Cultural Rot And Our Crisis Of Authenticity

Originally published at Wrong Speak Publishing

Collage by Author

To write about any aspect of our culture that has caused yet another internet uproar feels like feeding the fire. These events are certainly not anything that any “writer” would need to cover, but many are events much too juicy for the “blogger” to ignore. 

Frankly, we all know we shouldn’t care at all. Most people had long abandoned culture as a form of entertainment—just a game of whack-a-mole for points. We know all too well that the miasmic fog of Hollywood is much too thick to see through, the inner workings of which are layered precisely, strategically, politically, and pivoted in such a way that talent, humor, and self-expression lose their intimacy with the public on an individual level. And the mechanisms by which we measure artistic merit are obscured. There is no decipherable “talent” anywhere—air-brushed footage, special effects, auto-tune, and nepotism abound.

Vocal coaches, brand managers, and producers groom golden boys and girls from the dregs of mediocrity into the stratosphere of mega-stardom. It could be that twinkle of the eye that just shouts “make me a star!” or perhaps a jawline that looks carved from stone. Whatever the case, “merit” has been perverted beyond recognition.

Of course, the entry ticket to the grand kabuki theatre of American-style celebrity worship is surely our integrity, which slowly but surely vanishes as we sop up every juicy story, every sliver of celebrity gossip that comes down the trough of American hyper-sensationalism. In one generation (perhaps two) we have seen the rise and fall(-ing) nature of social media—at its very beginning we became comfortable sharing our lives through photos of our daily selves. It seems the pipeline from Instagram to pornography was finally a complete circle as OnlyFans took up the task of providing the inevitable—a place where those who have long been willing to share their bikini photos and twerk videos online are now bearing all for a profit. Who would not have seen that coming?

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At the same time, female adolescents and teens are suffering the most in mental and physical ways — body image issues, identity crises, eating disorders, emergency room visits, and bodily self-harm are all on the rise. And with this constant barrage of sexual innuendo at every turn, we find it commonplace to view pop singers as porn stars, dripping on stage with sexual temptation at every chance. Everything is trash. Everything is bottom shelf. Everything is as cheap and predictable as possible.

The Late-Night circuit (the Kimmel’s, Fallon’s, Colbert’s, etc.) have long been a pageant for Hollywood talking points, low-resolution, bite-size, t-shirt phrase analysis. The canned, nervous laughter of the audience punches a hole through any veil of authenticity, as the host tries to ask questions in an earnest tone, as if the question, joke, and punchline weren’t pre-scripted. Over and over, we see the over-zealous celebrities, touting their films—multi-millionaires playing buddy-buddy with another multi-millionaire host, all before a crowd in the ghastly corridor of Hollywood Boulevard or Times Square. These interviews do not provide any insight into the artist, tread less on topics concerning art, and much more become contests of strange comfort. 

Affable, gleeful celebrities who are capable of laughing at themselves—the salt of the earth, self-deprecating types—they are not. Hollywood pays well and we only interview the rich. What, if anything, does that do to our concept of the artist as actor? The artist as musician? The artist as artist?

What we see and hear is not the barbaric yawp of the artist with which we could once associate—to find solace in their story or character, or find comfort in their journey. Today, the complex, dark, and perhaps mysterious artist—the more serious, the more dangerous, 20th-century type (the last of which was probably someone like Basquiat or Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse) have vanished, mostly. 

What we now see are celebrities faking their way into recording studios, stage sets, and art galleries. I don’t hesitate to mention that Jaden Smith, the son of Will Smith, embodies this idea to near perfection.

When looking dispassionately through his catalog of online modeling photos and selfies, one gets the impression that “artist” is something Jaden Smith would aspire to be. Trendy fashion, graffiti, brand endorsement, cool, catchy captions, references to his father, and an unmistakably pampered aura to his skin complexion swirl in a sexy, youthful, vibrant way. Unfortunately for Jaden, in this author's opinion, all the things that make him a successful celebrity are the exact same things that will prevent him from ever being an artist (barring some sort of tragedy) in the pure sense of the word. But no use in picking on Jaden. Just one example of thousands…

When the overbearing loudness of American culture (which reverberates around the world, but deafens American ears to anything else) blisters our minds with sex, violence, platitudes, sermons, and materialistic concerns, we succumb to the notion of “Get rich or Die tryin”—and what does that mean? Well, it must mean we’d rather be dead than poor.

It means we will sacrifice our dignity for kabuki, pervert the measures of our own will at the request of garbage culture, turn our backs on the things that give us joy through the making and viewing of art. And when we drop them, we are then asked to roll around and play in the mud.

So goes the grand theatre of distraction. A theatre that demands that its brightest stars remain in the limelight for far past their prime and demands that its “audience” must pretend not to notice. And only when every opportunity has been soaked up—endorsement deals, irrelevant business opportunities, a fragrance line, national commercials, etc.—we can say the celebrity has gotten everything out of it.

At the root of it, it seems like we are still scraping at the bottom of the barrel, making sure we have seen the very depths of our own cultural despair. We can’t bear to watch it, but we cannot look away either. So shaken is our mechanism for discerning good taste and value, so rotten to its core is the system that provides our creative outlets, and so completely shattered is our pursuit of meaning, that we have become fools for foolish entertainment, where mediocre “artists” who call themselves musicians but cannot play music; “actors” who can only dazzle with glamorous looks; and painters and writers who are very afraid to expose themselves in any meaningful way. 

When the crafting of culture rots away, weathered out by time and ax, we are dreary, exhausted from its misuse—and, like cross-eyed buzzards, we are circling for a crumb of dead culture in a hellscape of all things that are repulsive. What we have here is a crisis of authenticity and are certainly deserving of the “culture” we are provided.

JSV
2023