REFERENCES - interview with Nicholas Mir Chaikin

Nicholas Mir Chaikin is American and hails from Williamsburg, New York. He has witnessed first hand the rise of the modern hipster and is involved in their culture; as a visual artist, he has exhibited work at the Walker Foundation, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Meymac Center for Contemporary Art.

Nicholas is CreativeDirector at Spill, and has been at the forefront of web design since 1995, creating the vision of 1999 long before it ever arrived.

He was also listed by Taschen in 2003 as one of the five most influential web designers in the world, Nicholas has been the curator of fashion online - from magazines such as Purple Fashion Magazine and Self Service, right the way through to fashion heavyweights such as Chloé.

Here you go. My answers between the questions.

>While trying to come up with a definition of a hipster and the reason why this phenomenon is so >big and so special I put down internet as a social factor that leads to uniformity of tastes and >homogenization of certain-hip- kind of coolness and lack of authenticity. In this definition >photography is a kind of “translator” which helps hipsters express/share/exist in the online >reality (blogs, online social sites). And that might be a reason why photography (fashion photography especially) became a hipster attribute (photography as a fashion accessory).

What is your opinion on that? How would you define a hipster? How would you separate modern hipsters from snobs, fashion victims or other subcultures that's been always out there and only change with time? Do you think this phenomenon is new and characterizes 1999-present only?

I am not certain what the definition of a hipster is. I suspect
however that it might be something like: A trend amongst urban
youngsters (and not-so-youngsters) who strive to break from certain
prescribed mass-standards of behavior and fashion, while at the same
time embracing, and creating, certain elements of a mass-culture. The
nebulous definition of a hipster may be fed by what kind of products
and culture it consumes, differentiating it from a Goth, for example.
It may after-all only refer to a style of dress.

> Do you think hipsterism influences modern media/fashion photography. Can you
see it present in your
industry?

I'm not really sure I see any, except that like all trends, it will
inform the choices of artists, creative directors, stylists and other
"opinion makers."

> What does it mean to you as a professional? What does it mean to the
industry and current trends?

See above answer. I can add that many of our clients would be adverse
to outwardly accommodating only one slice of the population. It is
generally bad for business, unless your target is niche, and you hope
to hit that niche hard...

> Would you say that it is a positive phenomenon?

No, nor do I see it as negative. As cultural phenomena go, it is
probably fairly innocuous -- less transformative than a sexual
revolution or the Hippies, less nefarious than the rise of Fascism.
Again I see it as a descriptive word describing certain tastes in
fashion and culture.

> For how long do you think it is going to last and what is the next big step
from it? How can you see it
progressing?

Trends are in constant flux. Perhaps the notion of punctuated
equilibrium applies here, with its periods of relative calm and then
dense transformative moments (think: disco or the incredible growth of
meth users in the US). The punctuations in an equilibrium are almost
impossible to predict, they tend to come from some sort of upheaval
(e.g. social media in Egypt, or a meteorite vs. the dinosaurs).

> How do you think young creatives could keep/regain an authentic/original
style?

I think we are always subjected to the mores of our society. It is
silly to think we live outside of them, unless you live solo in a yurt
in the woods and eat berries and grubs. People are communal animals as
far as I can tell. Being within the boundaries of our society as a
hipster, a hooligan, a frumpy schoolteacher, or a transexual biker is
normal and practically inevitable. The pursuit of new ideas is perhaps
the best we can hope for.

> Can you see your self/your personal life/style being affected by hipsterism?

I suppose so. I think it would be more accurate to say that I am
influenced and affected by art, culture, music and ideas, and like
anyone else I've ever known or encountered, they inform my choices of
dress, behavior, consumption, language, taste, geographic location,
sexuality and the songs that get stuck in my head.

REFERENCES - Allen Ginsberg - Howl

"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959). "Howl" was written as a performance piece and later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. Upon its release, Ferlinghetti and the bookstore's manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, and "Howl" went on to become the most popular poem of the Beat Generation."

Also:



Film based on Allen Ginsberg's life and work called "Howl" directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

REFERENCES - White Negro by Norman Mailer

"The most famous, or infamous, version of [his personal philosophy of hipsterism] was Mr Mailer's controversial 1957 essay, "The White Negro," which seemed to endorse violence as an existential act and declared the murder of a white candy-store owner by two 18-year-old blacks an example of "daring the unknown."


Christian Lorentzen is an associate editor at Harper's magazine

REFERENCES - A Portrait of a Hipster by Anatole Broyard

"Broyard's best-known essay, one which was reprinted several times in later years and extensively quoted from, was "A Portrait of the Hipster," published in Partisan Review in 1948. In it, Broyard attempted an analysis and a definition of a new type then appearing around Greenwich Village who had, in his view, been welcomed by intellectuals who "ransacking everything for meaning, admiring insurgence... .attributed every heroism to the hipster.,, But Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels, and saw the attempts to escape from the restraints of society through narcotics, jazz, and general disaffiliation, as merely ways to a new conformity. People who were once shadowy presences in the jazz underground began to take themselves seriously and to crave the adulation others gave them. In Broyard's words: "The hipster promptly became in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero." And he added that the hipster life-style "grew more rigid than the Institutions it had set out to defy. It became a boring routine. The hipster - once an unregenerate Individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla - had become a pretentious poet laureate."

Of course, what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a sham. It was the intellectuals, in their desperate search for types who seemed to stand against the society intellectuals despised, who had idealised the hipster, something which had deep implications for their own state of mind and lack of broad political vision. Broyard's essay was written fifty years ago, and yet it has relevance to current practices where intellectuals try to find cultural heroes amongst pop musicians and the like.

The magazines which carried Broyard's essays usually mentioned that he was working on a novel, and that portions of it had appeared in various journals. A 1954 issue of Modern Writing printed "Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn," a story which was about a Greenwich Village intellectual visiting his parents in Brooklyn and trying to come to terms with the fact of the growing distance between them. It was a sharply observed piece, and I recall that when I first read It In the 1958 anthology, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, it seemed to speak for and to me in terms of how I felt about my own background, and the way in which I was moving away from it. There were astute little scenes in Broyard's story, as when, on arrival at his parents' house, they rush to find him the book supplement from the Sunday paper, as if to show that they understand his needs."

by Jim Burns

REFERENCES - Who's a hipster by Julia Plevin for the Huffington Post

Another reference, a short article by Julia Plevin, called "Who's a hipster" (Huffington Post, August 2008), in which she says;

"definition of 'hipster' remains opaque to anyone outside this self-proclaiming, highly-selective circle". She claims that the "whole point of hipsters is that they avoid labels and being labeled. However, they all dress the same and act the same and conform in their non-conformity" to an "iconic carefully created sloppy vintage look".

REFERENCES - N+1 magazine's discussion at the New School in New York City in April 2009

"Along with web-only content, N+1 bi-annually publishes a print journal about politics, literature and culture. Hoping to generate discussion about contemporary hipsterism, the magazine hosted a talk at the New School in New York City in April 2009. Following the conference, articles, responses, and essays were published and printed in the pamphlet “What Was the Hipster?” In the preface, editor of N +1 Mark Grief describes the investigation as a means “to find out if it is possible to analyze a subcultural formation [hipsterism] while it is still happening, from the testimony of people who are close to it.”

Printed immediately after the preface, his essay for the conference, titled “Positions,” considers both the historical background of the term “hipster” and also proposes a variety of definitions of the contemporary hipster intended to spark discussion."

WRC joins discussions on modern hipster culture by Dina Zingaro, The Phoneix, October 2010

REFERENCES - Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

My very first reference for this project would be Arcade Fire and their new album released in August 2010, called "The Suburbs".
Interesting and ironic as the group is often described as "quintessentially indie" and definitely appeals to modern hipster taste (together with the XX, they must "the most listened to" band in all the "creative" places), yet they new project is all about the problem of spreading hipster uniformity;


"Let's go downtown and watch the modern kids
Let's go downtown and talk to the modern kids
They will eat right out of your hand
Using great big words that they don't understand
They say

Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo

They build it up just to burn it back down
They build it up just to burn it back down
The wind is blowing all the ashes around
Oh my dear god what is that horrible song they're singing

Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
Rococo, rococo!
Rococo!

They seem wild but they are so tame
They seem wild but they are so tame
They're moving towards you with their colors all the same
They want to own you but they don't know what game they're playing

... "

Arcade Fire, Rococo

Gurdian's interview with the group from November 2010;

“What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different. I think that's important and it's missing in youth culture. I guess some of the songs are a reaction against the tyranny of youth culture, where you only hang around with people who dress like you, think like you and listen to the same music as you. It's scary because it spreads like a virus and it's hard to define yourself against. I think the very notion of the suburbs in the old-fashioned sense – that homogenised sprawl of corporate housing and malls – is like a metaphor for something much bigger (…)

Even though we are seen as the quintessential indie band, I feel very far from that culture a lot of the time."

"I think it goes way further than that," he says, "if you think of the sociological impact of the internet, which has led to this uniformity of taste, this homogenisation of a certain kind of coolness. It's scary because it spreads like a virus and it's hard to define yourself against. I think the very notion of the suburbs in the old-fashioned sense – that homogenised sprawl of corporate housing and malls – is like a metaphor for something much bigger."

PRIORISM

PRIORISM - a term that first appears in an essay called "A Portrait of the Hipster" (first published in Partisan Review, June 1948) by Anatole Broyard (American writer, critic and editor for The New York Times) which describes a claim to superior knowledge;

"One of the basic ingredients of jive language was a priorism. The a priori assumption was a short cut to somewhereness. It arose out of a desperate, unquenchable need to know the score; it was a great protection, a primary self-preserving postulate. It meant "it is given to us to understand." The indefinable authority it provided was like a powerful primordial or instinctual orientation in a threatening chaos of complex interrelations. The hipster's frequent use of metonymy and metonymous gestures (e.g., brushing palms for handshaking, extending an index finger, without raising an arm, as a form of greeting, etc.) also connoted prior understanding, there is no need to elaborate, I dig you, man, etc.

Carrying his language and his new philosophy like concealed weapons, the hipster set out to conquer the world. He took his stand on the corner and began to direct human traffic. His significance was unmistakable... "

Even though in his essay, Anataloe Broyard refers a hipster of the 1940s ("a character who likes hot jazz”), PRIORISM seems to characterize all the incarnations of the hipster;

"Referring to the work of Anatole Broyard, Grief considers the hipster as the black subcultural figure of the late 1940s. “Broyard insisted that black hipsterism was developed from a sense that black people in America were subject to decisions made about their lives by conspiracies of power which held a monopoly of information and knowledge that they could never possibly know,” Grief said. So, the “hip” reaction of the black community was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge one knew before anyone else, and knowledge independent of experience — a priori knowledge.
Later in the 1950s, the hipster was a white subcultural figure inspired by “the desire of a white avant-garde to disaffiliate from whiteness,” and achieve the clichéd “cool” knowledge of the African-American community. Beginning in the 1980s, new subcultures such as the 1990’s “neo-bohemia” and “indie-rock” cultures, emerged as alternatives to the success of consumer capitalism. So contemporary hipsterism, which is defined by its rejection of the mainstream, emerges from a tradition of youth subcultures that tried to remain independent of consumer culture.

Yet contemporary hipsterism, according to Grief, is more complicated since it is defined as a subculture of people, but is currently quite dominant. Grief said, “The hipster is that person, overlapping with declassing or disaffiliating groupings — the starving artist, the starving graduate student, the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skate punk, the would-be blue-collar or post-racial individual — who in fact alights himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”

"WRC joins discussions on modern hipster culture" by Dina Zingaro, The Phoenix, October 21, 2o1o

hipster NOT an artist

Reach out for some examples of well-known hipsters and you will end up with a list of accomplished artists who might be called icons of hipsterism and who definitely appeal to hipster taste -

in film Chloe Savigny



in music Karen O.



or Bjork



in painting Elizabeth Peyton



in art Andy Warhol



in fashion photography Terry Richardson



- but you won't call them hipsters as that would go against their particular achievements.
Almost by definition a real hipster isn't an artist. The hipster is the cultural figure, who understands consumers purchases within the familiar categories of mass consumption (but still not available to everyone; only to the hip consumer/rebel consumer) – the right vintage T-shirt, the right jeans, the right food, the right photograph – to be a form of art (subculturation of consumer capitalism). They might be called critics, re-mixers, curators or the copy-writers who follow the actual artists but they are never artists themselves. At best, it seems, that they are art students; people who aspire to create art (hangers-on, poseurs, rather than art makers).

HIPSTERS vs. PHOTOGRAPHY

Investigate the origins of the hipster photographic aesthetic and all the roads lead back to Polaroid and lomography. Even those photographs shot on digital or traditional film clung to the Polaroid's visual characteristics; a thin palette of muted ambers and blues and over – exposed flash (Apple created a special application for iPhone that applies those effects on your picture or video automatically). For it's object the hipster aesthetic took pale, slender-tighted women with messy hair and dark make-up – models from the Polaroid casting-call portraiture - and men who, if dressed at all, dress for the medium (athletic socks, tight-fitting trousers and mustache) as if stepping into the Polaroid frame necessarily meant stepping into the look of '70s.

The Polaroid SX-70 was released in 1972 and that was the only mass camera before the digital that could do what the modern technology does. It could produce photographs that were both instant and private. So by the time (2001) digital cameras became cheaper and more accessible and good enough to compete with film, the Polaroid Corporation bankrupted and completely stopped producing instant film in 2008. The digital medium was cheaper to use and offered plenty more options of working with the picture in terms of post production. But for hipsters a rare and dying form seemed more attractive. With it's roots in basement porn, modeling headshots and crime scene photography, the look of the Polaroid seemed to give all subjects a sense of sexy authenticity. It also worked really well with the hipster mood of irony and nostalgia. It offered a sense of rawness and possibility of self-construction (ability to watch one's own image appear on film and then adjust and shoot again). Even amateurs could create this atmosphere of spontaneity in two dimensions (as taking pictures and being in the them).

Andy Worhol

a father and inspiration standing behind modern hipsters - photographers;

"Warhol all but disappear at the parties unless he was taing pictures with his Polaroid camera"






Cory Kennedy -> http://itscorykennedy.wordpress.com/

"At the height of her fame, authenticity, desirability, specificity, inventiveness - her "roundness" as a character - the female hipster existed before the camera, photogenic and photographed; and so it was here, through the lens , that the hipster feminine came into definition. She may have remained a muse and a subject, flattened and available for exploitation. But if so, she was a muse for herself, and for other women. "

What was the hipster? Sociological investigation.





Fashion photographers taking from the hipster aesthetic:


Terry Richardson




Jurgen Teller




Dov Charney




Dash Snow




Maciek Kobielski

PHOTOGRAPHY AS A FASHION ACCESSORY

HIPSTERS vs. DIGITAL MEDIA SELF - AWARENESS

Hipster can be also described as a by- product of growing self-awareness in terms of digital media;

- blogs (!!)

- social network sites like: Facebook, LastNightParty



- websites like: RoidRage, The Cobra Snake



- magazines like: Vice



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > PHOTOGRAPHY (party and self-photography)




Medium treated by hipsters as a main element that defines them, expresses them, makes them present (online and generally).
Cameras (Diana, Polaroid) become a FASHION ACCESSORY.