+1 for both Tom and Graham.
IMO as it stands today technologists have taken over distribution of content as the arbiters of tastemaking in what the public gets see among the trillions of images everyone has no time in culling through. Thin profit margins in new startups has forced a sort of democratization of tastemaking and allowed the public to decide through "viral" feedback what is good or bad art in photography or any other creative outlet and format.
Some (maybe most) of these tastemakers lack the sensitivity to recognize nuance or as the French would say "je ne sais quoi". If the public is not exposed to this level of art by it being buried in the oblivion of a trillion images, they don't get to vote.
It sort of explains why I keep seeing youth liking vinyl records, '70's fashion & culture and wanting to shoot film. They sense this lack of the "undefinable" in current pop culture and resort to nostalgia much like I did reacting to the counterculture of the '60's & '70's longing for the good 'ol days of the '40's & '50's not knowing how bad it really was because I romanticized it from watching re-runs of B&W and Technicolor movies from that era.
But I didn't have access to a trillion movies or images to choose from as it is today. There were tastemakers back then allowing me to see through a small window in the form a 3 channel TV set plus a public television station.
And boy did I miss a lot. I'm 56 and I'm still seeing new stuff that came out 40-80 years ago. I feel I have a lot of catching up to do.
But that's the trouble: I was there; and it wasn't.
Of course the war had just ended, there was crap, rubble and desolation all round, and the war years had kicked the fuck out of the cities but not of the people! But the country was different then: it picked itself up and started over. The demolition of so much permitted the building of so much more: you coudn't find anyone to employ! Women were drafted in to do things women had never had to do before. Business boomed, and people began to buy cars, people whose families hadn't even dared dream of owning cars. Many more people got rich or simply better enough off to notice the difference. You were in school, and all the local big employers used to come to the schools at the end of the year to snare the leavers with apprenticeships and even better. It truly was a moment of opportunity.
Music was starting to blossom again, jazz became popular once more, and if you were able to drop down to London you could go to Old Compton Street and visit the 2i's coffee bar; I saw Wee Willie Harris there, he had green hair, in 58 or '59. Punks, eat your silly hearts out: you knew nothing. Pop music, jukeboxes, we had it all, and better yet, in the coffee bars you got
American music, where the radio was starved of the real thing courtesy the Musos' Unions...
'55 or '56: Rock Around The Clock burst upon us; Heartbreak Hotel, it was the first and second comings brought together! Shit, by '56, courtesy of the Suez Crisis, even
I had wheels!
You didn't romanticise it.
The crap hit the fan years later, when the Brits lost themselves.
Rob