In an interesting essay in Harper’s magazine, writer Justin E. H. Smith explores what he describes as "an annihilation of almost everything that once oriented us." Smith is talking about Generation X, those born between the middle of the 1960s and 1980. According to Smith, the world he grew up in has become so unrecognizable he has to see a therapist to handle the dissonance.
Everything is digital, and there is no critical integrity or guardrails anymore. Smith laments "the widespread philistinism and prissiness" that prevails now among younger people in regard to art. Millennials and Gen Z have "an inherently authoritarian" attitude towards music , film, and literature . Challenging artists like the Cramps, Robert Crumb, and David Bowie would today be considered "problematic." "Problematic," Smith observes, is "a weasel word employed by people who lack not only the courage of their convictions but also anything beyond convictions, any of the aesthetic or moral virtues that engagement with art was, for some centuries, believed to be essential to cultivating: taste, curiosity, imagination, fellow feeling with the wretched and the fallen."
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