The Economy Decides What Art You See
And what contemporary art says about whether we're in an AI bubble
A little over a year ago, we asked the question: how do economic recessions impact art and culture?
Looking as far back as the 1300s, we saw that the impact was transformative and generative:
Popular artists and styles were rejected.
Art markets, put under strain, had to find new (or old) patrons.
Art became darker, reflecting new economic anxieties.
When we wrote the article, it looked like we might be headed for a global recession. Instead, the stock market rallied and set new records. Some think this is being driven by an AI / tech bubble.
So now we’re asking the inverse question: how do economic bubbles impact art and culture?
We went looking for an answer in five periods when a bubble drove intense and unsustainable economic growth: the 1630s Dutch Tulip Boom, the Roaring Twenties, the Asset Price Bubble in 1980s Japan, the Dot-Com bubble, and the Global Housing Market Bubble.
And we found the following through lines:
The proliferation of slop
Futurist aesthetics
The popularization of new genres
Critique
Art mirroring the technologies, assets, or financial logic fueling the bubble
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Each bubble has its own story, and its own culture. They have produced enduring works of art, and have a lot to teach us about the relationship between culture and the economy.
Understanding the cultural productions of bubble economies also offers us insight into whether our current economic run is a bubble or sustainable, so we’ll end the piece with an analysis of this question, through the lens of our contemporary cultural output.
Read on for the full picture.
DUTCH TULIP BOOM (1630s)
The Dutch ‘Tulip Mania’ is often considered the first asset bubble, and came during a period of general prosperity in the Netherlands known as the Dutch Golden Age.
During this time tulips were regarded as status symbols, and as the general income level rose, the newly rich became obsessed with them. Speculating middlemen entered the market, driving prices up, until they crashed in 1637. By that point, certain bulbs were going for four times the annual salary for skilled artisans.
In general, artistic output of the Dutch Golden Age was superb, but focusing specifically on the period surrounding the bubble, there are several trends we should pay attention to.
New patrons buying bad landscapes (slop)
This was due to the changing makeup of the art market. Previously, the church and certain societal elite were the primary patrons, but thanks to economic upturn, a merchant class that often displayed a much more common taste was now financially empowered to buy art themselves.
This is not to say all merchants were commissioning slop, just that, in general, this new class of buyers was not aesthetically discerning. Mainly, they wanted landscapes and genre paintings. There were also more of them, meaning more space in the market for middling artists to make a living.
Tulip still lifes (mirroring)
Still lives depicting the coveted flower were very popular at the time. In many cases, these were cheaper than buying a bulb. In a bubble, luxury items get so expensive that to satisfy their desire for them, the masses are forced to accept their artistic reproduction.
The Vanitas subgenre (critique / new genres)
Some artists, attuned to the economic madness around them, embeded in their work a critique of the bubble culture. The result was the emergence of the Vanitas subgenre, wherein symbols of luxury are juxtaposed with symbols of death, such as skulls and decaying fruit.
THE ROARING TWENTIES (1920s)
Nothing gets the US economy cooking quite like the end of a World War. The years following the end of WWI were years of expansion and industry in America, facilitated by easy access to credit, and inflated by stock market speculation.
During recessions, culture displays a general skepticism about modernity and the future; in bubbles, the inverse happens. Optimism is the tone of the day. The Roaring Twenties was highly optimistic, and art from the period reflected it.
Art Deco (futurism / mirroring)
Art Deco was an aesthetic celebration of the industrial technology that was making the Roaring Twenties possible. It was sleek, geometric, and mechanistic. It incorporated new materials like chrome plating and stainless steel. It remixed a number of international styles in a modern way to create something that was a blatant break from the past.
Art Deco is a prime example of an aesthetic that aesthetically references the underlying technology fueling the bubble it emerged in. Positive associations with mechanistic automation, and the new materials it could produce at scale, bled into the public’s attitude toward Art Deco. Psychologically, not dissimilar to the Dutch wanting Tulips hanging on their walls.
The Great Gatsby (critique)
The Roaring Twenties gave us one of the great social critiques of American history: The Great Gatsby. This 1925 novel by Fitzgerald is a searing indictment of the decadent opulence and moral decay of the age.
Art Deco’s industrial optimism and Gatsby’s moralizing reflect two sides of bubble cultures. At the root, there is often real economic gain accruing from genuine innovation. But the optimism this creates goes too far, money circulates too freely, and people succumb to a kind of hysterical hedonism.
The Jazz Age (new genres)
The Roaring Twenties has another name: The Jazz Age. Jazz was not the only form of black expression that gained popularity during this period. The Harlem Renaissance was at the heart of the emergence, and represented a great unlocking of creative talent that had concentrated as a result of the Great Migration. Bubbles, when they are able to relieve financial pressures, can often serve this unlocking function.
Rise of pulp fiction and magazines (slop)
With advances in industrial automation and mass production, printing became cheaper than ever in the 20’s. As a result, pulp magazines and pulp fiction exploded, creating a massive amount of poorly written novels and magazines. Much like today’s AI boom, the same technological innovations driving economic growth also enabled an unprecedented wave of of mass-produced slop.
THE JAPANESE ASSET PRICE BUBBLE (1980s)
At one point during the Japanese Asset Price Bubble of the 1980s, the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace were worth more than all the real estate in California combined. Reckless lending and very loose monetary policy, among other things, injected the Japanese economy with an immensity of cash.
City Pop (new genres / mirroring)
City Pop was a genre of music that peaked in the 80s, and can be considered the soundtrack to the era. It was music that sounded like wealth, a cosmopolitan blend of funk, synth-pop, and jazz. The western influence of the genre reflected the globalization of the national culture at the period.
Anime explosion (new genres / critique / slop)
The ready availability of cash at this time made it possible to fund very expensive animation projects. Many of the pinnacle creative achievements of the form, such as Akira and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, were created during this period.
But embedded in some of these projects were critiques of the very paradigm that produced them. Akira, for instance, deals directly with the social outcomes of corruption and governmental inside baseball, both of which were rampant in Japan’s bubble economy.
Trash-tier anime was the other side of this coin. Plotless and nonsensical OVAs, produced by well-funded individuals with no experience, were common.
Bubble Architecture & Design (futurism)
Real estate and renovation are two of the first things that arrive in the mind of anyone handed an unexpected windfall. Construction and design projects were plentiful in ‘80s Japan, and were aesthetically very distinct from the preceding era, which was focused on efficiency and functionality. The architecture of the period was heavily ornamented and drew directly on vibrant postmodern aesthetic trends. The interior design was surreal and futuristic. Japan thought the future had arrived, and built an environment that reflected that.
DOT-COM BUBBLE (1990s)
This is the bubble that most closely resembles today’s conditions. A new technology promised revolutionary changes, and the money believed it. A 600% stock market surge, some of that funding genuine paradigm shifts (like Microsoft and Oracle), some of it funding nothing at all (like Pets.com). It was another moment when the future was promised. Like most promises, it was fulfilled only partially.
Y2K aesthetics (futurism)
While it might feel retro to us today, the aesthetic wave now referred to as Y2K was, at the time, driven by a collective excitement about the future, and a desire to imagine what that future would look like. The answer was shiny, blobby, smooth, sometimes chrome or metallic (not all that unlike Art Deco in some ways), colorful, and often housed on a digital interface.
Net.art (new genres / mirroring)
The Dot-Com bubble is unique in that, in addition to money, it also gave the arts an entirely new medium to work in. Net.art was the result. Using the internet as its canvas, and thematically interested in the interactivity the internet promised (browsers, HTML, and hyperlinks were all common elements), Net.art was a blatant reproduction of the technology that was, in many cases, funding its purchase.
The YBAs and Shock Art (mirroring / slop)
The Young British Artists (YBAs), a loose conglomerate of artists that included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, might be the quintessential art movement of Dot-Com bubble. As a whole, these artists were highly entrepreneurial. They looked at art as a business. This worked well at the time, because art buyers were increasingly seeing art in the same light. So when the YBAs produced massive sensational heavily-reported exhibitions, that for all intents and purposes looked like great art, a massive amount of money chased the appearance. This led to a lot of bad art being purchased for large sums, although some great work resulted as well. This was the period that gave us the mega-gallery1.
THE GLOBAL HOUSING AND CREDIT BUBBLE (2000s)
Another monetary policy bubble, an economy propped up by easy credit, where if you could fog up a mirror, you could get a home loan. While a tone of escapist hedonism was palpable in the social sphere, the booming banking sector and general financialization of society were the bubble’s enduring changes. Never before had life and culture become so centrally about money. When the bubble popped, and created the 2008 recession, this attitude persisted, and still shapes cultural attitudes today.
Overinflation of art’s price (mirroring / slop)
Sometimes referred to as the ‘rococo period of contemporary art’, the fine art world became ornamental and decadent. The massively scaled art antics of the YBAs echoed into the most popular art of the period, with artists like Hirst and Jeff Koons achieving new heights of profitability.
New hedge fund billionaires inflated the prices for the work of living artists, with some estimates saying prices were up 800% in the period. During this era, the mega-artist became a CEO. Automated processes increased. Big artists hired entire studio teams to run artistic production in the mode of an assembly line.
Street Art Response (social critique)
This commercial state of affairs did not go uncritiqued. The artist who, especially in hindsight, defined this era was Banksy, whose street-site, graffiti-adjacent pieces critiqued (at least vaguely) the state of the financial obsessiveness of the times. The work of other street artists, like KAWS or Shepard Fairey (best known for his OBEY graphic), even if not as directly critical, was still a response to the new functionings of the capitalist art market, and stemmed from a feeling of alienation from the white box gallery world.
McMansion Architecture (slop)
This bubble also gave us an enduring symbol of poor taste and performative size: the McMansion. Architecturally criminal, very large, and purchased hand over fist by the class of newly rich, the style of these homes is sometimes referred to as ‘neo-eclectic’ because they mix (without much thought devoted to the harmony of this mixture) many different aesthetic styles. Perhaps nothing speaks to the effect of new money on the look of our environment as well as these homes do.
Frutiger Aero (futurism)
Replacing the futurism of Y2K was Frutiger Aero. An eco-oriented aesthetic imagining of the future, largely deployed by the companies shaping the digital world with an interest in promoting the idea that technology could co-exist in harmony with nature.
AND TODAY’S BUBBLE:
There are differing perspectives about whether we’re in a bubble today. We’re facing revolutionary technological change, peddled by a handful of companies that are not yet profitable. Money is moving circularly, with investments often being paid back in the form of product purchase.
But there is no denying the possible usefulness of AI, and unlike companies in the Dot-Com era, those garnering massive valuations today do, for the most part, seem to be reporting real revenue.
Looking then to today’s cultural output, let’s see whether any of our expected themes pertain to today
Slop
Alas, baseline slop levels are very high these days. Uniquely, the very technology that is driving today’s maybe-bubble has unlocked the easy production of slop. It is this mechanism, more than exploding buying power in a newly rich group of patrons (those getting rich off of the AI bubble seem mostly indifferent to art), that is driving today’s slopification.
Determination: ambiguous
Futurist aesthetics
If anything, it feels like we’re seeing the opposite in the incessant nostalgia-fueled reheating of past aesthetics. Part of the issue might be that we struggle to imagine a future today. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one that would complicate any futurist project2.
Determination: not a bubble
New genres
Certainly the case in music, where the long-term fallout of hyperpop’s brief explosion has delivered us a revitalized electronic music crossover space, and subgenre classifications from electroclash to laptop twee are popping into and out of existence like fireworks.
Determination: bubble
Critique
Most people are not happy about AI, artists in particular. Many artists are positioning their work as inherently anti-AI, but this is a framing (and marketing) decision more than a direct critique of AI. It is also difficult to untangle a specifically bubble-fueled critique from the glut of critique-oriented art has been made in the 2020s. There is a palpable and specific distaste for the new tech elite, but that new distaste feels mostly social, rather than formalized into focused artistic expression.
Meanwhile, there is also a quiet incorporation of AI into a lot of today’s art. It’s everywhere if you look closely. “RUBBERZ” is one of the most obvious examples.
Determination: ambiguous
Mirroring assets, tech, financial logics
An easy yes. From AI art, to VR dynamic-world immersive installations, to the rise of systems art, to art that meets the popular demand of instantaneous production.
Determination: bubble
Whether we are in a bubble or not, it is undeniable that it does not feel like we’re in one. The distribution of the gains, thus far, has been almost completely one-sided. Only those directly involved in the industries, or with portfolios heavily exposed to them, have benefited.
This is not to diminish the extent to which the rapid growth of the AI sector is propping up the stock market. But even those with 401k that will collapse if this bubble pops probably don’t feel, right now, like they’re living in flush times. The truth is that the contemporary American economy is so organized that most people most of the time feel like they’re just scraping by.
This is the worst case for art. Relief and freedom can be good for creativity. A shattered life can be good for creativity. A terminally ill life that requires all of your effort just to hold together is almost always terrible for creativity.
To give these artists their fair due, their work was putatively a critique of this new decadence in the market.
Look closer at culture closest to the bubble, though, and there is some futuristic noise. Most notably, a growing interest in accelerationism (a school of thought that promotes the rapid acceleration of development with minimal limitations) among silicon valley elites. But this is far from a widespread cultural interest.
I've been thinking about this general lack of a sense of future for a while now; I do think people imagine a future, however not at a societal scale (except maybe for the accelerationists and AGI people you mentioned). Think longevity movement, trends like cycling or other cardio-heavy sports, mostly set in nature. There's a sense that many strive for a long life, and one which they can tell stories of (think dad-lore, riding through Central Asia-type content). But it's an inwards vision describing individual futures that are imagined to be divorced from any societal context.