Why baby-boomers don't produce great art

Television and a few other things. I think Philip Marchand is really on to something:

[Edward] Albee, back in 1962, riveted American culture with his profanity-ridden Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? No dramatic work since has so fascinated and disturbed Americans. Even though there are playwrights working today who are at least as talented as Albee, they don't have his aura. He's like a general at Waterloo or Gettysburg 40 years after the battle. He's a survivor of a period when culture meant something.

This is not baby-boomer nostalgia, even though we are talking about the '60s. Albee is not a baby boomer. Neither is McCartney nor Jagger nor Dylan nor Keith Richards — these rock stars were all born in the early '40s. They were lionized by the boomers, but they were not of them. All the baby boomers did was buy their records and attend their shows.

The real force behind the 1960s revolution was a generation born in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the early 1940s. We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the "Greatest Generation," the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between.

It was precisely this generation, however, that transformed our culture. From this demographic cohort came the men and women who became the icons of the 1960s and who have had no equivalent successors. They cast very long shadows...

Why have these people born in the 1930s and early 1940s exercised such disproportionate influence?..

...this generation was the last to grow up without television. This, of course, does not set it apart from previous generations, but it may well have given its cohort a decisive advantage over the following generation of baby boomers.

Television, as we now know, has a hypnotic effect that destroys your mind. Well, more or less...

...the generation of the '30s and early '40s took advantage of a unified culture that has since disappeared. The artists, writers and activists of this generation wrote and performed and argued before an audience that often saw the same movies, viewed the same newscasts, and read the same journalism...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 7, 2006 01:35 PM