are we in a culture recession???

On the lack of evolution in arts and culture and how that manifests as an economy of "art" t-shirts.

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• The latest 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 features icon Jeff Carvalho of Selectism (and formerly of Highsnobiety) joining Ben Dietz and I to talk gentle parenting, TV podcasts, and the relationship between tech and wavy shoes. Listen on Spotify or YouTube.

• Trend Report Live™ (TRL) is online — and a week from today! Join us August 3 at 7P CEST / 6P GMT / 1PM EST / 10A PST for a review of the month in culture: RSVP here.

• Copenhagen and Stockholm: see you next week!! Bobby Aaron Solomon and I will be in town for CPHFW, hitting a few items like the Sprezza hang. Beyond that, I’ll be holding office hour hangs Aug 10 and 14 at 5P at Mina’s Kaffebar and Aug 21 and 24 at 5PM at Lykke Nytorget. Hope to see you!

Starvation in Gaza
"Famine in Gaza is the most horrific"
I went deeper in this subject on Thursday — and we’ll talk about this next Wednesday — but every month holds a deeper tragedy related to the treatment of people in Palestine, just when you think they’ve suffered enough. This is a defining stain on our lifetime that some are only now acknowledging. Shame.

Japan’s Dominant Party Defeated, Voters Swing Right
This went under the radar and I’m worrying about it darling!!!!!! “He is facing calls to step down after the setback left the Liberal Democrats, who have led Japan for all but five of the last 70 years,” the story explains, which is to say: bad news.

Johnson Cuts Short House to Avoid Epstein Files
The DOJ Told Trump He's in the Epstein Files
Trump’s Name Is on Contributor List for Epstein Birthday
House Oversight Committee to subpoena DOJ
Surprising to no one — except the Qanon Shaman, a person who is of a growing wave of post-Trump people who are going to coalesce into…nothing good! They’re not going to all of a sudden become Dems or some shit, but perhaps a greater more chaotic evil. Anyway, here are some funny jokes: Republicans want to rename the Kennedy Center after Melania, Trump withdrew from ‘woke’ UNESCO again, and this very good related Tweet.

Why are young adults in the world so unhappy?
U.S. birth rate hits all-time low, CDC data shows
I don’t agree with the premise of the unhappiness item linked to housing but I do think these things are related: fewer opportunities for upward mobility at work, in housing, in love paired with increasingly terrible political and technologic outcomes has created mass ennui, a failure to thrive for all of Millennial adulthood which is coming to mark Gen Z adulthood too. This isn’t hard to understand given that nothing has progressed. WE MUST RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE!!!!!

Tea app hacked: 13,000 photos leaked
App Where Women Share Anonymous Dating Reviews
To the above: if women cannot have safe spaces to warn of incels without incels interrupting to leak their home addresses, then clearly no one’s having kids — or happy. This may be a defining moment at the culture-tech crossover.

Sam Altman warns of an AI ‘fraud crisis’
Cue the Tim Robinson hot dog meme.

Corn sweat will intensify a heat wave this week
“No A/C Challenge is not for everybody”
Britain and Europe need to get serious about air conditioning
The heat is on, which ties to A/C inequality. The “No A/C Challenge” is horrifying given intense heat, which leads to the second item about how the UK and EU are (allegedly) so bad at air conditioning that more people die from heat deaths in the EU than people in the US die from guns. Let that sink in. (For fu`nsies, here’s a story on what temperature museums keep their AC at.)

Exhibit A: “The Young Magician Planning to Make History” in Texas Monthly by Katy Vine, published July 13. The story follows one of the world’s top magicians, Eric Chien, as he seeks to redefine magic as an art form — as it feels stuck, stagnating. “It’s the lack of rivals that frustrates him,” Vine writes. “‘I really want more magicians to improve,’ he said. ‘I feel like a lot of people are just stuck on the classic stuff, you know? I feel like magic should evolve.’ He griped about tricks that employ a Rubik’s Cube—a prop he too has utilized for magic, though he spoke of it like it was an indulgent sin. ‘Everyone is just coming up with different methods now, but ninety percent of the methods that they come up with are just [recycled].’”

Exhibit B: Simon Pegg’s Criterion Closet picks, from July 18. His final pick was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which he called “an insanely disturbing movie.” “I showed this to my daughter the other day — and she hated it,” he said. “She hated it for exactly the reasons that David Lynch wanted you to hate it…I was delighted that Tilly hated it because she talked about it nonstop that night and then the next day, and I said, ‘Sometimes entertainment is an overrated function of art. Sometimes being made uncomfortable is the point. Sometimes being repulsed is the point.’ I think David Lynch knew that better than most.”

Exhibit C: A comment left on a David Perell interview with Erza Klein, as pointed out by Perell. “Just take a look at the Arts section in the New York Times, and compare to ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago,” the commenter wrote. “You'll notice that various elements of what used to be referred to as ‘high culture’ have successively disappeared. Most of it is now about products of the entertainment industry. I hate to use the word ‘intellectualism’, but there was a time when middlebrow thinking wasn't the upper limit of cultural aspirations, when the word ‘elite’ wasn't a pejorative and didn't have anything to do with power or money. I see a world of ruthless conformity. People don't even know what they're missing, though they do know that they're missing something, and that's the problem.”

Exhibit D: I had lunch with Ariana Romano on Friday, who noted she was going to see Fantastic Four — not because she wanted to but because she wanted to go to the movies and there were no good movies out. We then debated what the movie of the summer would be, given the lack of song of the summer. I pointed to Superman as the likely breakout, even if Weapons will end up being what is remembered of this time. We then discussed nostalgia and how all these movies cannibalize on previous ideas and IP, all ghost culture haunting your longing to be in another time, at another point in your life. The results are films you don’t want to see but see them anyway because you want to experience something communally, with others.

There are more exhibits — the ongoing debate that electronic music is in limbo, without a future, the belief that “painting is dead“ while “AI art” adds nothing to the space, the loss of reading as a cultural activity, fashion recycling styles and business models from decades past — which all get an idea that has been swimming between my ears for months: entertainment as an expression of our lack of evolution. By “entertainment,” I don’t mean The Industry™ but the idea of something being entertaining, that something makes you “feel good,” which is the first symptom of our stalled evolution: our need to be “entertained” is ruining so much of the very human desire to create and tell stories. By everything needing to “be entertaining” — which in many ways also means “profitable,” “quick,” “easy to digest” — much of creativity has stalled. This oversimplifies all art forms and means all movies, music, theater, art, etc. and the idea of certain time-intensive leisure acts like reading and writing must feel like junk food now: if it’s not “fun,” if it doesn’t “make you feel good,” then it somehow is “bad” at its job. Cue the death of the critic conversation! This invokes Ted Gioia’s decade defining “dopamine culture” theory, which has been making the rounds again this week, as we’re perhaps realizing how flat life is becoming without any friction the art we encounter consume. Borecore, as I said in 2021, which is a seeking of comfort over a challenge, which has rewired our brains four years later, less to be lazy and more to equate the consumption of creative junk “as art.” “Was it fun? Was it entertaining? Did it feel good? Did it satisfy me?” Jamaal Burkmar asked on TikTok, tied to the Simon Pegg video. “Who cares?...The other feelings that linger and that challenge you and make you squirm or sit in silence for a minute too long, those matter.”

The other issue — which is far more grim, a shadow that has shrouded me for weeks — is art itself has stopped evolving. This isn’t unique to art but is a cough in the bigger larger philosophical sickness humanity suffers from: human progress has stopped. The idea is tied to philosopher John Gray, who shared this idea in the late aughts and early 2010s which has found new life on TikTok. “The myth of progress isn't to do with whether or not things have improved: things have improved in many respects in the last hundred years,” he explained in a lecture over a decade ago. “It’s to do with the idea that the long-run impact of the growth of human knowledge is to make the world human life more civilized: that's the myth — and practically everyone who says they don't believe in this myth do…The growth of knowledge is very powerful but what it produces are new forms of civilization, recurrences of old and new forms of barbarism.” Gray has talked about this concept for some time, tying the continuation of torture and slavery — Abu Ghraib, for example, and outsourced slavery, as another example — as illustrative that human progress has not advanced to leave behind our worst traits, which is made worse by a secular (and even religious) belief that humans “have gotten better” at treating each other despite the horrors of this contemporary moment saying otherwise. “The rapid movement in technological advancements creates a phantom of progress,” he said in 2013. “Phones are getting better, smaller, and cheaper all the time. In terms of technology, there’s a continuous transformation of our actual everyday life. That gives people the sense that there is change in civilization. But, in many ways, things are getting worse.” Over a decade later, you can only imagine what Gray would think of the goings-on of 2025.

Thus the double edged sword that has consumed both artists and audience alike: it’s less that we’ve hit a ceiling as far as what can be created but that the ceiling has been painted with a beautiful sunny sky — and we choose to sit and stare at it, believing it to represent us at the peak of existence instead of laboring to break through, to reach higher despite the discomfort. The illusion of progress delivered as small dopamine hits of glee, the wheels of the vehicle of humanity spinning in the same mud instead of moving along down the path. Thus, our great cultural recession, the end of trends, the constant vomiting of decades past into the mouth of civilization.

“Dance is often confused with entertainment, which is about someone consuming it,” the dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones told the artist Theaster Gates earlier this year, in an interview for BOMB. ”Who are you making your art for, and what happens once it gets consumed?” he asked. “Unless we retreat or ascend — depending on your point of view — to a plane that is not about survival or making money, the whole of an artist’s career becomes an ephemeral gesture that will only live in certain people’s memory.” As Jones suggests, the issue may not be the artists but that the world has minimized creation, outsourcing it to technology, turning a deeply human act into an “ephemeral gesture” that was non-valuable, unable to become harder, better, faster, stronger. Is that not deeply dehumanizing? Is that not a biting progress report of these times?

What happens once we spot the asteroid that will hit Earth?
Fascinating story! Now let me clean my seat as I shit myself.

Scientists bust myth about 10,000 steps
Apparently the “10K steps a day” thing was an advertising plot for a Japanese pedometer. Who knew? Also: 7K a day is enough. File this alongside the Blue Zones story!

Anti-Woke Dad Who Fled With Family to Russia
Black Woman Flees U.S. Racism to Russia
When the digital nomad dream turns sour
I’m building an army of Americans who thought life abroad (In Russia??) was a fantasy instead of actually just real life.

Amazon Hiked Prices on Hundreds of Essentials
"What’s going on between Amazon???"
We know nothing will be done to curb price gouging but, if you need another reminder to stop supporting Amazon, let this be it.

25 Best Horror Movies of the 21st Century
The economy of “best movies” or music or whatever of this century is an expression of rage bait, as this list proves. To that: I guess being at the quarter mark of a century means we’ll continue with these lists until the clock chimes 2026.

The Enduring Reign of El Daña
FRUITSLICE Issue 7: Home
It Gets Better’s Summer Reading Challenge
The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists announced its 2025 winners and the first link, about a 79 year old California drag king, won for the Excellence In Radio Award. Give it a read! The second link is the recent issue of queer LA lit mag FRUITSLICE, which…I have a story in! These two stories lead to the fourth: the It Gets Better summer reading challenge, a fundraiser to support queer kids worldwide. Support queer literary culture, please!!

the girl in the window
Dani, then and now
I randomly did a deep research dive on feral children (new novel, etc.) and came upon the story of Dani Crockett, a Florida girl who was left in a room by herself for the first six years of her life. The first link is to the first major coverage of her in 2008 — which won a Pulitzer. The second is a follow up story from 2017, checking in on the family and with Dani. It is…a tough, wild, sad read that ultimately speaks to human resilience and fragility.

“POV: I'm a painter from the 1700's making paintings that reflect the cruelty of the regime I'm under and see my painting printed on the back of a 5.99 SHEIN phone case,” someone observes on TikTok.

This is true: for a little more than a single Euro, Van Gogh’s 1888 Café Terrace at Night can be yours, thanks to SHEIN, who do not even mention his name or the title of the work but instead distill it to “Oil Painting Fashion Design Phone Case For Daily Use.” Don’t stop there: why not consider the “Creative Painting Anti-Drop Transparent Soft Phone Case” featuring Starry Night along with key inspirational phrases like “OUTSIDR I CAN FIGHT MY FEAR”? “Why, I say to myself should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France?” Van Gogh wondered in 1888 — and you can wonder that too thanks to Burger Bae.

There’s an entire economy of such items and they’ve become quite trendy, which isn’t a trend limited to Van Gogh as Edgar Degas hype tees, Paul Cézanne hype tees, and Claude Monet hype tees expand this universe. These looks are almost always sold by fast fashion brands, which is leaking into “bigger” spaces as brands from Obey to Playboy take inspiration from art-as-apparel. It’s surprising that Impressionism, capturing an idea over representing precisely, continues to leave an impression as Van Gogh’s painted butterfly wings flapped so that Warhol and Basquiat and Haring could be turned into Uniqlo collabs, which, along with MoMa, are responsible for the hype tees too that collapse centuries of art into the easily consumed, worn and trashed, training generations to devalue our creative power. The art market as we know it, as down as it is, doesn’t disagree as it allows itself to be the greatest accessory of our time, be it for a Beyoncé and Jay Z music video or for Netflix’s Glass Onion: this representational technology of the past continues to stand as shorthand for taste and refinement but also little monsters of what once was, where I can be at a music festival dancing to a track composed of found sounds from archival African chanting while looking at two different men wearing the same tee depicting Monet’s Water Lilies. Did the tribe who was recorded for the track ever think their voices would be enjoyed decades later, thousands of miles away, by a listener who was sipping wine from an even further country while standing within a country that he is not from? Did they, like Monet, imagine they would become accessories to global homogeneity?

(This isn’t just an art problem, or the fault of people who wear clothes: fashion sold art out too. For decades and decades, becoming increasingly popular, art has been used to elevate clothing while ultimately degrading both, equating paintings and all things “created” as something seasonal and therefore disposable. Jonathan Anderson, the bon vivant of the fashion-art and art-fashion intersection, holds the knife that cut out the heart of both worlds. The whole of the creative economy as a cerulean sweater.)

There is coming a time when all art and all creative expression will be by and for technologies that hum songs and draw pictures back and forth to an audience that does not have the physical features to enjoy them. Art then will be a form of information, a dehumanized expression that is without meaning: it is only an input. The images will collapse, the songs will slow, the words will be scrambled and copied, everything human a memory that industry suckled upon until all the artists died which meant all the humans died. Art hype tees may be trendy but they say so much about how we value art, that it is to be copied and worn out instead of sat with and enjoyed: they are swag from the frontlines of our cultural recession. A signal less of culture but that you were able to buy from a curator of a curator of a curator, produced in lands far away by people who likely were paid the idea of money instead of actual money. And yet! The item was made. The original artist and the maker of the reproduction erased for clout.

“watching a movie on Tubi”
“you can venmo the United States”
“una bolsa de shein”
“the concept of”
Dispatches from the future — and what a future we are lucky to live in!

“Her (2013)”
Tokyo Toni should star in a remake of every movie.

"Lorne Michaels officially"
"Lady Gaga officially has"
"Lorde is when"
The “Am I reading that right?” has-is trend made me go crosseyed, which may play into human pranks as another form of ragebait meets typoisms (or really is AI slop).

“they couldn’t handle him”
As this video shows, big boners this week for Hunter Biden given his (baller) interview. We love a Harmony Korine coded blue pilled dgaf Gen Xannie dad!

“Conservative MP”
I had to see British Ellen now you do too.

“let me be”
“Obama voice”
“[Obama douching]”
The Obama gay jokes got me through the week (that and “gooner based world view”).

“every time I see these videos”
Yes, some are making Epic Meal Time meals in 2025.

“this is a fever dream”
And, just like that, I just learned I can speak Dutch, which is very important for my upcoming trip.

“singing the zip code”
You’ll never listen to Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” / the Dawson’s Creek theme the same after this.

And, finally, a look at what is going on in my head.

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