It’s later quoted in a more aphoristic form by W.J.T. Mitchell and by Zizek in various places.

I lived in the country thru mid-84, after that I’ve always lived in cities. So I cannot speak for the ‘burbs.

In the country we had cable TV, newspapers etc - everyone I knew loved to talk and hang out. I grew up in what was essentially a Mennonite church, and the Mennonites in the 80s were very politically active. I believe they still are. I didn’t feel disconnected from anything. Plus we would all trek to the city frequently (it was only an hour away) to for more culture, entertainment etc.

btw I know I write like an old Andy Rooney-guy, but I’m barely a year older than you.

Also, Erika, something I’ve been curious about since Dominic posted this is how or how not a sense of possibility manifests across age by decade, ie, from someone your age today, to mine or Tim’s or Dominic’s, to Peter’s. I often feel my immediate contemporaries are the least able to envision any kind of radical change to the status quo (& utopian fantasies (mine) are SO UNCOOL/impractical); how much is that about what Dominic’s describing above? And where the baby boomers have an–albeit often disenchanted–memory of certain forms of collective action, and maybe people your age have some kind of greater access to a sense of how to ask the right questions to get at a practical revolution? (Why are we talking about revolution in a comment box, and is this actually public space?)

I’m 28. To me 68 was a time where people were gathering and people were talking and also something a little bit mystical was happening in the air because youth in so many cities around the world said enough. And they all felt that the time was right they were looking for the right time and they saw it and they acted. They saw the open space and they jumped into it.

Art didn’t inspire that. That inspired art.

I would like to be tuned in to when the time is right. I would like to say enough when I feel that time is upon me. But how will I know, when that perfect moment arises to risk and act, that anyone will be there with me? We don’t meet and talk and gather in public spaces anymore. Gathering in public spaces is cheesy. Are we going to blog ourselves a revolution? Has the time for revolution passed? I think maybe. But I also think, Dominic, that you said something really important here. If there is a way, it’s about

IMAGINATION AND ITS BLIND SPOTS

It reminds me that in order for us to find the real alternatives (and by that i mean separate from consumption and spectacle) we need to be more imaginative. We need to be conscientiously enthralled and looking for the moment.

“We didn’t have any energizing, politicized sub-culture… so it was easy, too easy, for us to romanticize, even eroticize, the ‘60s.”

Having grown up in the 80s (I was born in 1966), I cannot find anything more wrong with your statement.

The late 60s American anti-war movement was fueled mainly by a fear of the draft. The middle-class college students were being called up. They didn’t like it. Obviously, it was in their self-interest to stop it. There was nothing, politicially, in the 80s that had any real directly adverse effect on middle-class youth. But there were plenty of movements afoot, you just had to care beyond your class: anti-apartheid, nuclear arms race, the environment, women’s reproductive rights, the beginning of the War in Drugs.

No one I knew romaticized or eroticized the hippies. Even though herpes put a bit of a damper on free love, there was still plenty to go around. And plenty of wrongs to be righted. Sure, the Velvet Underground in their uber-coolness were idolized, but the crunchiness and self-indulgences of hippies drove my friends and I nuts. To this day, I avoid hippies of all ages (I was a punk in the 80s)

And yeah, new wave music became woosey and the goths were boring, but the DIY of 70s punk gave birth to the amazing alt rock of the 80s. Ignoring the coporate rock monster (much of it run by former hippies), youth created their own sound and sound.

I would have to agree with you when you write “Art, including cinema, is almost useless as a means of social change” because I’m assuming when you say “almost” you are thinking of the exceptions like Emery Douglas or the Chicano grahics movemnt who did help create social change.

@Peter,

In some incredibly broad sense we are about alternatives – but, really, who isn’t in that business these days?

I don’t think the world is as cut and dry as it was forty years ago. I think we now live in a place of choices. I don’t see how artists are specifically about alternatives anymore. It seems to me its about keeping the choices alive. After 40 years of art becoming more vulgar, Dave Hickey recently summed up the current era, as “on the verge of a period devoted to gradual refinement. You’ve got to recognize the end of things when they end…. Can you get more vulgar than Richard Prince?”

We’re still all about alternatives. Isn’t that what artists DO?