Movie trailers and the dangers of virtual reality

Trailers for old movies are really weird. Since I was born in late 1981, I didn't really see many movie trailers until the late '80s. What I didn't realize until recently is that that means I exactly missed the transition between the old style of movie trailers and the new. But now that movies' original trailers are almost always included in the special features of DVDs, I've been exposed to lots of these old trailers, and I'm blown away by how different and old-fashioned they seem.

What makes the old trailers so different is how focused they were on the narrative of the films advertised. This hits you right away in the voiceover. Whereas lots of trailers today -- maybe the majority -- have no voiceover at all, it seems like every trailer back then had voiceover, and a lot of it. These old voiceovers functioned like narrators, introducing you to the characters and giving you lots of exposition. In contrast, voiceovers in trailers today are spoken by a remote-sounding, Godlike man in vague, stereotyped phrases such as "In a world where...," "...one man...," etc. which set the scene and mood with as few words as possible. The clips in pre-'90s trailers, too, tell a story; they're loooong clips, all of uncut dialogue, all in order, mostly of the same length, going all the way up to the end of the film and often essentially giving away the ending. In contrast, trailers today show you lots of short, out-of-order clips of varied lengths, many of them atmospheric shots of setting, silent action, or even just text on a blank screen, and the clips containing dialogue are always edited down and compressed, creating more of a collage.

Here's a comparison: the upcoming Pineapple Express has a trailer that I love to watch over and over again because of the way it massages my mind's visual and aural pleasure center with its lovely rhythmic cutting while not taxing it with anything but the most basic evocation of narrative; contrast that to the relative clunkiness of the trailer of a similarly-themed movie from 1978. What a difference. And yet I'm sure that if someone made a new trailer for Up in Smoke, it could look just like Pineapple Express, because compared to trailers, the style of movies hasn't changed at all. It would also be funny to try cutting an old-style preview of Pineapple Express to see just how unenticing it could be made to look.

Anyway, basically, the people making the trailers figured out that what they were selling wasn't a story, but an experience of a story. And that's what trailers show you: an extremely heightened, compressed sense of what the full-length experience of seeing a movie will be like. And they work really well; movie trailers are like crack, and all human beings readily admit that they love the previews.

But in terms of the actual movie, people are there for the story, right? The importance of the story of a movie gets lots of emphasis from filmmakers, especially recently, in my experience. Seemingly all film schools aggressively proclaim that their curriculums are centered around "storytelling," and most screenwriters and directors emphasize how their main drive is to "tell a story.” It starts to sound a bit defensive – and with good cause. Because the vast majority of the movie-going public, I’m pretty sure, does not go to movies for stories; they go for the same thing they like about trailers – the experience, which is primarily the experience not of the story but of the alternate world for which the story is only a fourth-dimension framework allowing you to pass through that world in time.

But if you didn’t need a stable framework for the fourth dimension in a world – what then? Well, that’s what’s possible in virtual reality. And virtual reality is the direction we’ve been moving towards for a long time. It’s what goes on in the movie-franchise phenomenon, which allows you to experience a movie in multiple media – the film, books, websites, TV shows, theme parks, food, music, weddings, furnishings, clothing… – to the extent that you’re essentially participating in an alternate world. New electronic media, as well -- the internet, video games, even DVR and OnDemand to some extent – break down the artificial structure of time created by the story and open up untold new dimensions through which humans and their senses can travel. Interestingly, this surrender of the fourth dimension in media is coinciding with new advances in the exploration of multiple dimensions beyond the fourth in reality.

What’s happening is the implosion of fixed-time narrative in media and its replacement by experiences of other worlds in which we the audience create the narrative ourselves.

But wait. What happens when we get rid of the story?

I think bad things might happen. Bad, bad things.

Stories are what communicate meaning and truth. They’re normative. They’re stable. They provide reference points for comparison, standards. So when stories are completely eclipsed by experience, which is amorphous and amoral, we lose a way of examining and agreeing on central significances in life. Is it a coincidence that the most successful virtualesque video game, Grand Theft Auto, is about a chaotic and amoral world? No.

Not only do storyless media experiences dispense with frameworks for meaning, but they also create a very problematic illusion of free choice. In the phantasmagorical hyperreality of a Disney franchise or packaged-goods brand universe, we have the illusion of traveling into a new world, where we can try being ourselves in a different atmosphere. The problem is that this atmosphere is not a neutral playground for our senses; it is a highly fake fantasy designed expressly to sell us things. There is in fact a built-in message in these artificial universes, and the message is BUY ME. And this message gets across so successfully exactly because of the way it exists apart from narrative and time. A commercial, which is like a story, tells you one thing once. A world, which when very successful can get confused with reality, brainwashes you constantly.

What's cooler than being cool?

How can our culture turn around from the dead end it’s reached with Cool?  This is something I think about a lot.  We’ve been stuck for way too long re-processing the same cultural material, in this hyper-ironic state of mind, and the feeling of stagnation is overpowering.

Marshall McLuhan would say we’re in a Narcissus phase.  In Understanding Media, he described what he called the “cooling” process, in which a culture uses play, parody, and miming to assimilate new (“hot”) information.  Cooling serves a healthy cultural purpose, but it can become unhealthy if overindulged in.  This often happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new form of media.  In the hyper-cooling phase that follows the invention of a media form, people, not yet “understanding” the new form, become fascinated and enslaved by the extensions of themselves in it.  This enslavement occurs because people make the crucial mistake of thinking that the new media is separate from “real life,” when it is actually a part – an extension – of life and of people themselves.

In the present day, the hypnotizing media is the internet.  Because of the internet, the speed of culture and its cooling has gotten so fast that living with media is like watching a video of life that’s on a split-second time delay: disorienting, disturbing, and discouraging – but hypnotizing.  Hypnotizing because the split-second delay gives the false sensation of watching something fake, something different from our lives – a fantastic show that we don’t want to miss.

McLuhan would say that we’re making the same mistake as Narcissus, who, he emphasizes, did not fall in love with himself, but with a reflection of himself which he genuinely believed to be another person.  Similarly, what we haven’t realized, in relentlessly parodying, recycling, and remixing pop culture, then consuming it again, is that this parodied, recycled, remixed culture isn’t some “other” culture, separate from our own, better than it – it IS our culture.  Our problem, then, isn’t the common diagnosis of self-love, but rather self-alienation and resulting self-hate.  Who but a really, really messed-up person could look at her reflection in the mirror and think to herself, “That person isn’t me”?  But that’s exactly what our culture is doing.

And it’s clear that, subconsciously, the culture knows that it’s messed-up.  Because just as Narcissus’s initial happiness at meeting such a beautiful creature quickly turned to anger and disgust when he found his image unresponsive, the initial attraction we felt when discovering ourselves on the internet turned quickly to ugly, hateful tearing-down when we started experiencing how empty it is to feed upon oneself.

McLuhan doesn’t provide an answer for how to overcome the problem of over-cooling.  He does mention something called a “break point,” however, which seems to be the point at which a trend tips and reverses to the other direction.  We simply have to be approaching such a break point now.  How will the tip happen, though?

I’ve been trying to figure this out by extending the metaphor of cooling, asking myself, what happens when something over-cools?  The short answer is that it freezes.  That would translate into the speed of internet “cooling” breaking the speed of the internet itself.  Literally that’s impossible, since it would mean images of real-life events would have to appear on the internet before they occurred in real life.  Conceptually, however, that’s just the right idea.  We have to put things on the internet, and out into the internet-adapted culture generally, before they “happen.”  Meaning, we have to put things out there that aren’t real -- that are, in other words, art.

And entertainment has started doing just that.  The NY Mag article about Gossip Girl pointed out that the most ground-breaking thing about the series is how all the gossip surrounding its actors’ real lives may be being manufactured by the same person who writes the show for the characters.  So that would mean that the gossip reported on the internet is actually being written ahead of time.  This is an old trick, of course – the film studios figured it out a long time ago.  This has also been happening on the super-scripted reality shows like The Hills.  Again, a kind of art sneaking in under the guise of life.  We say this kind of behavior is somehow reprehensible, but I think it's just what we need.

Because like I started thinking here in reference to the internet, I think that our almost-frozen culture is also paradoxically the “hot”test it’s ever been.  The question of which extreme the temperature is actually at doesn’t matter: the sensation is the same, and all that matters is how we conceptualize it.  Are we going to keep thinking of our fake culture as “cool,” and tricking ourselves into thinking that as we constantly disparage it we’re talking about something better than ourselves?  Or are we going to assert that we are part of it – very much a part of it?

What’s “cooler than being cool” is, as we all know, “Ice Cold.”  I think what Andre 3000 wrote about in "Hey Ya" was actually a quite profound message about the redemptive pain of breaking through alienation by embracing it.  In the video, Andre 3000 is the quintessential alienated artist in the act of transcendence.  He's supposed to "act like [he's] got some sense," but all he knows how to do is "play," because that's the only way he knows of dealing with the complete ridiculousness of the adulation of his public (both in the studio and through T.V. screens) -- by inciting it, embracing it, and raising it to even-crazier heights.  He does this by putting on a false persona -- not just one, but actually 6 personas (1 of them repeated 3 times), each with its own costume and personality and style of seduction.  The seduction is both overtly fake (the over-the-top suaveness of the singer, the girl who runs up on stage to hug him but then ends up mainly wanting to wave at the camera) and intensely real and personal (the sweet girl in the yellow top blowing a kiss to the keyboardist, who shyly smiles).  Both modes coexist and make each other possible -- embolden each other, perhaps.

The video parallels the love story in the song, which is itself a metaphor for the alienation in modern life.  The song is about romantic ambivalence: "But does she really want to / but can't stand to see me walk out the door" (these thoughts incoherently running into each other, they're so mixed-up).  There's this terror of committing to something, for fear that its disappointing reality ("separate's always better when there's feelings involved") will make the fantasy crumble ("got it just don't get it till there's nothing at all").  What makes love the exception?  There's no straight answer to that, other than not to try to pin down an answer.  Instead of listening to the words of the song, we should just dance; and instead of introducing Andre 3000 to our mother, we should just have sex with him.  We should just live -- and living necessitates a little fakeness, a little superficiality, but also a little faith, just like love.

In the video, the bizarre instantaneousness of media communication drives home the miraculous coexistence of superficiality and depth: real-life Andre 3000 transforms into a still image of himself on a poster waved at him by a fan; Polaroid pictures develop images of what's currently going on before our eyes.  But again, this can only happen (actually not, according to the Polaroid Corporation) if we "shake it."  Andre 3000 demands this participation, not just by actively seducing his audience, but by weaving a really infectious call-and-response into his song.  Even uptight Catholic school teachers can't resist the excitement of involving oneself in this kind of "play."

"Ice Cold" means that state of extreme “so-hot-it’s-cool”ness which "Hey Ya" is about, which is the best kind of coolness -- the kind in which you’re actually going out on a limb and owning what you create.  Instead of pretending you’re somehow above what we all do now – put on personas, wear costumes, fake attitudes, create brands for ourselves – generally “be superficial” – you’re identifying with it and even asserting that what seems “fake” is, in the world of modern media, actually the realest thing there is.

Six human needs

Recently I've become a big fan of Ellen Dissanayake and her book What Is Art For?. Dissanayake defines modern art as distinct from the "primitive" arts in that modern art sees aesthetics as an end in itself, whereas humans originally used aesthetics as a means to the end of "making special," or emphasizing the importance of certain important rituals, objects, and occasions.  The reason "we" (really Western elites) invented modern "art for art's sake" is as a method of self-transcendence in a world in which literacy has destroyed the old ("primitive," "superstitious," "magical") ways of transcending ourselves.

Towards the end of the book, Dissanayake speculates about exactly what it is that modern Westerners are missing that makes them need art.  She identifies six "human needs," which are not being well met in our text-centered culture:

• Humans tend to construct, accept, and share with others systems that explain and organize their world as perceived and known, and feel uneasy without such explanation and organization.
• Humans tend to require the psychological (as well as physical) security of predictability and familiarity of knowing and accepting their role and place in life, and feel uneasy without such predictability and knowledge.
• Humans require psychological ratification or certification by others--by being an integral part of a group or family--and feel uneasy without this certification.
• Humans tend to bond or attach to others, and feel incomplete without this attachment.
• Humans recognize and celebrate with others of their kind an extraordinary as opposed to ordinary dimension of experience, and feel unsatisfied without it.
• Humans tend to engage in play and make-believe, and feel deprived if unable to do so.

She thinks that if we reorganized society with an orientation towards meeting these needs, we would all be happier and less alienated.  And, presumably, we would no longer need art, and aesthetics would retreat back into its role as a tool for "making special." 

Even though not needing art would mean we were "healthier," I still hate the idea.  I don't want to accept that something I grew up thinking was one of the big points of life is actually just a symptom of our civilization's sickness.  But then, I'm a classic alienated Western elite, and my feelings about art probably put me in a tiny minority of people worldwide.  Most people are probably better off not feeling a need for art.  And yet, the artification of culture worldwide (see Head-to-toe for my reactionary rant about that) seems to be proceeding at a quick pace.  Before too long everyone may be alienated out of their skulls.

Or maybe the artification trend will reach saturation and reverse itself automatically.  As I mentioned in B.O. is the new perfume, I do think that people are getting very interested in a "New Humanism" which looks to our natural, instinctual, inherent human qualities for guidance as to how we should live and structure society.  So maybe the "six basic needs" will get some attention after all.

Escape from "New York"

This spring we're finally seeing the last gasp of the media's over-the-top fantasy of consumption-fueled, glamour-filled "New York." What began in 1998 with "Sex and the City" the show will come to an end, this May, with Sex and the City: The Movie. Leading up to it have been the pale copycat shows "Cashmere Mafia" and "Lipstick Jungle" and now "The Real Housewives of New York City."

Ever since the media's "New York" debuted, real New Yorkers have bemoaned the disappearance of "real" New York (= affordable, creative, dirty, crime-filled New York in the 1970s). But now that "New York" is about to be over -- and the utter tiredness of the "New York" fantasy in these new shows leaves little doubt about that -- can "real" New York come back?

Well, I don't think so. New York today is very unaffordable, clean, safe, and, according to popular opinion, less and less creative as a result. And I don't think there's any going back. The problem is not New York itself, but the whole idea of the creative city: it just doesn't work anymore. New York is a great place to showcase creativity, because all the infrastructure, both physical and social, is concentrated here to support it. But that's all it is: infrastructure. And that infrastructure has gotten so big, established, and expensive that it's pushing out the creativity it was originally meant to support.

The infrastructure isn't just overgrown; it's obsolete. The art world is already moving onto the internet, and as this trend progresses the physical location of art and other culture will become not just irrelevant, but nonexistent. Marshall McLuhan predicted this outcome in 1967 in The Medium is the Massage:

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former "cities" will be very much like World's Fairs--places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.

Isn't fantasy "New York" just such a "Williamsburg"?  The only difference is that it, like the rest of culture increasingly, exists not in physical reality but in the virtual reality of media.

I predict that the creative work of the future, which will be aided more and more by technology and the internet, will be done by people scattered across the remote, affordable, natural, and beautiful rural areas of the country and world, as rural gentrification becomes the next "creative class" trend.  (Friends of mine are doing this right now in upstate New York.)  Major international cities like New York will become more and more expensive, sterile, and artificial, and the work done in them will become more and more abstract and business-oriented.  Perhaps a time will eventually come when the rural creative workers storm the rich cities, demanding their share of the glitz and glamour.  Or maybe the opposite will happen, and the new exciting passion will be not to make it in New York, but to make it out.

Graffiti

One last reader question:

Do you see graffiti subjects or colors trending a certain way?

I am far from being an expert on graffiti, so I have no idea what the current trends are. However, the trend in street art that interests me the most is the work of the Splasher. The group behind "the Splasher" is very opposed to the growing alliance between and merging of art and commerce which I'm predicting will be the huge trend of the 21st century. "The Splasher" is one of the early examples of resistance to that trend.

Interestingly, I believe that the group behind the splashings may have had its own anti-co-optation art co-opted by Sephora, whose current promotion features a woman's face "splashed" with different colors of makeup. Granted, this is clearly supposed to be a Pollock reference -- but it's curious that a "splattered" image was chosen to advertise all the other "art"-themed makeup looks, which don't even include a Pollock-inspired look. It's possible that the Splasher was on the advertisers' minds and that the "splashed" aesthetic will be seeping into popular culture.  MAC Cosmetics is using the street art aesthetic in one of its new lines, too, by partnering with graffiti artist Fafi.  These art-focused makeup lines are evidence that cosmetics companies are finally beginning to resolve the mismatch between clothing and makeup (which I mentioned in this post) by catching up with apparel companies on the "creativity" trend.

Getting back to the anti-corporate-art movement: Just as international resistance to American dominance is taking a terrorist form, the Splasher's resistance to capitalism took the form of "art terrorism." But terrorism is no use against the market. Advertisers mastered and improved upon "guerrilla" publicity long ago, rhetorically bankrupting such tactics for their inventors. The organizers of the "splashings," by engaging in the same forum as the street artists, "lowered" themselves to the same level as the perceived sell-outs, and hurt their own cause more than they helped it.

How will counter-culture cope with the almost instantaneous co-optation of the "creative underclass" and its "terrorist" tactics by consumerism? Again, culture will follow the model of war: just as, under a Democratic administration, the U.S. will withdraw from Iraq and allow the Iraqis to "fight it out," capitalism, too, will cool its heels while the artists tear each other apart. Corporations will extract as much profit as possible from the fight, then pick up one day and leave, abandoning the creatives to fend for themselves in their ravaged community. Afterwards there will be a long period of "rebuilding," during which anger towards the exploiters will grow -- but it still won't find a powerful outlet in "terrorist" actions for years to come, because such tactics will be so discredited. Instead a "shadow" creative movement will grow, safe in isolation from commerce. One day, it, too, will be co-opted. That seems to be how things work.

The coming collapse of the American art market

I've been wondering what will happen when the American art market collapses. I think it's going to happen soon -- maybe this summer.


The economic super-boom America has been in since the end of WWII paralleled the super-boom in American art. It was no coincidence that America's political and economic supremacy made American artists supreme. But that is about to change. Now that our boom has gone bust, the art boom will meet the same fate.


It's not that there will be no more money for art. Just like in other recessions, the American super-rich will get to keep much of their wealth and will still be able to spend it on expensive art. They just won't want to. What made American art so attractive to new money was what it symbolized: that exciting American supremacy. The rich didn't just want the status of owning art; they wanted the psychological justification for their wealth and power that that art seemed to provide. But once American supremacy diminishes, American art won't look so appetizing anymore. As a result, American artists are going to see a lot less demand for their work and much lower prices.


The art itself will change, too. In contrast to the egotistic exuberance of early-boom artists like Pollock, post-boom Americans artists will shed their bravado and mystique. No one will be interested in that anymore. And in a way, that will be a big relief. All the postmodern ennui, the fragmentation, reflexivity, and ambiguity, will finally come to an end. Postmodernism will be revealed for what it really was: not a discrete period constituting a reaction to Modernism, but merely Modernism's self-digestion and death. In other words, there is no such thing as Postmodernism. The period properly called "postmodern" has only recently arrived. Postmodernism was just the final period of Modernism: Late Modernism.


The new art won't be "post"-anything. It will be new. And it will build on the foundations of our new, globalized reality. It will be hugely influenced by the 2.0 paradigm. It will see the reclassification of the artist from lone visionary to collaborative craftsman. Luckily for America, it will begin right here, during our decline. Unluckily for America, it will then spread and find its greatest expression abroad, during the rise of other countries.


Update 2/8/08: Uneasiness at London auctions
Update 4/17/08: Is Street Turmoil Coloring Art Market? [WSJ preview, subscription required for full article]

Post-postmodernism

I love the word "post-postmodern," first of all because it is so silly, but also because I'm so excited about finding out what "post-postmodernism" will be, as well as what its real name will be (because by its very nature, "post-postmodernism" is emphatically the wrong name for it).

I think post-postmodernism will be defined by the blurring of the line between reality and construct. In the post-postmodern world, life, art, and commerce will be one. This development will be dehumanizing according to our old definitions, but rehumanizing in our new ones, which will resituate money, advertising, capitalism, and the market, moving them from the status of parasites feeding off of humanity's blood to something more like the blood itself. I know, it sounds very bleak. But I think it's the real answer, because capitalism is here and it's not going anywhere, and we've waited far too long to devise some real, humane way to deal with its realities.

I'm not quite up to figuring all that out, but what I am up to are some ideas about how art and culture will respond. I think the new style, like the new geopolitics, will attempt a reconciliation between the realism we can't ignore and the humanism we strive for. The new "answer" in the arts will be neither a desperate search for meaning nor a flat rejection of it, but an acceptance that meaning is both real and unreal: intrinsic to humanity, yet "only human." Under the new pragmatic humanism, we will no longer be devastated by the recognition of our own perspective's arbitrariness--rather, we will accept it, and this acceptance ("ironically," although irony really will be dead this time) will enable us to lift up and celebrate art even more than we did in the twentieth century. Art and meaning will no longer be "only" constructs, but plain-old constructs--just like every single other thing we experience in our extremely subjective human way.

Art will moreover be recognized as essential therapy for humanity. I think anthropologists and psychologists will identify art's emergence along with civilization as an adaptation humans evolved in order to deal with the extremely traumatizing experience of living in a society. We will then turn this new information about art to our advantage, finding ways to use the arts to ease our transition into the modern world.

This new art will be totally unlike what we've seen before. It will be everywhere, and everyone will be a part of it. It will be awesome.

Head-to-toe

You hear it all the time: “I would never wear a whole outfit by one designer. I like to combine designer clothes with cheap stuff from H&M and vintage store finds to create my own unique look.”

“Unique.” Ha! That same unique look is worn by every single celebrity, rich person, hipster, and “fashionista” in the world. Sure, one person may combine that thrift-store jacket with a cocktail dress while another pairs it with an ironic T-shirt, but both people are wearing essentially the same look: that “I created my own unique style by wearing a bunch of stuff that doesn’t go together” look.

I’ll admit that, within the context of this now-ubiquitous “look,” creating a successful outfit requires some creativity. Honestly, it is quite a challenge, and someone devoted to getting it right can spend a great deal of time doing all the shopping and outfit-planning it requires. But to what end? A person who dresses like this may be wearing a unique outfit, but they are not sending a unique message. Instead they are sending the same message as everyone else on the planet: “I want to look creative, I hope I look cool, God these booties are uncomfortable, did I overdo it with the beret? Are people looking at me?” In other words, no message at all, except for a vague, self-centered longing for an identity. I think it’s only a matter of time, now, until people realize how shallow, boring, and essentially hypocritical this message is, and start looking for a new one.

I’m not asking for everyone to become genuinely unique and creative with their clothes. My, what a trial that would be! No, in fact, I’d prefer it if people dressed a little more alike, if that’s what it takes to get a new style going. After all, it’s nothing out of the ordinary for the majority of people to send the same message with their clothes; that’s what fashion is. In fashion, everyone sends the same message with their clothes at the same time because everyone in the society is going through the same things: the same economy, the same world events, the same environment, the same popular culture. Think back to some fashions that meant something (they’re easy to remember since we’ve now been recycling them in our creative outfits for the past ten years): flappers (“We’re liberated, we have legs, hooray!”); the New Look (“Yes! The war is over! we feel like looking HOT”); Courreges and space-age fashion (“We’re exited about the future, we’re going to fly to the Moon, we have even more legs, hooray!”). What fun those all were. These days, however, with our “unique” outfits, we’re trying to deny the fact that we’re all experiencing the same things. Instead we’re focusing on all the different experiences that are available to us now as a result of globalization and the internet, and that proliferation of possibilities is showing up in our wacky mish-mashed wardrobes.

But everyone is scared, too. And I think that fear is what’s causing us to place so much emphasis on creating a unique (but ultimately uncreative and “blocked”) style of dress. In this new world, with all its problems and possibilities, we’re afraid of losing our identities, of being submerged in mass culture. We’re insecure, so we’re exhibiting self-conscious, self-centered behavior. This is manifesting itself not in a new fashion, but in a new use of fashion.

Until recently, fashion wasn’t a very important part of most people’s lives. It was something that decorated, commented upon, and reflected life, but it wasn’t the focus of life. But since the millennium, fashion, and all the arts, have grown out of their proper contexts. Instead of being treated mainly as a decoration for life, the arts have come to substitute for it. We would rather look at art than what’s really going on in the world. Nowadays everyone wants to work in, or at least feel like they’re an expert in, film, fashion, music, writing, or art. Witness TV shows like The Hills and Project Runway: we’re all fascinated by people who are “making it” in these creative fields, and we think that in order to be truly unique and authentic, we have to be involved in creative pursuits ourselves, too. Witness the insane art market: everyone who can afford it is gobbling up art at high prices because they hope that its creativity and uniqueness will rub off on them.

But all this is an illusion. We can’t, as a culture, come up with a new statement in fashion because we’re overly focused on the fashion itself. Sooner or later, the feedback loop will have to break down, as a cannibalizing culture finally consumes itself. At that point, designers and other artists can turn back to looking at life, instead of at art, and a genuinely new style will grow out of that—one that reflects our times, our collective mood, and our culture’s aspirations. People—lots of people—will adopt the new style, and go from trying to be creative with their clothes to being genuinely creative with their lives—from insisting on the important uniqueness of their individuality to collaborating more in groups. Looking forward to that is very exciting.

I have a few ideas about what might happen, and I’ll probably post some of them later. But for now, I just want to predict (and pray) that before too long, we’ll start being able to say, “I’m wearing head-to-toe [blank],” and be proud of it.