The post-lockdown disorientation in the arts

The arts community got the message.

So in 2022-20023, we inhabited a world that had essentially gone psychologically mad, as substance abuse, pharmaceutical addiction and injury, and deeply distorted perceptions of reality, to say nothing of traditional bourgeois understandings of boundaries, had reached their apex.

It was in this period when there emerged an actual and widespread confusion about the meaning of chromosomes as biological determinants of sex. We quickly moved from polite kindness toward gender dysphorics to actual mandates to pretend as if biology does not matter or is entirely malleable with pharmaceutical assistance, just to give one example of many. Suddenly every aspirational professional faced pressure to declare one's pronouns.

It was during this period that the movie Snow White was being put together, along with many symphonic seasons programmed and museum exhibits scheduled. They came to fruition at the exact moment of turning.

It was a sudden awakening from a crazed dream, and we found our world in a state of madness from out-of-control crime, unhinged protest movements, a migrant crisis by political design, and revolutionary art forms all crashing in on our heads at once.

We cannot forget the great Bud Light saga of 2023, in which some one member of the overclass holding a high corporate position briefly imagined that it would be smart marketing to sell a working-class beer through the personage of a fake trans influencer with a great number of Instagram gawkers. This led to the toppling of the king of beers to become a mere pawn among many, precisely as any member of the non-expert class could have predicted without much thought.

One might suppose that this consumer revolt would send a message that would be immediately absorbed. Instead, it took more time than one might have supposed. The leading lights of elite culture simply could not bear to believe that their lessers were more and more in the driver's seat of cultural change.

Lockdowns, isolation, and mass social and cultural upheaval had such a far-reaching impact on the arts that it led its most confused elements – long having existed in the underworld of disgruntled anger at the bourgeoisie – to imagine that they really could become the mainstream, and thereby shove all this alienation down audience throats regardless of ticket sales or collapsing revenue streams.

I've personally experienced this countless times now in the post-lockdown period at local theaters, museums, and symphonies where it would seem that the management truly had lost all touch with reality. The Kennedy Center with its drag shows, the Met Gala with its Hunger Games opulence, European arts festivals struggling to be as offensive and tasteless as possible, and so much more.

It was never more clear that something had broken than when standing in the gender-neutral lines for the washroom at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts concert hall, surrounded on all sides by seething audience members who paid up to $1K a ticket to be publicly humiliated in some grotesque biological experiment.

The reset in which we live right now is not the Great Reset of 2020 and following but just the opposite, a desperate clamor for normalcy, merit, reality, and truth, backed by a burning passion to drive out any strains of wokeness from educational and corporate institutions.

There seems to be no stopping the counterrevolution at this point, as the spat upon and disrespected middle voice of cultural normalization claws its way back from humiliation back into the mainstream of cultural experience.