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The Postmodern Hipster

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Art after the Hipster
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Abstract

In this section, hipsterism is examined through the lens of postmodern theory, which provides an historical context for the hipster in terms of subcultural politics, irony, camp, conceptual practice, pastiche and the sociology of taste as class distinction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paul Willis, Common Culture (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), 135.

  2. 2.

    Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press), 8.

  3. 3.

    Francis Davies, “Bud’s Bubble,” The Atlantic vol. 277, No. 1 (1996): 100.

  4. 4.

    Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare,” History Workshop, no. 18 (Autumn, 1984): 81.

  5. 5.

    John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco, 2004), 5.

  6. 6.

    Cab Calloway, “The Hepster’s Dictionary: Language of Jive,” Of Minnie the Moocher & Me, ed. John Shearer (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976 [1939]), 255.

  7. 7.

    Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U. S Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 72.

  8. 8.

    Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 452.

  9. 9.

    Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The meaning of Style (New York: Methuen & Co, 1979), 47.

  10. 10.

    Ibid.

  11. 11.

    Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of a Hipster,” Partisan Review, vol. 15, no. 6 (June 1948), 721.

  12. 12.

    Ibid.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 725.

  14. 14.

    Broyard’s ancestors on both sides were defined as black, but his father, a light-skinned black man married to a light-skinned black woman, during one period passed as white in order to join a union to get work in Brooklyn. Anatole Broyard passed as white for his entire adult life. Henry Louis Gates, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (London: Hachette, 2012), 345.

  15. 15.

    Broyard , “Portrait of a Hipster,” 721.

  16. 16.

    Anatole Broyard , “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” Commentary, 10 (July 1950), 57.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 58.

  18. 18.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956[1943]), 103.

  19. 19.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (Meridian Publishing Company, 1989[1946]), 345.

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    Broyard , “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro,” 59.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 61.

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 63.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 64.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Henry Louis Gates Jr., “White Like Me,” New Yorker, June 17 (1996), 143.

  29. 29.

    Mailer, “The White Negro,” 276.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 285.

  31. 31.

    Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1967), 151.

  32. 32.

    Hebdige , Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 48.

  33. 33.

    Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce (New York: Panther, 1974), 133.

  34. 34.

    Ibid.

  35. 35.

    Ibid.

  36. 36.

    Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997. 31.

  37. 37.

    Guillaume Marche, “Why Infrapolitics Matters,” Revue franc¸aise d’études américaines, no. 131 (2012), 15.

  38. 38.

    Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1965), 122.

  39. 39.

    Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 283.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 282.

  41. 41.

    Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1965), 122.

  42. 42.

    Krauss , The Optical Unconscious, 283.

  43. 43.

    Pierre Bourdieu , Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 6.

  44. 44.

    Pierre Bourdieu , Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977), 95.

  45. 45.

    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 (accessed 1/4/15).

  46. 46.

    Mark Greif, “The Art of Criticism: Mark Greif on Why He’s “Against Everything”,” To the Best of Our Knowledge, January 19, 2017. https://www.ttbook.org/book/art-criticism-mark-greif-why-he’s-“against-everything” (accessed 1/2/2017).

  47. 47.

    Tony Bennett and Elizabeth B. Silva, “Cultural Capital and Inequality: Policy Issues and Contexts,” Cultural Trends, 15 (2006): 91.

  48. 48.

    Jacques Rancière quoted by Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), x.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., xi.

  50. 50.

    Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 2000), 187.

  51. 51.

    Jacques Rancière, “Art is Going Elsewhere and Politics has to Catch it,” Krisis issue 1 (2008): 71.

  52. 52.

    Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York, The Guilford Press, 1991), 114.

  53. 53.

    Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 59.

  54. 54.

    Jean Baudrillard, “Consumer Society,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1990[1987]), 31.

  55. 55.

    Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 278.

  56. 56.

    Jean Baudrillard, “Fatal Strategies,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1990[1987]), 202.

  57. 57.

    Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Deaths,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1990[1987]), 202.

  58. 58.

    Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009), 44.

  59. 59.

    Ibid.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 45–6.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 46.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 45.

  63. 63.

    Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: the Implosion of the Social in the Media,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 1990[1987]), 216.

  64. 64.

    Ibid.

  65. 65.

    Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: verso, 2006), 23.

  66. 66.

    Ibid.

  67. 67.

    Jacques Rancière, “In What Time Do We Live?” Política Común, 4 (2013). https://doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0004.001 (accessed 1/3/2014).

  68. 68.

    Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 216.

  69. 69.

    Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

  70. 70.

    Charles Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (London: Viking, 1972), 312.

  71. 71.

    Ibid.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 319.

  73. 73.

    Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 106.

  74. 74.

    Benjamin , The Arcades Project, 938.

  75. 75.

    Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering”107.

  76. 76.

    Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering” New German Critique, No. 39 (1986), 105.

  77. 77.

    Dayna Tortorici, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (n +1 Foundation, 2010), 124–5.

  78. 78.

    Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and other essays (London: Picador, 2001), 290.

  79. 79.

    Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 211.

  80. 80.

    Sontag , “Notes on Camp,” 292.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 293.

  82. 82.

    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 149.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., 150.

  84. 84.

    Sontag , Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 10.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 11.

  86. 86.

    Ibid., 14.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 12.

  88. 88.

    Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 88.

  89. 89.

    Ibid.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., 128–9.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 159.

  92. 92.

    Marcel Duchamp quoted in Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets (New York. 1951), 311.

  93. 93.

    Elena Filipovic, “A Museum That is Not,” E-flux Journal No. 4, March 2009: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68554/a-museum-that-is-not/ (accessed 1/3/16).

  94. 94.

    Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 30.

  95. 95.

    Richard Hamilton, Collected Words: 1953–1982 (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1983), 78.

  96. 96.

    Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT, 1996), 53.

  97. 97.

    Thierry de Duve, “‘This is Art’: Anatomy of a Sentence,” Artforum (April, 2014): 126.

  98. 98.

    Ibid.

  99. 99.

    De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 53.

  100. 100.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 204.

  101. 101.

    Thierry de Duve, “The Glocal and the Singuniversal Reflections on Art and Culture in the Global World,” Third Text 21.6 (2007):683.

  102. 102.

    Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 56.

  103. 103.

    Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1997), 15.

  104. 104.

    Ibid.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., 18.

  106. 106.

    R. Jay Magill Jnr., Chic Ironic Bitterness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), xi.

  107. 107.

    Ibid.

  108. 108.

    Ibid.

  109. 109.

    R. Jay Magill Jnr., Chic Ironic Bitterness, xi.

  110. 110.

    Ibid., xii.

  111. 111.

    Mark Greif, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (n +1 Foundation, 2010), 11.

  112. 112.

    Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, 21.

  113. 113.

    David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993): 151.

  114. 114.

    David Foster Wallace quoted by Lee Konstantinou, “We had to get beyond irony: How David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and a new generation of believers changed fiction,” Salon March 28, 2016: http://www.salon.com/2016/03/27/we_had_to_get_beyond_irony_how_david_foster_wallace_dave_eggers_and_a_new_generation_of_believers_changed_fiction/ (accessed 1/3/17).

  115. 115.

    R. Jay Magill Jnr., Chic Ironic Bitterness, 40.

  116. 116.

    Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 125.

  117. 117.

    Jameson , Postmodernism, 296.

  118. 118.

    Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Debate,” The Ideologies of Theory Essays, Volume 2 (London, Routledge, 1988): 105.

  119. 119.

    Jameson , Postmodernism, 17.

  120. 120.

    Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. By Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 119.

  121. 121.

    Thomas Lawson, “Forum: Generation in Vitro,” Artforum 23 (September 1984): 99.

  122. 122.

    Hal Foster , The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, xii.

  123. 123.

    Foster , Recodings, 16.

  124. 124.

    Foster , Recodings, 28.

  125. 125.

    Ibid.

  126. 126.

    Foster , Recodings, 16.

  127. 127.

    Hal Foster , The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, xii.

  128. 128.

    Foster , Recodings, 29, 31.

  129. 129.

    Ibid.

  130. 130.

    Foster , Recodings, 164.

  131. 131.

    Sianne Ngai, O ur Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 32.

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Hill, W. (2017). The Postmodern Hipster. In: Art after the Hipster. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68578-6_3

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