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THE DEATH OF COOL (p. 3 of 3)

1 | 2 | 3 | JAN

But let’s sit for a moment in the gallery – in London’s former County Hall, directly across the Thames from Westminster – and observe how these rebels are embraced by the mainstream. Because while the press may hysterically assert that Saatchi has situated himself here in a two fingers up gesture to the powers that be, the fact that his gallery is snugged into the crotch of the London Eye is the more significant detail. The gargantuan Ferris wheel and the enormous gallery – a neat illustration of bombastic civic architecture over the centuries – are in direct competition for the same tourist dollars. They vie for the same popcorn and ice cream money, the same brief attention spans of the same bored international consumers. And so you’ll find, standing in a ring around Hirst’s mechanized, bisected pig, a few art students in their faux 1970s sneakers. But you’ll also find far more middle-class types: British couples in matching blazers, stressed-looking North Americans just popped over from Big Ben and (my favourite) the immaculate linen-clad Dutch families whose fathers will be loudly and confidently explaining the pig to wife and kids.

Neophilia and non-conformity, not to put too fine a point on it, is the early 21st-century mainstream, a fact of abiding interest to University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Heath. He argues (in person and in his upcoming book There Is No Alternative: Style, Rebellion and the Myth of Counterculture) that we (the so-called mainstream) consume rebellion and individualism, just as in the 1950s, we consumed products that made us appear wealthy.

"Cool has merely replaced conspicuous consumption as the status hierarchy of contemporary urban society," he tells me. "The desire for distinction now drives consumerism."

So we see how mainstream cool has, in fact, become. Advertisers no longer pitch the appearance of wealth; instead, they sell us the very same things on the basis of how they’ll contribute to an illusion of individuality and rebellion (iPod, PT Cruiser, anyone?). The shift in marketing focus doesn’t change the fact that these are precisely the same kinds of naff mainstream consumer transactions as before. And this is exactly why sameness spreads relentlessly even among those environments purporting to be "small, unique and ultrafashionable." The trendy ideas jetting in and out of London and around the Western world are doing so in response to the unstoppable engines of consumer markets. And so a cool new product in London (the St. Martins Lane) in due course becomes an indistinguishable, agoramnesia-inducing product in NYC (the Hudson).

None of which is a change in itself. The hard-won cool that Brouwer remembers was also a tradable, competitive product. What has changed – and what ultimately leads me to conclude that atmospheric conditions in the contemporary urban West no longer support the life form known as cool – is the efficiency of these markets. Consider another friend of mine who, as a young man in the early 1980s, returned to Saskatoon from a family vacation in London with Chelsea boots. He walked God-like down Cumberland Avenue, untouchable, impervious to local esthetic weather systems – and for quite some time, too, as an enormous amount of effort would have been required to source and import a competing pair of boots at that time. To state the matter in purely market terms, my friend exploited an arbitrage opportunity, a situation where an object trading cheaply in one location (pointy-toed boots on Kings Road) could not be had for any price somewhere else.

And here we arrive at the death rattle for cool as we’ve known it. Because at precisely the moment we understand cool as an arbitrage opportunity, we crush it out of contemporary existence. Markets abhor arbitrage, ruthlessly competing it away wherever it arises. And this was true even before the Internet allowed Avril Lavigne’s T-shirt to circle the globe thrice before the cock crowed for morning.

So, as Brouwer might ironically have it, "Whither the hipster?" Which is a tricky question when what the world agrees is cool is by definition not and what nobody knows about cannot be proven to exist. A koan, you might say, for contemporary culturists. [ ]

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