Art & Creativity Quote by Christopher Lasch

"Make it new" lands like a slogan because Lasch wants you to hear it that way: not as Ezra Pound’s avant-garde rallying cry, but as the operating system of a marketplace that survives by manufacturing dissatisfaction. The line’s bite is in its demotion of modern art. Art isn’t cast as the heroic saboteur of bourgeois taste; it’s cast as consumerism’s "mirror image" - reflecting, amplifying, and sometimes glamorizing the same restless churn.

Lasch’s intent is diagnostic rather than nostalgic. He’s sketching a cultural feedback loop: consumer capitalism trains people to crave novelty, then art - especially art that prides itself on rupture, shock, and perpetual reinvention - becomes both a proof of modernity and a premium product of it. The subtext is that innovation, once framed as liberation from convention, gets repackaged as a duty. You don’t merely buy new things; you must become new, keep up, curate a self that doesn’t look stale.

Context matters: Lasch wrote in the late 20th-century moment when advertising, lifestyle branding, and mass media were turning identity into a consumer project. His broader work (most famously on the "culture of narcissism") argues that institutions and markets encourage a thin, performance-based selfhood. This quote sharpens that critique by targeting a familiar alibi: the idea that modern art stands outside commerce, resisting it. Lasch suggests the opposite: modernism’s fetish for novelty can rhyme too neatly with planned obsolescence, making rebellion another seasonal line item.