Koons as ‘the last of the methane in the cow of post-modernism’.
But then a miracle occurred, and Irony turned into the Pursuit of Authenticity. This was partly a cyclical reaction to the trend, but also because a new generation of Ironists had realized that the only way of becoming Irony-proof themselves was to proclaim yourself one hundred per cent Authentic: a no-nonsense, bit-of-a-laugh, see-you-down-the-pub kind of person. Enter the massed armies of Mockney, the Lads, Ladettes and Babes – the football’s coming home, none-of-that-low-fat-malarkey, ‘trainspotting’, fever-pitching, text-messaging, wap-phoning, Girlie Show and two smoking barrels. Enter, Attitude! A breath of fresh air, perhaps, or the fashionable face of anti-intellectualism.
Robert Hughes, needless to say, would now become Newly Marginalized and wheeled out as a Reactionary for his trouble – partly because of his book, The Culture of Complaint – which was held up as a proto-typical, disgusted-of-Manhattan, ‘everything’s dumbing down’, anti-political-correctness kind of book (the same thing would happen to Harold Bloom, with his ‘School of Resentment’ comments about the dangers of politicized – isms to literary criticism, in his massive book, The Western Canon), but also because the top froth of the culture – television, advertising, various chunks of the visual arts, pop and literary worlds – had been hanging on to irony for dear life, even as they were beginning to feel the pull of New Authenticity.
Robert and Harold, therefore, were shut up faster than a pair of dotty old men who had wandered into a rave – they just didn’t get it, did they, and in the neo-Swinging Nineties, if you weren’t hip to the Attitude!, you were … almost definitely … hopelessly … middle-class and toxic.
And this was strange: in a broad-band of culture which was being maintained, administrated, mediated and consumed almost entirely by the middle classes, for an actual cultural practitioner to be regarded in any way as ‘middle-class’ was pretty much the end of the line. It usually implied that you were anti-modern, and, worse, anti-multicultural. Cultural-type people, therefore, were falling over one another to become bourgeois-proof. Regional culture (for example), and dialect in particular, was seized upon to provide the new morality comedies of Authenticity – from Trainspotting to The Full Monty; but at the same time there had seldom been such a pan-media boom in essentially bourgeois lifestyle subjects, from funky cooking to interior design and urban gardening.
‘So why,’ – as Quentin Crisp once remarked – ‘was there such a racket?’
‘The ‘dumbing down’ ticket was a waste of time: a debased and pointless phrase which, along with the equally pointless ‘politically correct’ and ‘Middle England’, simply denoted some vague idea of an armed confrontation between, on the one hand, tweedy intellectuals from the Home Counties with maths-teacher haircuts and a passion for opera, and on the other wantonly extravagant, taxpayer-paid-for, brand-new Faculties of Hip-Hop Studies. It was simply the old High and Low culture debate, but now with added Bitterness.
Rather, the 1990s, perhaps, were acting out their version of the cultural identity crisis that occurred towards the end of most eras, and which the critics of the time can never quite agree upon. And as a fin-de-millennium, as well as fin-de-siècle, the Nineties got a triple whammy of crisis.
With regard to the trend for such crises, writing in 1939 about the 1930s, for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge had stated: ‘The present is always chaos, its prophets always charlatans, its values always false. When it has become the past, and may be looked back on, only then is it possible to detect order underlying the chaos, truth underlying the charlatanry, inexorable justice underlying the false values.’
And here was Blake Morrison, in 1999, beginning a polemical essay for the Independent on Sunday newspaper – headlined: ‘All Plugs and No Shocks: PR Driven, ‘accessible’, bland, ‘self-congratulatory’. That’s today’s art scene’ – with a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘“We can assert with some confidence,” Eliot wrote in 1948, “that our own period is one of decline [and] that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago … I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even have to anticipate a period [of] no culture.”’ Morrison adds: ‘It’s not that we’ve got no culture, but something almost as bad is infecting the patient: Blandness, capital B. Not just the quiet, inoffensive kind. No, something more shrill and happy-clappy. A relentlessly cheerful, end-of-millennium, let’s-make-everyone-feel-comfortable blanket of good taste.’
Such doubt and pessimism about the state of culture, therefore, why It’s All Over or has never been worse, would appear to be a traditional sub-strand of culture itself – a homoeopathic dose of fatalism, to keep the arteries of progress clean. It had occurred in Pope’s ‘Dunciad’, back in 1728, and Theophile de Gautier’s Preface to his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, at the start of the nineteenth century, through nearly every cultural configuration by way of Wilde, Pound, Auden, Shaw and Orwell, to the disillusionment with the idealism of the 1960s shown by Sixties people like Christopher Booker (The Neophiliacs) and even Jonathan Green (All Dressed Up). And so when the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it is announced, one can only really think, ‘Well, no change there, then.’
But as the shutters came down (the moss-green submarine light in the grey penthouse apartment, the pedal-dampened difficult chords, the snapped violin string) and the culture-vulturing city slickers experienced the gathering loss of sympathy between a particular generation and the times they are living in (pondering Muggeridge and Morrison perhaps), there was suddenly the nagging doubt, ‘What if they’re right?’ … That what was now required, maybe, was the exchange (to judge from the shorter history of disillusionment) of a secular for a spiritual path.
For the 1990s seemed to be a decade of dichotomous thinking, which pointed out more sharply than usual the limits of generational sympathy. Within the culture, there were few gradations of points of view – little anxiety of oscillation between Either and Or. Beyond the increasingly important world of visual art – because visual art, in the 1990s, would become a multi-purpose emblem of modernity and regeneration, rather like London’s Docklands had been in the Eighties – the rest of us would simply become aware of subtle, or not so subtle, massaging shifts in the presentation of things … You just got the feeling that you were usually being sold something, and that, as cultural commodification appeared to be approaching critical mass, most of it simply wasn’t worth the price. ‘So much of everything!’, as Peter York has refined the moment into a four-word statement.
Britain, TV and Art
It was Mike Myers, the American star and creator of the spoof nerd cable TV show, Wayne’s World, who really addressed the recent British obsession with searching for expressions of its national identity in the ironic remodelling of its popular culture. For it was Myers, in an unexpected piece of comic shape-shifting, who discarded the definitively American character of Wayne – all gleaming white teeth and cap-sleeve t-shirt – for the amplified Britishness of Austin Powers: psychedelic secret agent and International Man of Mystery.
The cinema release of Austin Powers coincided with the attempt to revive ‘Swinging London’, as an emblem of Britishness for the late 1990s, heralding the official rise of Cool Britannia. So when the fashionable alliance of New British restaurants, BritCulture and a myriad PR companies was suggesting that a return to the colourful optimism of the mid-1960s was just around the corner, Austin Powers marched round the other corner on our cinema screens, leading a parade of sequence-dancing Beefeaters and hand-springing policemen to a waiting E-type Jaguar painted in the colours of the Union Jack. ‘Hello Mrs Kensington …’ he drooled to the leather-clad agent sitting at the wheel, and the mirror held up to Britain’s latest image of itself as neo-Swinging retro-kitsch was showing a perfect reflection – New Irony and all.
As Britain is described
