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Art after the Hipster

Identity Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. Wes Hill

    1. School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia

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  • Examines the hipster in terms of fundamental debates about aesthetics and ethics in contemporary art and visual culture

  • Investigates the unique paradoxes of the term “hipster”, which is at once an aesthetic stereotype and an ideological mode of deflection

  • Historicises the hipster in order to grapple with issues of cultural appropriation, identity politics, aesthetic discernment and critical practice, drawing from the legacies of the flâneur, the avant-garde, and the beatnik to illuminate the cultural changes effected by global capitalism and digital technologies

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
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  2. Introduction: Caring Too Much and Not Enough

    • Wes Hill
    Pages 1-8

  3. The Twenty-First-Century Hipster

    • Wes Hill
    Pages 9-46

  4. The Postmodern Hipster

    • Wes Hill
    Pages 47-89

  5. The Hipster as an Entrepreneur of the Self

    • Wes Hill
    Pages 91-128

  6. Conclusion

    • Wes Hill
    Pages 129-133

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 135-150
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Keywords

About this book

This book examines the complexities of the hipster through the lens of art history and cultural theory, from Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur to the contemporary “creative” borne from creative industries policies. It claims that the recent ubiquity of hipster culture has led many artists to confront their own significance, responding to the mass artification of contemporary life by de-emphasising the formal and textual deconstructions so central to the legacies of modern and postmodern art. In the era of creative digital technologies, long held characteristics of art such as individual expression, innovation, and alternative lifestyle are now features of a flooded and fast-paced global marketplace. Against the idea that artists, like hipsters, are the “foot soldiers of capitalism”, the institutionalized networks that make up the contemporary art world are working to portray a view of art that is less a discerning exercise in innovative form-making than a social platform—a forum for populist aesthetic pleasures or socio-political causes. It is in this sense that the concept of the hipster is caught up in age-old debates about the relation between ethics and aesthetics, examined here in terms of the dynamics of global contemporary art.

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia

    Wes Hill

About the author

Wes Hill lectures in Art History and Visual Culture at Southern Cross University, Australia. Previous publications include Emily Floyd: The Dawn (2014) and How Folklore Shaped Modern Art (2016).

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