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AFTER a while, I get tired of all the jive around certain terms. “Disruption” is one; “empowerment,” another. (“Innovate” seems to be headed for corporate sponsorship.) 
The latest infuriating one is the way the word “subversive” has been turned into a marketing strategy and a straight-faced description of Lady Gaga and Jeff Koons. For my latest Salon story, I dig into how we got here and what the consequences are.
Here’s how it kicks off:
The turning point may’ve come when the P.R. pitch about the “subversive cross stitch” came my way. When you’re a journalist long enough, all kinds of ridiculous stuff comes across your desk, like the note I got last year about the family that had chosen to move to Los Angeles “as a brand.” (Hmmmn.) But this pitch about “the innovator of edgy needlepoint” made me wonder what subversive even meant these days. At a time when the term is applied to corporate pop stars like Lady Gaga and smug-plutocrat artists like Jeff Koons, subversive has come to mean close to nothing. It’s become the Marilyn Manson of critical terminology — somewhere between shock and yawn.
I get into Marcel Duchamp, Charlie Hebdo, and other subjects in the course of this rant.
Enjoyed your article. Much needed words about academic cant. I wouldn’t just single out Lady Gaga. By its inherent nature, mass media pop protest is phony. It is distinguished by its ready-packaged, benign form of social criticism that raises protest only within the strictures the mass market will accept. This characteristic, however, must be carefully disguised or the impression of hipness is weakened. Big business is the dirty secret that must be kept in the background
God forbid that someone like the Dixie Chicks have a moment of weakness and really tell the truth. Poof and their gone! Americans have thus become rebels without a cause, people so empty, sated, and brain-washed by the mass media’s hegemonistic, de facto Staatskultur that they have trouble creating and recognizing art with genuine meaning. Cue the grand entrance of Jeff Koons.
The result is what Tom Frank calls the hip-goiese — intelligent, educated suburbanites acculturated by the mass media who elevate the music industry’s artifices and faux rebellion to high culture. The principle authors of this philosophy portray themselves as postmodernists dissolving elitism when in reality they are an intellectual elite working in elite educational institutions. Through inadequately differentiated concepts of aesthetic leveling, they legitimize the interests of a music industry that appropriates and debases folk, popular, and protest music for immense financial gain. By legitimizing this oligarchic industry of appropriation and hegemony, much of postmodern philosophy fell directly into the hands of America’s cultural plutocracy.
Even much hip-hop music suffers from this problem of social protest whose authenticity is weakened and de-centered by being packaged for the mass market. Music genuinely centered in local, black communities would not, for example, so readily celebrate such things misogyny and gang violence. We see once again that black culture faces a constant specter of debasement and destruction through appropriation and mass marketing.
I can also speak from personal experience. I am a composer who has lived in Germany for 35 years, but for the last 20 I have not been able to participate in its cultural life. My widely known protests against sexism in orchestras such as the Berlin, Munich, and Vienna Philharmonics, and the feminist concepts I put into my music theater works (my artistic focus) led to deep ostracism within the German-speaking classical music community. It is virtually impossible to raise *true* protest in music without being silenced. What are some examples of people who succeeded.
I agree with your point. How can you be subversive if there is nothing left to subvert? How can you be iconoclastic if the icons have all been clast?
Well said.
There is more than ever to subvert, but under a totalizing economic and political system subversive voices are not heard.
I should have expanded on my short comment to indicate that I was referring to American culture. Mr. Timberg gives examples of real subversives, but they are in other countries. For Americans, I feel we have arrived at a sort of cultural endpoint. The quasi-subversives from a couple of decades ago were only a couple of steps ahead of where the culture was already going. That’s why the term could be co-opted by those playing catch up. And so Mr. Timberg’s analysis rings so true.
But the supreme court told us even way back in 1992 (Casey vs. Planned Parenthood) that “…At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.” This stamp of approval from the highest court in the land joined the rest of the cultural flow to our present state of words meaning anything, therefore meaning nothing.
In our country, if you want the eye of Sauron to dart in your direction like when Frodo exposed the Ring, then you have to be “versive”, you have to say that a word has a specific meaning. You could, for example, say that you agreed with President Obama’s definition of marriage during his first term; then you will see the same type of results experienced by Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei.
I am working on a painting called “Scanning for Clowns Without Cell Phones” where I will make a cultural statement about how there will always be a group of people in a given society that is seen as truly subversive, not the fake ones that Mr. Timberg pointed out. You can type in Scanning for Clowns into Google images and see the digital version I made as a template for the original painting in progress.
Lovely, insightful article. Jeff Koons is indeed the Thomas Kincaid of the monied set. (Which is pretty much everyone who can afford to live in Taylor Swift’s New York.) And Lady Gaga is the recycled detritus of Madonna, Cher, and the rest of the faux liberated female em-pop-erment stars who preceded her. There is clearly a widespread hunger to escape from the strictures of a social order that demands great conformity even when rebelling. But real rebellion is risky. Ask Joe Hill.
Thank you for this article. (And the comments that followed have also been a real breath of fresh air.) In American culture, there’s certainly plenty that needs subverting, but (as William Osborne pointed out) I’m wondering if the corporate nature of how art and music are consumed and disseminated nowadays are what make it harder for those voices of dissent to break through. There just seems to be so much more noise in the (digital) background to drown out the young, angry artists we need. Where are the new folk singers? Where are the punks? The Riot Grrls? Are they now buried so far underground they’re starving in silence?