Nothing new in American art/culture since 1980?

Cafe Society
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These threads always seem to be really superficial - the sum whole of art and culture seems to be entirely focused on ‘clothing style changes adopted by everyone, and network TV shows, and radio music?’. They seem to ignore huge chunks of culture, like who even gets to be shown on those network TV shows or how people consume art and media - the move from listening to radio and buying whole albums from major publishers (which were often listened to front to back) to highly customizable streaming services and downloads, or the move from watching TV on a major network when they aired it to streaming and DVRing stuff whenever you want it is pretty significant. Or how people interact with each other - the process of going out to a movie or going out to dinner/drinks with a few friends was radically different from what it was back in the 80s in the 2010s, as was hooking up, dating, and marriage, and 2020 has completely upended social interaction. And specific clothing changes always seem to get ‘special-cased’ out of existence - face masks in crowds is a huge marker of whether a picture was shot pre-2020 or post, but I doubt that is going to count.

Take a look at one narrow case: how gays are treated in popular culture. In 1980, gay culture was mostly underground and gays were mostly considered the butt (hurr hurr) of jokes, SSM wasn’t even taken seriously, and gays outside of big cities generally had to live in the closet. By the 1990s, SSM started to become talked about as a political issue (only 27% support nationwide) and gays had some level of acceptance. While many popular shows (Friends) tended to treat gays as ‘around, but kind of uncomfortable’, other shows actually showed gay weddings occuring (Northern Exposure and Roseanne). IKEA ran an ad with a gay couple in 1994 and got death threats, Subaru marketed to lesbians but only in a ‘wink and nod’ way. By the turn of the millennium, you could have a gay person as a star on a network series (Will and Grace) and a show specifically about a bunch of gay people (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). By 2015, SSM was legalized across the US, and support for it had gone up to 67%. While today network TV is not as important as it was in the 80s, non-straight charactes are not rare even there, and are even more common in other media (cable TV, pay cable, streaming services, movies, and more), and it’s not treated as particularly noteworthy. The mainstream wedding industry is fully onboard with selling cakes, dresses, tuxes, and all of the rest to weddings even when there are two brides or two grooms.

There’s simply no way you could air a comedy on network TV in the 80s about a police precinct with a gay police chief as an incidental feature of the character, and casually run jokes about he and his husband’s issues the same way you would a straight married couple. But Brooklyn 99 ran for several years on Fox, then moved to NBC when Fox decided to cancel it after multiple seasons. And there’s no way Cheerios, Nabisco, Amazon or VISA would have run commercials featuring same-sex couples back in the 80s (Amazon didn’t even exist then) - but they do now. If a cable network declined to run same-sex-couple ads in the 90s it wouldn’t even be noteworthy, but Halmark declining to run one in 2019 got them a lot of heat.

I honestly have no idea how someone can look at just that narrow bit of massive change over the last 40 years and say that there’s nothing new going on, much less all of the other changes.

42

Married With Children started in 1987, and I kind of think they could have done that, yes. Wasn’t Marcy’s husband gay?

EDIT: Or her second husband? Or am I thinking of a different character the actor who played her second husband played on a different show? Not sure.

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I think most people would recognize the name Maya Angelou, even if they couldn’t quote one of her poems. (But I doubt the average person could quote a poem by Rod McKuen either. Or John Keats.)

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No, both of Marcy’s husbands, Steve and Jefferson, were straight and were played by straight actors, David Garrison and Ted McGinley. Perhaps what you’re remembering is that Amanda Bearse, who played Marcy, is gay. But the character of Marcy was straight.

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I once read an interesting article about how the prestigious art medium shifts. There was a period when the great medium was painting. Then sculpture. Then symphonies. Then novels. Then movies. Then songs. Right now it’s the television series.

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Applicable in how different ages view todays culture and how much has changed…for them:

If you were 14 when Star Trek TNG ended, you would be 40 today.

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The idea of innovation in art is itself the product of an older age, the beginning of the 20th century. And it ran its course halfway through the 20th century.
Art discussion has a tendency to navel-gazing instead of looking at art in relation to society. The general public is not interested in artistic theories, but also gets bored if art stagnates. The public wants art, but not the kind of art that artists fuzz about. So we get new forms of artistic expresion, which do find a ready audience, and which shows a marvellous amount of creativitiy:

  • games
  • rap
  • youtube
  • modern streaming serials on Netflix or as web series
    etc.

If you are not into those forms of expression you will not recognize the consideration and talent that goes into the production of these forms of expression. They don’t obey the expectations of the older generation that demanded grand conceptual changes, and precisely for that reason are revolutionary: they reject the format of their elders.

If you look at what provides ordinary people with emotiional satisfaction, excitement, beauty, those are these modern forms of expression.

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And another thing to note: Tv shows have changed radically since the 80s in content. A show like Friends is clearly from before 2000 in its almost painfully whiteness and heterosexuality. I’ve seen criticism of a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its treatment of homosexuality, which at the time was very progressive but from contemporary viewpoint seems to be too circumspect (if you don’t take into account the societal norms of the nineties).

A show like Brooklyn Nine-Nine where the main characters are all non-WASP, is clearly contemporary. Similarly shows like and Killing Eve would not have been produced even 20 years ago. Even more so: a movie like Get Out is completely revolutionary in showing us a viewpoint that up to now was mostly ignored by mainstream cultural expressions. That is innovation: breaking through the status quo, the blind sides of the older generation, showing that everything they took for granted is questionable.

As a matter of form, look at how shows like 30 Rock work with quick flash backs, jump cuts, reality show elements. And that is not exceptional nowadays.

Point being, there is a distinct change of TV fromthe ninties onwards. It may not be ‘new’ in the way the author that the OP refered to wants, but the defiance of expectations is precisely what innovation is about.

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Detective Charles Boyle is a straight white guy and it’s never mentioned he’s Catholic so he appears to be WASP. He’s the only one though, unless you count Hitchcock and Scully, and they’re in the opening credits now so maybe they are.

Gina Linetti is also white and straight but maybe she’s Catholic?

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Based on her name, she’s probably Italian and not Anglo-Saxon. As for H&S, since they’re such parodies of old-school NY cops, I always assumed they were Irish.

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Why was there such an emphasis on innovation in “The Arts” during the 20th Century? That seems to be the outlier, not the stability.

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If you take a look at the history of art, you’ll find that there’s always been innovation. Perhaps the speed has increased, but art has never been static, it’s always been changing and evolving.

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“There’s nothing Don Quixote did that the Romans, Chinese, and Japanese didn’t do first!”

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Married with Children did an EPISODE with a married gay couple in 1990, but that was a one-shot episode after five successful seasons on the air. They did not have anything like that as a major character, and definitely nothing as conservative-baiting as a legally married to a man policeman, much less the captain, and they had already established themselves as a successful vehicle for the network to make money by the time. When the show was pitched and established itself, it was entirely looking at heterosexual marriage and jokes about that - and at the same time wasn’t poking fun at the police. (And Married With Children would certainly not be the same show if it was about a police precinct instead of a married couple.)

There was simply no way a show like I described would get on the air in 1987, which is seven years after the supposed cultural freeze and three years before the highly successful MWC did a one-off episode on the topic. There is a big difference between a successful show running a one-off episode portraying a same-sex couple in a positive light and having a member of such a couple as a focus character from the start of the show, and an even bigger difference between portraying them as an outsider doing something odd and having them be legally married and a high-ranking law enforcement officer.

I think what you’re thinking of is that the actor who played Marcy came out as a lesbian in 1993, after the show had been running for six years, and they later did an episode where she played her own lesbian cousin. Al and Jefferson definitely had a bromance, but he was never portrayed as gay on the show.

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Also, the MWC episode was “let’s make an episode about a gay couple”. It took a long time after that for homosexuality to become an incidental character trait.

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Thanks for taking yourself out of the discussion and thereby improving it.

I like this distinction. We do have to be careful to distinguish between “art” and “popular culture that I like.” They do overlap and one can become the other but they aren’t the same.

Schools of art used to dominate whole decades. Art Nouveau before WWI, Modernism afterward, Art Deco in the 20s, Streamline in the 30s, Populuxe in the 50s, Psychedelic in the late 60s and 70s. They were design trends that usually started as art and then moved into the culture to be reflected in fashion, furniture, appliances, architecture, stage design, and illustration. It’s hard to think of anything similar that has come since. Minimalism has been around for a while and has made some inroads into various arts but it’s never been dominant. Postmodernism and post-postmodernism (really) are mostly grab-bags of stuff that don’t have a common aesthetic.

New forms of art have often emerged in times of repression or just after the lifting of it, true. The late 50s and 60s were especially fertile this way in the U.S. and Europe. That doesn’t explain why no major art forms have come from the hundreds of cultures worldwide who have consistently been using art to express grievances over the past several decades. The whole world can’t be decadent.

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This thread has been fairly respectful! Usually its a litany of variations on “You’re old, STFU.”

58

Right- the 1980s were quite the time of ferment in terms of music, fashion, art, cinema, etc… and was very different than the 1960s or 1970s. The 1990s sort of… slowed down, but there was stuff like grunge and metal and the associated fashion trends that cropped up.

My suspicion is that it has something to do with the Internet paradoxically allowing for greater splintering/niche-ing of art/cultural forms, and also managing to totally homogenize what’s “mainstream” at the same time.

I mean, I don’t doubt that there are some very innovative artists, musicians and filmmakers out there doing their thing and producing really new stuff. But at the same time, the mainstream has stagnated and homogenized itself to a crazy extent. I tend to think that the crazy number of international variants of a show as mediocre as “Everybody Loves Raymond” is absolute proof of this. I mean, it’s not like the show is that funny, or the bearer of some kind of universal comedy truth. It’s a very forgettable sitcom, albeit maybe one that was particularly well executed. But it’s got multiple international versions for some strange reason, which I’m inclined to think is this weird mainstream homogenization thing that’s going on.

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Please remember this isn’t the Pit. Personal shots like these don’t belong here. No warning, let’s just keep it nice.

RickJay
Moderator

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I doubt it. In '99 the athleisure fashion trend didn’t really exist.