Luna Luna

It’s easy these days to take cultural synthesis for granted. In one of its many forms, the Internet is a World’s Fair that never ends and the idea of having to gather in a particular place to experience a particular thing often isn't so much archaic as it is supplementary. With the advent of the algorithm electing itself to lifelong presidency over most of our consumer behavior, many of our offline assemblies are analog representations of our online world. Coachella, which just finished its first weekend of barbaric yawping, has become something of a physical Spotify For You page and Barnes & Noble has aisle caps and centerpieces dedicated to #BookTok.

The easy take on that might be that the end of Interesting Things is nigh, but I feel pretty strongly that it’s the opposite. It’s perhaps never been easier or more viable to build your dream project in exactly the way you want it to be, and in the wake of corporate smooth-braining pretty much every mainstay is ripe for something stranger to take its place. I also think the next 10 years are going to be a golden age for opening your own Interesting Neighborhood Shop so if you’ve ever wanted to scratch the shopkeeper itch now is a great time to start growing out your nails.

An example of what I mean, and what I think the next decade could look like, is the return of Luna Luna, André Heller’s 1987 bonfire of the culture gap vanities. Assembling Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney, Kenny Scharf, Roland Toper, Jean Tiguely, and Sonia Delaunay to design a carnival in a Hamburg public park sounds to our modern day ears like the sort of thing you’d never be able to accomplish without corporate sponsors, but Heller was able to do it with a $500,000 grant from Neue Revue magazine and an apparently-incredible pitch to the above list of luminaries that was something to the effect of “you all already make endless money how about you do something for fun.” He created it to help bridge the gap between the stuffy reclusiveness of the modern art scene and us Joe and Janette Briefcases, and the result almost instantly became the stuff of legend.

It’s also meaningful, given that Heller famously refused funding from McDonalds for the project, that Luna Luna’s revival is thanks to a $100mm commitment from Drake and will be paraded around the globe by the corporate peabodies Live Nation. On the one hand, the takeaway here might be that no good artistic deed goes unpunished on a long enough timeline, but another might be that millions of people are going to be inspired by a generation of geniuses they may not even be aware of, so for now I’m calling this a net positive and we’ll see how it shakes out.

But if I were me and you were you (which we are), we’d do well to have a think about what sort of things we’ve always wanted to build and then clear what we can in our schedules to get started. With the cost of production continuing to move in the direction of zero and most people sprinting to use ChatGPT to write a script that helps them seem interesting, this is very easily the most profitable moment in human history to simply be yourself. And there’s no rush either. This season is just getting started so feel free to rest up if you need it and start taking some swings if you don’t.