How to Cancel the Culture Industry
Back at Urbit Assembly in October I spoke on a panel moderated by Sam Frank with Lomez of Passage Press,
, and . (Pro Tip: If you’re at all worried that a panel you’re organizing will be dry or boring, get on it stat.) The panel was called “Cancelling the Culture Industry.” I actually came up with the name. To be honest with you, when I came up with it I didn’t know what it meant. Someone asked me for a suggestion on what the panel should be called and it just came out of my mouth.But I’d like to give an ex post facto explanation of what I could have meant. (As is often the case, my subconscious probably knew all this at the time and was looking for a way to express it.) If what I say below resonates with you at all, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the MRB at the button below. Just scroll down a little bit and select your subscription tier.)
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The culture industry—the amalgamation of universities, big media outlets, and producers of the arts—are looking exposed. Disney, with its business of woke sequels, is losing amounts of money not thought humanly possible. The President of Harvard, supposedly one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in our country, is a plagiarist and a fraud, appointed to her illustrious position merely for mouthing the right platitudes. And whatever you think of Elon Musk’s X—I’m personally neither a superfan nor a hater—the experiment is making clear that sooner or later tech platforms rather than old-fashioned publications will be the media on which journalism and other writing is done.
It seems that we’re approaching the point, deadly for any society, when the population ceases to believe their own myths. What I mean is that even though Harvard is still Harvard (and a very profitable business still), and the New York Times is still the New York Times (also still very profitable), the cultural caché of these institutions is seriously waning.
We need a rejuvenation of cultural institutions, but I don’t believe this means reform. It means starting new institutions from scratch.
This is a slow process, and it means doing a lot of work that is neither fun nor glamorous. I get frustrated with all the daily irritations of running a small business. The book reviewing business has never been the industry for those looking to get rich quick, and it can be hard to pour so much energy into such an industry. Then I hear about someone hearing about the Mars Review from a coworker at a bookstore on the other side of the country, or a friend’s father who found the Review without any prompting from his son and looks forward to reading the print edition every time it comes out.
Then I come back to this dream—of creating a truly self-sufficient, elegant vehicle for art and criticism. And I fall in love with the process all over again.
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Warm holiday wishes,
Noah Kumin
Editor in Chief
Mars Review of Books