Staffer’s note

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an editorial by Susan Cain entitled “The Rise of the New Groupthink.” It might’ve been in the Sunday Review, because those are the days when I fish through pages of arts events and travel destinations and snarky commentary on contemporary literature until I’d like to say that I experience all of this source material in some way. But I don’t, really, because my vicarious experience is limited to a physical and intellectual processing of the text rather than walking through Damien Hirst’s exhibit at the Gagosian or taking up the latest in the contemporary-male-fiction-canon a friend recently referred to as “d**k lit.”

Anyway, the article contends, critically, that “collaboration is in.” The “New Groupthink,” Cain writes, “holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.” Idea-production in school, work and culture is now exclusively collaborative. Gone, Cain says, is the notion of the solitary artist creating art for art’s sake; she quotes Picasso (“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible”) to further dichotomize the argument. On one side of the spectrum are the Great Artists in concentrated pursuit of form and beauty. On the other are IKEA-clad open-plan workspaces and a universalization of the extrovert.

All of which got me thinking: can we apply Cain’s diametrical thesis to not only the production but the experience of art as well? A week ago, I saw The Artist, and was pleasantly surprised that the theater was packed—with, I’ll note, mostly those upwards of age 60 (who are clearly my people, since we also share a love of PBS and practical footwear). I was so taken with the movie largely because of the communal experience. We beamed together at Jean Dujardin’s uncanny resemblance to Gene Kelly and strained our eyes to read the title cards, engrossed in the Hollywood-Golden-Age throwback. I realized the film’s subject matter corresponds to the movie-going experience. Like Dujardin’s fictional character, who hones his art for the commercial public but processes his experience as a singular figure, we as viewers are able to recognize ourselves and our interests within and apart from the community the film both acknowledges and creates. Other experiences I’ve had lately follow the same principle: while during break I slugged around (by myself, in my pajamas) for two days straight slurping up both seasons of Downton Abbey, I was desperate for the red light to flash on my phone, reminding me that I’m part of a real community. Reciprocally, I wanted to gush about how much I loved the show, but didn’t want to force something I’ve resigned myself to admit not much of ‘our’ generation cares about onto anyone I care about. If this trend, which continued last week as I read Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Inoperative Community” and texted friends bemoaning the essay’s difficulty, is anything worth noting, it’s both a mediation and embodiment of Cain’s spectrum. The phrase “I ran from it but was still in it” comes to mind: When we (or I) say we’re so #overit—memes, the hook-up culture, commodified cuteness a la Zooey Deschanel—we’re still in it, just with a more nuanced understanding of what we as individuals and as a group think is culturally (and personally) valuable. As Cain writes, we “have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.” In 2012, I’m for inhabiting contradictions. It seems the closest way to pin us down—without actually doing so.