Apparently, I am a relic.
A cultural fossil trapped in some generational tar pit, still stupid enough to believe that admiration should be earned. This appears to be my problem.
I was raised in a world where contempt could still be useful. You were allowed to hate bad things. You could call something vulgar, stupid, fraudulent, talentless, ugly, or boring without first assembling a committee to investigate whether the object of your contempt had experienced sufficient personal growth. Some things sucked. That was the review.
Now I seem to have been sentenced to permanent irritation with the age I actually inhabit. Rage at movies. Rage at music. Rage at public life. Oscar-level, table-flipping rage. Also rage at the Oscars.
There was a time when the Academy Awards, however ridiculous the ceremony itself could be, still carried some relationship to serious cinema. A film could be difficult, frightening, morally unpleasant, formally strange. It could expect something from the person watching it.
Now I increasingly watch cultural institutions congratulate themselves and wonder when judgment became a branch of public relations. Perhaps this is what makes me a relic. I still expect prizes to imply distinction. I still expect distinction to have something to do with achievement.
In my world, literature has fangs.
Céline. Malaparte. Borges. Munthe.
Writers who do not merely tell stories. They alter the pressure in the room. You feel the intelligence behind the page — malicious, elegant, feverish, amused. Their style does not decorate the thought. You do not read them because somebody has certified them as important. They become important because the writing itself has force. That distinction matters.
Then Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Bob Dylan is a brilliant songwriter. Precisely. There are Grammys for that.
We do not give Michel Houellebecq a Grammy because his prose has rhythm. We do not give a novelist a Palme d’Or because his descriptions are cinematic. Categories exist because different arts demand different forms of mastery.
Dylan had already conquered his field. The Nobel did not need to certify that he mattered. What the decision did instead was make the prize itself more interesting: provocative, unexpected, wonderfully arguable. And that is exactly what bothers me.
The moment a great award begins choosing partly for the cleverness of the choice, the cultural symbolism surrounding it, the ideological fashion of the hour, or the excitement produced by stretching its own definition, some of its authority leaks out.
The award starts looking back at the audience. Did you see what we did there?
This is what irritates me about cultural prizes now. The Oscar should make me think about cinema. The Nobel in Literature should make me think about literature. The moment I start thinking instead about the cleverness, virtue, daring, politics, or cultural positioning of the people handing out the prize, something has gone wrong.
Prestige survives on a simple faith: that the prize is looking at the work harder than it is looking at us.
Once merit inside the field begins competing with symbolism, ideology, novelty, shock value, or the institution’s desire to demonstrate how enlightened and adventurous it is, the medal changes character. It stops saying, this is extraordinary. It begins saying, look how interesting our decision is.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the gold loses its lustre.
The same infection has spread far beyond prizes.
Respect used to carry weight. At least that is how the world appeared from where I stood.
A doctor entered the room and you assumed he knew something you did not.
A teacher could tell a child that he was behaving like an asshole without first requesting permission from the child’s emotional support committee.
A scientist was imagined as some half-mad creature pursuing an answer through a forest of equations, rather than polishing a personal brand between conference panels.
Of course the old world was full of frauds. Obviously. There were vain doctors, useless teachers, corrupt academics, imbecilic politicians, fashionable charlatans, and artists whose principal contribution to civilization was dying in time for their work to become expensive.
Nostalgia applies excellent lighting. I know this.
That is what makes the irritation worse. Because even after subtracting nostalgia, I cannot shake the suspicion that something genuinely changed: we stopped demanding proof of excellence before handing out its vocabulary.
Everyone is brilliant now. Everyone is a creator. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has a platform. Everyone is somehow “important.”
The word has been inflated until you could use it to buy bread in the Weimar Republic.
And then there is music. Lord, the music!
Every age produced rubbish. Mozart presumably heard things that made him consider violence. Beethoven did not live inside some enchanted European terrarium where every drunk with a fiddle was secretly Schubert.
The difference was that rubbish did not require a theory explaining why its rubbishness was actually revolutionary. Bad music could simply be bad music. What luxury!
Musicianship once implied an almost humiliating degree of craft. You had to know what your instrument was doing while you were doing things to it.
There was knowledge beneath the performance.
Now a suspicious amount of cultural production seems to begin with the photograph. Get the face right. Acquire the haircut of a person who has recently experienced something near a synthesizer. Produce approximately three minutes of noise.
Voilà! Vous êtes un créateur!
And perhaps this is the source of my hatred.
I do not hate modernity because it is modern. Every generation that survives long enough eventually becomes convinced civilization ended shortly after the invention of whatever came after the things it personally liked. That is too easy. I hate the cheapening of categories.
I hate watching words such as artist, genius, expert, activist, intellectual, and icon handed around like promotional tote bags.
I hate the strange contemporary terror of saying that one thing is better than another.
Once everything deserves admiration, admiration means nothing. And once criticism itself is treated as some embarrassing defect of character, culture begins filling with things nobody particularly respects but everybody has agreed to applaud.
Perhaps that really does make me a hater. Fine.
Hatred has its uses.
Disgust has taste buried somewhere inside it. You cannot be offended by mediocrity unless some stubborn little part of you still believes excellence is possible.
That is the humiliating secret behind most serious haters. We are disappointed romantics.
Under all the sneering and profanity, beneath all the theatrical contempt, sits an embarrassingly earnest demand: Could somebody please make something fucking good? I would love to stop complaining. I do.
Give me the book that rearranges my nervous system. Give me the film that leaves me walking home in silence. Give me a musician who makes me briefly consider selling everything I own and apologizing to the piano.
I am prepared to worship.
This century simply keeps handing me influencers.
So yes. I am a hater.
Here, have a glass of anger. I got more.
The image above, The Deer Hunter, an iconic moment in Oscar-winning cinema, represents the mastery that once defined Hollywood craftsmanship, something absent in today’s industry.
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