I'm interested in Seth Abramson's take on an essay in the recent issue of Jacket -- "The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a 'New Sincerity'" by Jason Morris -- partly because Morris attempts to describe a group of artists that has some overlap with those Ana and I brazenly lumped into the "New Childishness" "school" (Joanna Newsom and Tao Lin), and partly because, as it does Seth, the essay strikes me as wrong.
Even if one takes the term "The New Sincerity" at face value, i.e., interprets it as sincere, as Morris does, it seems overapplied or inappropriately applied. Seth notes: "Reading the essay became, in many respects, exactly the sort of experience I'd feared: a disappointing one. As a fan of Wes Anderson's films, I'd be the last to say, as Morris does, that they aim at 'an honest representation of reality.'" And: "if one has to re-define terms in order to crowbar them into an aesthetic, it seems to me as though the notion of 'sincerity' has already been sacrificed from the start." Exactly ... one must essentially redefine "sincerity" as "irony" to call Anderon's films "sincere" with a straight face. But the straight face in the first place is one of my problems with the essay. I mean, to quote from Joe Massey's manifesto thusly:
Don’t plasticize your shit with dildonic irony. Keep it real, ass.
The New Sincerity rejects Top Gun sunglasses and floppy bangs that scream “trying too hard!”
The New Sincerity rejects the inside egg-headed jokes of academic crackers!
FUCK YOU, and your THEORY GOGGLES!
and then follow the quote up with this: "On first reading this it seemed to me to fit a very basic, intuitive definition of messianism: Something’s Coming. Something that will do good, something that will heal, something that will reverse wrongs." That seems to me to fit a very basic, intuitive definition of missing the point.
2 comments:
Here's what the bard, Donald Fagen, said way back in 1993:
"I'm into my post-ironic phase...which of course would include irony as well. And I'm not talking about the New Sincerity, of course, but rather Post-Irony. Or maybe it's the Pseudo-New-Sincerity, or New Pseudo-Sincerity, or maybe it's Pseudo-Post-Irony. I don't even know anymore. It's hard to say. You know what? As soon as David Letterman hit the airwaves, it was really all over for irony."
Go home and write what you want.
That's my avant-sincerity.
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