The Churn: Why New People are the Most Important People in a Scene
Tonchi
The people that will come after you will always be more important than you are.
That statement isn’t meant to belittle or insult anyone reading this, instead it’s a statement in which I personally find solace, and I believe everyone should as well.
After the death of my great-grandmother at the age of 101 years old, I had a life-affirming conversation with her daughter, my lola. I won’t go into the specifics of my extended family’s generational trauma, but instead I will recount the three word phrase etched into my soul after said conversation:
“Better every time.”
What does this have to do with art scenes? Quite a lot. Let’s talk about The Churn.
It’s a fact of life that people fall in and out of love. With people, with interests, with artforms, with scenes. Add to the mix human mortality and capitalism’s forced trade of time for money, art scenes will naturally bleed out over time due to the loss of interested people. The only true solution is to make sure that there are consistently new people coming into an art scene, because you can never guarantee that the people in the scene one day are the same people that will be in it the next.
If getting new people into a scene is the primary means of keeping it alive, why are so many of a scene’s typical behaviors actively discouraging towards new blood? Gatekeeping, obfuscation of connections, making it feel like there’s a difference between the artist and the fan: many scene behaviors and infrastructures consolidate power amongst those that already have it. Most don’t act in the interest of community propagation, most act in the interest of being “the best or biggest” in their pond. Why expand the pond if it creates more competition?
The shortsightedness of this mindset becomes clear when you think about the potential results of “expanding the pond”. New artists entering a scene doesn’t only mean additional competition, it also means that friends and fans of said new artists can enter the scene as well. This is why scenes especially benefit from the addition of new, interested people with no existing connections, as they can result in entirely new demographics and groups being introduced to said scene. The introduction of new blood is not only good for statistical reasons, it’s good for ideological and artistic reasons too: new people mean new ideas, and one of the best ways for a scene to grow and change is by having norms challenged.
The Churn is inevitable, essentially characterized as scene entropy. To attempt to hold on to certain groups or practices of “glory days”, whether for nostalgia, power, or control, is useless. Each generation of a scene should show that there is a brighter future than the last. If you’re not aiming to be better every time, what are you really doing?