Getting through the day requires a mind-set unknown to past generations. Not only must we give ourselves over to our phones but considering all the deceit out there, we also need a certain suspension of disbelief.
Americans of all persuasions are world-class consumers. Try finding a parking spot at Costco. We are saturated with commercials, even with the mute button on; fed fabrications, exaggerations and images leading us astray from reality. Nowhere more so than with ads for prescription meds. The voice over recites: Side effects include falling hair, memory loss, kidney damage and necrosis of the liver, while kids are blowing bubbles, kites are flying, a dog just caught a frisbee and an apple pie is coming out of the oven.
On some unconscious level we have swallowed the association. (Sorry, chum, the new car does not come with beautiful people.) We seem to have an enormous capacity for being led astray and furthermore, we are paying to be lied to in the price of the car, the mattress or the cheeseburger.
We also vote as consumers, buying into promises and half expecting to be cheated. In this scenario, truth is a non-operative word. At the far end of the spectrum we have a man in the bully pulpit who has mastered the art of faux-authenticity with inane blurts repeated to numb the brain.
But enough about Trump.
We are conditioned to straddle two worlds, the humdrum and the as if. They overlap and become almost undifferentiated at times. The imagination insinuates itself into the mundane. Wallace Stevens called it the necessary angel; that force which lifts us above the fray while our feet are stuck in the muck.
All this is a preamble to consider authenticity and artifice. The French New Wave in the late 1950s set out to overthrow the artificiality of studio-made cinema which lacked an edge and spontaneity of real life. It was deemed too literary, insisting on a resolution of conflict.
After a while the rebellion itself had a whiff of
pretension. Yesterday’s defiance becomes tomorrow’s convention. It seems to me
we now have a healthy mix of artifice along with raw bursts of reality.
As consumers, my hunch is we all share a hunger for moments of
transcendence whether classical forms, World Series, British mysteries, documentaries, theater pieces or live music…and all the rest I left out. The options have
never ranged so far afield, even as tickets are obscenely overpriced.
Warhol made art out of kitsch or was it just more kitsch? In this era of commodification, everything is monetized and that, I suppose, becomes yet another art form. Have Gen Z consumers discovered a new way of perceiving which has enabled them to find meaning through random surface images or phrases? What we regarded as depth, may have been an illusion based on our backstory and how we came to be us.
The current generation which shows an indifference to history also rejects narrative, tracing a protagonist through time. Resolution has given way to open text. What we regard as psychological depth, the new sensibility sees as just another construct, no closer to truth than an explanation of surfaces.
Like it or not, technology alters consciousness, the ratio of our senses and how we take in information. In my dotage, I find myself clinging to what I once believed were the eternal verities.
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