As someone who went to art school, 3 US presidents ago, and would have graduated with a minor in art history if he hadn't run off to join the circus at the last minute, I feel at least mildly qualified to weigh in on this.
This analysis makes some fundamental assumptions that I don't share: that culture has a direction and a velocity, like it's a vehicle we were/are collectively, at times unconsciously, driving in a given direction. It's a Fukuyaman view, and even has an odd distant echo of Marc Andreessen's recent grandiose pantspoop of a manifesto - tech determinism, the idea of scientific progress, projected onto culture. Cultural Progress.
Reading this made me realize how much I now see art as a function of society, one of many sensory organs grasping to understand the natures of our reality and our selves. What "direction" or "velocity" has a body that is shivering in the cold, coughing in sooty air, squinting to read tiny print?
So when the author here asks for examples of distinct cultural newness, I don't really know what to say. I might as well pick a random file from my Bandcamp (RIP) folder. Every new work I see around me is grappling with the current convulsions of society under capitalism, its aestheticizations, dying empire, platform monopoly, etc - which are unique in time, if ever-echoing in history. Even the most bog standard old-is-new-again nostalgia trawl is the way it is because of the contemporary forces that have shaped the market it so eagerly pours itself into. They are part of the piece; the piece is only aesthetically indistinguishable if you willfully ignore that context around it, but why would you? Don't we have an obligation to always interrogate these surrounding contexts? Isn't not doing that kind of how we get into a lot of these messes?
So I don't really see culture as a vehicle, standing still after a heady century of screaming down a new highway. I see it as a body, a sacred yet profane and an unkillable yet fragile body, that is currently having trouble breathing, because it is being strangled by the forces around it. And so I don't think the problem with culture is that it isn't serving up exciting new novelties to feed us some lascivious sense of The Future. The problem with culture is that it's being slowly strangled, and we need to kill what's strangling it. Because, ultimately, we need it to live.
A few years ago, I was at dinner with a friend whose father (now in his 60s) was in town. We're having a pleasant, meandering conversation, and in response to some innocuous comment, he said, "You know, I just can't figure it out. Why isn't anyone doing anything new in music nowadays?"
Those of us at the table looked around at one another. It wasn't even clear what he was asking. We asked some follow up questions, and he hemmed and hawed for a bit, before saying, "Well, it seems to me that the last time anyone did anything new in music was, I dunno, around 1986? 1987? Before 1990. What's the holdup? Why are we so stuck?"
The conversation spun its wheels on this theme for about 20 minutes before we mercifully transitioned to another topic, but the man was completely sincere. He genuinely thought that musical history ended right around the release of "Big Generator" by Yes and every example we mustered of something new in music in the last 30 years was brushed off as not new ("Brian Eno was doing that in the 70s"), not music ("All music producers do is negotiate contracts and line up talent"), or [ERROR FILE NOT FOUND] ("I don't know what that is").
I do not see a meaningful intellectual difference between Jason Farago's five thousand word lament about the sterility of this unbelievably abundant era and that baffling dinner conversation.
