Our art fighting ageism

Ryan Brown is a junior majoring in English.

I was in my German class the other day, and in the usual gauntlet of foreign language education, my teacher was firing off questions about who in our classroom was the most of each specific adjective she had listed.

And so, in our quest to understand how to master our comparatives and superlatives, we began naming the tallest person in the class, the shortest person, the youngest person, each with greater ease as we began to grasp the concept within another language.

And then our teacher asked in German, “Who is the most beautifully dressed person?” No one answered. Following an awkward pause our teacher clearly did not understand, it dawned on me that within our generation lies an immense feeling of inadequacy to declare what is beautiful.

Clearly, we have our own ideas about preference that reflect ideologies and moral values within our individual selves, but what is it that is keeps us from declaring as a whole what is important to us as a generation, and revered enough by our standards to be called out loud by the term ‘beautiful?’

After all, we have already begun to appeal to a style that embodies a unique blend of irreverence, absurdity and extreme critique of the mainstream through our popular culture. Why can’t we legitimize what we have made for ourselves?

The answer lies in the still-disregarding culture of adulthood that tells us that what we create is not necessarily beautiful in a larger scale, but beautiful for our age.

I read an article recently regarding the LOLcats and other meme Web sites using absurdism as a form of popular entertainment that claimed this phenomenon should be treated as just another mindless distraction that has no significant value to culture, and will most likely not be remembered in the future.

While it might not be remembered far into the future, I still have to ask if what our generation finds so appealing is really just a mindless distraction, why would the same thematic ideas be found so frequently behind all of our supposed disregard-able artistic material?

A serious plague of ageism has trickled into our minds from the series of generations who see themselves as the ultimate authority in culture, legitimacy and the progression of ideas. But what this self-declared authority dangerously neglects is that we are a generation with our own ideas, our own high art and our own, legitimate sense of what is beautiful in the world.

It is time to see ourselves as a unified work of art, defying the conventions of our time and progressing in our pure reflection of artistic intent.