Sunday, September 10, 2023

Cultural Autosarcophagy:
The Erysichthonic Last Supper

The transition from Culture Vulture to Cultural Cannibal is nothing new with scene-level dilettantes running out of others’ material to recycle.
  But today the very torchbearers who have safeguarded decades worth of globally beloved creative works are vivisecting their own canon to feast upon their own viscera.
  A desperate move by the creatively impotent to reprocess legacy content, for sure. We know Kultural Kuru is a slow creative death for individual try-hards. But the Cultural Autosarcophagy that currently looms on a macro level happens to destroy both the content itself and the eater of his own content faster than a studio head can shriek ‘reboot.’ Not to mention, it doesn’t look so pretty to the public witnessing the Entertainment-Industrial Complex self-gorging without a lick of shame.
  Again, a lifeless carapace is the result — ironic, in the sense that to these callow cultureclasts, the importance of the façade has always outweighed any innate aesthetic essence.
SIDEBAR: From afar this may look like another example of Gaijin Contagion, or more accurately, Báizuǒ Bìng Sickness. Another irony — the genesis of Mao-Think itself comes from the Middle Kingdom, so the seeds of cultural rot planted in the West indeed come from without. Yet the cultural brahmins over here are the knowing knaves of the Long March playing their fools to incessantly bleat their performative concerns.
  Ultimately, this conflict (like most) boils down to “divide et impera” strategies, wherein the Powers That Be watch from on high as socio-political and economic entropy engulfs a world that only the Powers themselves can “rescue.” But this meta-scope view is a rabbit hole one could burrow into quite endlessly.
  Anyway, critics may say the onset of Cultural Autosarcophagy is just the endgame where the demand for Nostalgioid Opiates overrides the Thumotic Assertive. “Updating a Classic,” the proud tastemakers sniff oxymoronically. In truth, it’s just Burge’s Axiom turned on itself — the champion waving the knife is the one in the mirror, mirror on the wall.

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