"The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks."
The current issue of Adbusters skewers the hipster scene in a wildly self-important essay that ends, "The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new."
The article is enjoyable to read, since of course it's fun to read about how trashy and pointless hipsters are. But I have no idea how it made it past the factcheckers:
Hipsterdom is the first 'counterculture' to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.
Can it really be true that the folks at Adbusters have never read Adorno and Horkheimer writing about the culture industry?
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
