The myth of an avant-garde serves the same market forces avant-gardism pretends to overthrow. Art may challenge authority … But art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself, and never has, not in 19th-century France or 20th-century Russia or 21st-century China or Iran. Even when it manages to tilt popular thinking, it still ends up within the bounds of existing authority, and there has never been a true “outside” that really stayed outside: public consumption, by definition, adapts to the change, co-opts and normalizes all culture.

That’s Michael Kimmelman in his April 18th New York Times column, “D.I.Y. culture.”

A nice counterpoint in some ways to the Mira Schor quote I posted yesterday.

Kimmelman’s main point, however, is about how culture survives and thrives as a marker of ethnic and national identity in the face of the globalization.

Our work must be not just about marriage equality, it should also be about equal marriages, and about equal rights and security for those who opt out of marriage altogether.

From Melissa Harris-Lacewell‘s post Reflections on Marriage (via Twanna).

Yes.

Read the whole thing. Harris-Lacewell captures most of my fears and concerns about marriage and about getting married.

And in the absence of alternative models of masculinity, many low-income men will compensate for their lack of respect and resources by cultivating a hypermasculine identity that scorns traditional definitions of responsible manhood.

Stephanie Coontz, in “For Women, Redefining Marriage Material: The Good and the Bad” on the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog.

Now, let’s start by saying that Jennifer Hudson is a capable actress. She blew Beyoncé out the water in Dreamgirls and by all accounts she did her thing in The Secret Life of Bees. But like all outfits aren’t for all weather conditions, all parts aren’t for all people. It was an outright shock to learn she had been picked to play Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Good luck to her, hope she does the part justice, but it just seems a little, well, opportunistic. It’s like getting Salma Hayek to play Benazir Bhutto because they are both olive-skinned.

AfriPOP magazine offers up this criticism and gives Hollywood some advice in case it wants to cast black Americans in African roles.

Something that spools from these is that we don’t really have style subcultures anymore. Instead we have a playlist culture, where you’re allowed to mash up everything around you in a sort of pick’n’mix.

Ekow Eshun, Artistic director, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. From The i-Decade, on the More Intelligent Life blog.

I think Eshun nails it. I’ll take it one step further: I think the ’00s is the era of the individual supplanting the institution. Blogging is beginning to replace massive news organizations. We listen to radio less, instead listening to our iPod playlists. We broadcast who we are and what we’re into on Twitter. We can be our own banker of sorts through companies like Kiva and Prosper. We get internet famous by posting a YouTube video. We read the news we want by subscribing to RSS feeds. Content creation and consumption is driven more by what the individual wants and less by what companies try to tell us we want.

This doesn’t mean that institutions are no longer important. We still need some form of governance to settle disputes and ensure fairness and justice. We still need some way of exchanging goods and services. We still need paved roads and street lights and garbage pickup. Someone still has to create and bring to market those products we consume.

But I do think that the relationship between the individual and the institution has shifted in the last decade. We’re less mass and more micro. And institutions are struggling to adapt.

What sayeth you? How do you define the Noughties?

Related: On Style In The ’00s: “Defining The Noughties”

UPDATE: Also related: A Web of Lone Wolves from Foreign Policy magazine. The piece touches on the power of the individual in its look at Internet jihadism and how people are connecting online to wreak havoc ofline.

But the hoodie belonged to the Noughties. I don’t believe it was just about the ASBO generation hiding their faces from CCTV, either. It’s more practical than that. If you spend all your time hanging around on the street in a coldish, wettish country, a hood will keep you warm, and stops the rain spoiling your hairstyle. Plus it creates a safe anonymity for a teenage boy to hide in: if you’re a skinny, pimply 14-year-old who has to deal with a lot of confrontation, putting your hood up means that, from behind at least, someone might take you for something more dangerous than you really are.

From The Economist’s More Intelligent Life blog.

Also mentioned: Apple everything, poor-quality pixellated images, Eindhoven design academy, anti-modernism, Frieze magazine and Bernie Madoff’s smile. Also see, More Intelligent Life‘s The i-Decade.

In one of my moments of Random Thoughtitude, I was thinking about what my ideal country would look like. My first thought was infrastructure. I want a government that adequately funds and maintains a viable, nation-wide mass transit system and mandates bike lanes on every road. I want an educational system that actually teaches kids.

My next thought was: and what if our telecommunications infrastructure was owned and maintained by the government? What if our cable wires, our radio, our phone lines, and — the thing that sparked my original thought — our Internet were seen as massive public works projects on the order of sewers and roads?

Corporations would then compete in other ways. They might, for example, offer special content and charge for access to it. Or they might sell the hardware to connect to this otherwise national infrastructure.

Telecommunications, and the Internet in particular, has become this sort of basic, critical business commodity that is key to economic growth. But the corporations that run them are either too concerned with profits or really don’t have enough capital to upgrade their networks.

And we wouldn’t have this ‘Net Neutrality issue of corporations wanting to charge more or limit the flow of certain forms of data because boo-frickin-hoo, they don’t want to invest in their systems. Corporations are, after all, legally-bound to pursue profit. Their decisions must be made — for the bottom line, not the common good. Our government, on the other hand, would really have to treat all data the same and invest in our systems because we were all paying for it with our tax dollars.

Makes perfect sense, right?

Or does it? I thought some more and remembered that China controls its Internet infrastructure. And they have a few issues with censorship. Ditto Iran.

Our own government also has issues with freedom and privacy. Maybe handing them the keys to the Internet car would not be such a good idea after all.

I realized then that this is a pretty big conundrum. I wholeheartedly believe that corporations are evil, heartless, parasites who are incapable of doing The Right Thing unless it will make money. But I also believe the U.S. government is more concerned with maintaining power, control, and protecting their own personal safety and wealth than with building a just, free, and fair society.

So the question becomes: Who do you trust more? Corporations or Government?

And as importantly, what entities do you trust or would you trust? What does your ideal nation look like?