The other day during a momentary break in the rhythms of the day/hour/moment of the project, in one of those space-filling conversations at the table between me and two other guys (both of them about 10 years my senior, we'll call them Stretch and Stripey), Stretch makes an offhand comment-ey question asking "can you explain how your generation got so cynical about everything?" Now, I don't recall any particular cynical talk that preceded it, but Stripey chimed in with some agreeable mutterings, so apparently the opinion is not an isolated one.
I felt I had to respond, especially since I take great pains in my personal life to Give A Shit about certain things. Frankly, I fear for the minds of the trendoid hipsters with their wallet chains and skinny jeans and adoration of 80's fashion that have tried to make Irony the meta-fad. Like that marginal 20% of undergraduate art students who have no talent, or eye, or skill, or intent and try to use kitsch as some sort of statement... In both cases (irony and kitsch), what it shows is simply laziness, and even worse, dishonesty about that laziness. Trying to disguise that laziness in some sort of mumbo-jumbo about Lo-Fi this or "weaving a narrative of unspoken voices from the debris cast off from a throw-away society" that.
... blah, blah, blah.
But back to Irony. The thing is, I've been thinking about it lately... about how criticism serves only organization, and never creation. That derivative work requires a steady stream of original work. That while there are very few Truly New Ideas, attempting to find that daylight between centuries of Prior Art can, while bouncing against them, actually create its own daylight. Good ideas are easy - doing them is where it's at. Web 2.0, 3.0... 17.x might be great strides for blogging, twittering, or whatever-comes-next, but advancing biology requires petri dishes. Google Earth is a wonderful toy/tool, but the construction of bridges will always require someone to have taken a core sample or place survey stakes. And art will not just make itself.
I've started to see others similarly rejecting Irony. Like bacon, Irony has jumped the shark. Hipster/Mod/Fad Irony, that is. (there will always be irony just like there will always be tragedy, comedy, and satire.)
... but as I'm starting to explain that I sincerely think that Irony has jumped the shark and that Sincerity Is The New Black, they interrupt me with their laughter - about how crafty I am, responding to observations of my generation's cynicism with a cynical description of sincerity painted in an ironic way. ("AHA! I know, that you now, that I know, that you know, that...")
But see... I was being sincere. About sincerity. Circular, but sincere nevertheless.
So whither and whence the origin of yonder cynicism and irony? Maybe it is so ingrained that I can't even see it as it subconsciously leaks out. Or maybe it what I've learned to do because the previous generation expected it, so I learned to deliver it. Maybe it's all they could hear when I opened my mouth because that's what their ears are trained to hear. Or maybe the source of it, the handing down through the years, is what has brought it so strongly to its current height of fashion.
