The present is hard to love. That’s why we’re encouraged to imagine that things were better in the past, especially by politicians. These are common tropes across cultures and across the world. Leaning into nostalgia is easier than dealing with today’s messy realities.
A sentimental longing for a better past elicits a social response. Nostalgia is a social emotion. It comes alive in myriad social media posts and images which bemoan the state of everything today while harking back to a ‘less complicated’ past. We see it in the fascination for all things analogue, be it books or board games. Nostalgia is about social connection.
There’s nothing intrinsically bad in any of that. But there can be a dark side to nostalgia, an implication that things were better before [insert name of transformative legislation X or social change Y or arrival of people Z].
Underpinning the fascination with nostalgia is the search for certainty and simplicity. That is why it rears it’s head at times of change.
The past feels solid and grounded with the weight of a conventionally received history; the present chaotic, open to challenge with more questions about the foundations of all we take for granted than answers which validate the certainties we once held to be true.
I have news, however. Things were not simpler back then.
- ‘Back then’ was once a ‘today’, and it felt as unrooted, chaotic, and prey to forces we didn’t understand as today does.
- The seeds of today’s technologically driven flux were planted in the fallout from colonialism and the birth of accelerated global capitalism in the 19th century.
- The 1950s were a dreadful time for many people, there was little that was ‘great’ about them and many people lived in a climate of fear.
Nostalgia and consumer behaviour
For many consumers nostalgia is associated with authenticity. Authenticity and craft are things consumers are prepared to pay a premium for. Craft is now becoming ubiquitous. But how can artisanal activity produce so much on a mass scale. It can’t, and it isn’t.
Advertisers and brand marketeers are leaning into nostalgia to drive profits. Leaning into demographic realities; older people are plentiful and are statistically richer than Gen Z or Gen Alpha. We saw this with museum exhibitions foregrounding the early 1980s, celebrating the Blitz Club and New Romantics, or the fashions of Zandra Rhodes. That’s because the audiences with spending power were those whose teenage years to their twenties played out between 1977 and 1987. It made sense to lean into the demographic reality and appeal to their nostalgia. So it is with fashion, food and much else that we consume.
I’m cutting branches from the trees
David Sylvian, Nostalgia, Brilliant Trees (1984)
Shaped by years of memories
To exorcise their ghosts from inside of me
Millennial spending power is next in line. As Gen Z begin to achieve disposable income, so too will their nostalgia come into play.
But in each case, expectations of exhibitions, cultural experiences, fashions, and food are also changing. The lines between static or received knowledge, are shifting towards re-invention, fusion, tactility, interaction, and performance. Dynamic interpretation is ascendant because it taps into emotions. And emotions matter because they evoke values.
Values matter. Cultural spaces which accommodate people dancing through galleries, or gathering on their own terms are thriving.
That can feel like a threat.
Focus on audiences
Find out what they think, what they feel, what they want, and how they want it.
I think the apple’s rotten right to the core
Chalrli xcx, apple, brat (2024)
From all the things passed down from all the apples coming before
I split the apple down symmetrical lines
And what I find is kinda scary, makes me just wanna drive
Conversations are a two-way street. Listening and thinking are twice as important as talking.
Nostalgia is a cul-de-sac, a dead end. Go there and you’ll keep coming back to the same present, with nothing resolved, transformed, or changed. It is repetition, not a dynamic conversation which has flux, change, response, and recalibration at its heart.
Instead, adapting to involve communities and their diverse needs and having ideas from these conversations shape outcomes can be more profitable. It’s an investment of time, money, and care. It will be a challenge to established practice, but curators and conservators of any field can be part of the conversation too. Expertise must be heard and included, that is not at question. But expertise can no longer silence the voices or stymie the responses of communities.
