Reggie Watts, metamodernist artist

Following up on this post, this Abramson article on Reggie Watts, the band leader for The Late Late Show, sees Watts as a metamodernist artist. A few relevant excerpts:

"Back in the early twentieth century, a number of European literary movements, including Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism, bred young radicals who used wild-eyed manifestos and ultra-challenging experimental literature to force workaday men and women to more carefully consider the pitfalls of modern living. While sometimes this form of social protest included an element of performance, more commonly it was found in texts that—ironically—only the Continental intelligentsia were likely to ever come across. The aim of all these movements was nevertheless an admirable one: To make the conditions under which art is created and performed every bit as dramatic and complex as the conditions under which those who don’t make art are forced to live. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way this ambitious aim got sidetracked and stifled in the offices and classrooms of university-dwelling English scholars. Metamodernistic artists like Watts offer our best hope, now, of once again seeing America’s artist class making art directly relevant to how we live today."
"Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that metamodernists like Watts don't go in for reductive titles like "filmmaker" or "poet" or "novelist" or "musician"; today's most innovative work not only crosses all boundaries of genre but in fact ignores such boundaries altogether. We see it as much in poetry as in songwriting, as much in fiction as in comedy. This metamodernist approach weaves together different planes of reality and modes of communication to build the sort of uneasy coherence that allows us to survive them intact. In other words, while it may often seem, in the Internet Age, that a stable self-identity is a luxury few of us can access or afford, what metamodernism offers us—all of us—is a way to locate an authentic self even in the midst of contemporary America’s chaotic, social media-driven culture."

"Excellence in multiple types of language—and in the realities those languages create for us—rather than specializing in obscure theories about how individual parcels of language sometimes operate. It's like today's young innovators are looking upward, toward the many different realities layered atop our everyday one, whereas yesterday's aging innovators are forever looking down, trying to see how many angels (or European scholars) they can fit on the head of a pin (or in scholarly treatises no one reads)."