In a wonderful post from the Nonist about the the Diggers art movement of the 1960s, I ran across the following assertion:

The reigning young-bloods of the world love to needle the hippies. This, I surmise, is because the hippies are now their parents, grandparents, weird uncles, and, worst of all, their dick-head corporate bosses. The words Haight-Ashbury are as likely to induce a lemon-faced cringe as be met with a blank stare I would guess.

Not that most of us have been allowed to forget it for a single instant, but I’ll gently remind you anyway that there was a time when hippies were the avante-garde. A time when there were few personages thought more “happening” on planet Earth.

I’ll admit to a considerable degree of guilt in needling said hippies. At a number of points in the past, I’ve quite sneeringly disparaged the ‘flower culture’ as counterproductive to the vanguard of the modern project.

At some level, this is a product of legitimate philosophical disagreements with the central premises of the hippie movement. Hippiedom verges on the edge of the sort of anti-critical postmodern identity-ism which I consider the same argumentative root as religious fundamentalism and conservatism. In many ways, rather than countering the ‘culture of the spectacle’ which the Situationalists and others were so horrified by, hippie culture reinforced it and profited from it.

But those differences are largely superficial or easily surmounted, and when it comes down to it, I truly do respect the movement as a legitimate avant-garde. And in some ways this is an ancillary source of my bitterness: as the most recent epoch of real artistic and political generation in this country, the avant-garde of the 60s inspires me. In doing so, it also lets me down, because I can’t help feeling that the movement is at least somewhat to blame for the contemporary period’s utter stagnancy.

But at any rate, the pictures up at the site are beautiful. Go and look at them.