Culture and the "New Aesthetic"

"Lawrence Levine has argued that culture is less "a fixed condition" than "a process: the product of interaction between past and present." In Levine's view, therefore, cultural persistence depends less on the ability to defend the status quo than the capacity to "react creatively and responsively to the realities of a new situation.""

-James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, preface

Isn't that what the new aesthetic is? Artist acknowledge that the status quo has a legacy but that we aren't bound to it. They react creatively to this new situation of digital connectedness.

By the way, we're going to have to come up with a name that won't sound so silly in fifty years, or a couple of aesthetics from now.