Text based art about identity

When you identify as a particular type of person, you become a narrower type of person

Over the early 2020s in the West there has been a huge upsurge in people seeking and claiming ‘identities’.
People, especially young people, have always sort identities of course. Young people often become wedded to very specific types of music and clothing for instance and hang out with other young people who listen to the same type of music and who wear the same type of clothes. The young people probably think that they are making choices purely on aesthetic grounds whereas they are quite likely making choices to help cement their links with their chosen group.

That phrase ‘purely on aesthetic grounds’ probably needs unpicking a bit. It makes it sound as though aesthetic values are somehow absolute and set in stone. For instance, in the visual arts blue is a cool colour and red is a hot colour, and most people react to them in a similar way. It’s a result of our evolution and it’s in our DNA. However, I expect that those evolutionary aesthetics are overlaid by culturally generated aesthetics, and very importantly, by subculturally generated aesthetics. That’s where young people’s taste in music and clothes comes in. It helps them identify with their chosen subculture.

One of the reasons that a person identifies with a particular subculture is to signal that they are NOT part of a different subculture. Different subcultures, especially different youth subcultures, are often antagonistic to each other, sometimes to the point of physical violence. We could call it the subculture wars.

Subcultures and identity (especially youth identity) often have their genesis in rebellion, as a way of showing that you’re not part of mainstream society. Mainstream society is after all boring and/or responsible for all of the ills in the world. Who in their right mind would want to be part of that?

In recent years (the first half of the 2020s) the subculture wars and the natural striving for identity have been put on steroids and have morphed into what we now witness as The Culture Wars and Identity Politics.

The obsession with identity is no longer the preserve of mainly young people and no longer has as one of his main aims the function of reinforcing group bonds. On top of this, it’s no longer inward looking. In the past identity groups and subcultures were relatively insular and didn’t interact with mainstream society in any unusual ways. To a large degree they keep themselves to themselves, as long as the group was cohesive that was all that mattered.

There’s a problem with the present day manifestation of identity politics which stems from the nature of identity itself. Identity is necessarily divisive. People choose an identity so that they are different from other people.

This is fine when it involves the relatively insular identity subcultures of youth. However, the modern day identity groups of the culture wars are anything but insular. Engagement and confrontation are their watchwords.