The Twenty-First-Century Hipster

Hill, Wes

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-68578-6_2

Wes Hill²

453 Accesses

Abstract

In this section, hipsterism is examined in relation to concepts such as “normcore” and “post-critical,” as well as the theories of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière, portraying a contemporary image of the hipster as dominated by an identity politics that paradoxically depoliticizes its subjects.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

eBook: USD 16.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 59.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 59.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Kurutz, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/caught-in-the-hipster-trap.html?_r=0; October 1, 2014.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Mark Greif, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (n +1 Foundation, 2010), vii.
4.
Michele Persad, “The 13 Most Hipster Items of Clothing,” Huffington Post, July 16, 2014 http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/hipster-clothing_n_5589392.html?section=australia; Feb. 2, 2016.
5.
Dayna Tortorici, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (n +1 Foundation, 2010), 124–5.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Patrice Evans, What was the Hipster: A Sociological Investigation ((n +1) Foundation, 2010), 106–107.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Mark Greif, “The Hipster in the Mirror,” New York Times (November 12, 2010). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Greif-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 21 Sept. 2014).
10.
Sophy Bot, The Hipster Effect (New York: Sophy Bot, 2012).
11.
Joe Bish, “What will Replace the Hipster?” Vice (Dec. 18, 2015) http://www.vice.com/read/hw-what-will-replace-the-hipster-245 (accessed Dec. 20, 2015).
12.
Dan Ozzie, “Please, God, Let 2014 Be the Year We Retire the Word ‘Hipster’,” Noisey January 3, 2014 http://noisey.vice.com/blog/please-god-let-2014-be-the-year-we-retire-the-word-hipster (accessed Dec. 5, 2016).
13.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Double Visions,” Artforum (January 1992): 88.
14.
Anna Louie Sussman, “Can Only Rich Kids Afford to Work in the Art World?” Artsy (Feb. 14, 2017) https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rich-kids-afford-work-art-world (accessed 14 February 2017).
Stephen Pritchard, “Hipsters and artists are the gentrifying foot soldiers of capitalism”, Guardian (13 September, 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/hipsters-artists-gentrifying-capitalism (accessed 29/10/2016).
15.
Emily Nussbaum, “It’s Different for ‘Girls,’” New York Magazine 25 Mar. 2012. http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/girls-lena-dunham-2012-4/index1.html (accessed 1/5/17).
16.
Ibid.
17.
Hal Foster, “Arty Party,” London Review of Books (December 4, 2003): 22.
18.
Andreas Huyssen, “Introduction: Modernism after Postmodernity,” New German Critique 99, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 1.
19.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Routledge, 1994 [1942]), 82.
20.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 85–87.
21.
Johanna Burton, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’” October 130 (Fall 2009): 24.
22.
Terry Smith, ‘Questionnaire on the Contemporary’, October 130 (Fall 2009): 47.
23.
bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1.1 (1990): 12.
24.
Terry Smith, ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry (Summer 2006): 703.
25.
Ibid., 704.
26.
Smith , “Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” 47.
27.
Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 130.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Ibid., 131.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 153.
33.
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1968]), 17.
34.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 232.
35.
Gregg Bordowitz, “Cultural Appropriation: A Roundtable,” Artforum (Summer, 2017).
36.
A. Farrell. ‘Meet Norma Normcore’. Vogue online, 21 March 2014. Available: http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2014/03/21/normcore-fashion-vogue---definition [accessed 21/04/15].
37.
Baldessare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002), 32.
38.
K-Hole, ‘Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom,’ K-Hole, October, 2013.
39.
Benedict Seymour, “Notes on Normcore,” Mute, May 29, 2014 http://www.metamute.org/editorial/fifth-column/notes-normcore
40.
Rory Rowan, “So Now!:On Normcore,” e-flux Journal no. 58 (2014) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61168/so-now-on-normcore/ [accessed 11/04/15].
41.
Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 475.
42.
Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, No. 2 (2004): 236.
43.
Ibid., 225.
44.
Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” Body & Society Vol. 10 (2004): 205.
45.
Rosi Braidotti, “Borrowed Energy,” Frieze issue 164 (2014), 86.
46.
Bruno Latour, “Coming Out as a Philosopher,” Social Studies of Science 40.4 (2010): 600.
47.
Hal Foster, Bad New Days (London: Verso, 2015), 121.
48.
Nav Haq, “Art After Identity Politics: Nav Haq in conversation with Stephanie Bailey,” Ibraaz.org / 17 December 2014 http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/150 [accessed 21/04/15].
49.
Hito Steyerl, “The Institution of Critique,” Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: Mayfly Books, 2009), 17.
50.
Ibid.
51.
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 8.
52.
Sven Lütticken, “Art as a Second-Degree Medium,” OZG, 15 (2004):112–3.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Slavoj Žižek, “L’etat d’hipster,” Rhinocerotique, trans. Henry Brulard (September, 2009): 3.
57.
Ibid., 6.
58.
Ibid., 7.
59.
Ibid., 9.
60.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: WW Norton and Co., 1962), 61.
61.
Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics, trans. And ed. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 217.
62.
Ibid., 18.
63.
Ibid., 18.
64.
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999 [1995]), 123.
65.
Rancière , Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics, 144.
66.
Rancière, Disagreement, 138.
67.
Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” October, vol. 61 (Summer, 1992): 60.
68.
Ibid.
69.
Ibid., 59.
70.
Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” Reading Rancière , ed. Paul Bowman, Richard Stamp (New York: Continuum, 2011), 13.
71.
Ibid., 13.
72.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006), 41.
73.
Toni Ross, “Material Thinking: the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière and the design art of Andrea Zittel,” Studies in Material Thinking, vol. 1, No. 2 (April 2008). http://www.materialthinking.org (accessed 1/9/12).
74.
Jacques Rancière, “The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two readings of Kant and their political significance,” Radical Philosophy, 126 (2004): 9.
75.
Ibid., 12.
76.
Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics, 44.
77.
Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review 14 (2002): 135.
78.
Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics, 5.
79.
Nikos Papastergiadis, “A Breathing Space for Aesthetics and Politics: An Introduction to Jacques Rancière,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 31(7/8) 5–26 (2014).
80.
Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.
81.
Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2 (2004): 303.
82.
Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.
83.
Rancière , Dissensus, 136.
84.
Rancière , The Politics of Aesthetics, 42.
85.
Rancière , Dissensus, 136.
86.
Rancière , Dissensus, 74.
87.
Jean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge and John Rundell, “Themes and Dialogues in Contemporary French Critical Theory,” Recognition, Work, Politics (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2007), 4.
88.
Ibid., 184.
89.
Michael Rectenwald, “What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics),” The North Star (December 2, 2013) http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11411 (accessed 7/7/2015).
90.
Richard Rorty, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?” Critical Horizons 1:1 (February 2000), 7.
91.
Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country, 27.
92.
Jodi Dean, “Not Us, Me,” Verso Books (November 26, 2016). http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2970-not-us-me (accessed 2/3/2017).
93.
Ibid.
94.
Jean and John Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
95.
Dean, “Not Us, Me.”
96.
Monica Tan, “China Has Hipsters, too,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/11/china-has-hipsters-too/264414/ (accessed 12 Nov. 2015).
97.
Shan Huang, “Independence at Large: Contemporary China’s Alternative Music Scenes and the Cultural Practices of Post-Socialist Urban Youth,” Master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 2014, 1.
98.
Ibid., 42.
99.
Ibid., 47–55.
100.
Tan , “China Has Hipsters, too.”
101.
Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2015 (2016). https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=F2425415-DCA7-80B8-EAD989AF9341D47E (accessed 1 Nov. 2016).
102.
Ibid.
103.
Ibid.
104.
World Bank Group, “Global Monitoring Report 2014/2015: Ending Poverty and Sharing Prosperity,” (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015). http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/gmr/gmr2014/GMR_2014_Full_Report.pdf
105.
Ico Maly and Piia Varis, “The 21st-century hipster: On micro-populations in times of superdiversity,” European Journal of Cultural Studies (2015) 14.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales, Australia
Wes Hill

Authors

Wes Hill
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hill, W. (2017). The Twenty-First-Century Hipster. In: Art after the Hipster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68578-6_2

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68578-6_2
Published: 20 October 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68577-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68578-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics