts:

There was distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music". But we dont think like this anymore. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

A example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Music is divided differently now as there are many more catergoires used for one type of genre such as ambient music has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others. This happens in every genre except classic as its stayed as classic for the moment. It’s also going on in painting, sculpture, cinema and dance.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere e.g. internent. They don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.