Twee Magazine

"Twee," by Marc Spitz.

Marc Spitz's "Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film" wasn't that well received when it came out, and I think the criticisms of the book were fair. Spitz argues that twee (which he always capitalizes) is a legitimate youth movement, a sort of softer version of punk (also capitalized). He places its spiritual center in Brooklyn and creates a cultural narrative for its creation, as Greil Marcus did for punk rock in "Lipstick Traces." Spitz sees twee as originating with a number of artists in response to the horrors of World War II, including Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, and J.D. Salinger.

Critics have accused Spitz of overreaching, in part because he includes such unlikely characters in his story of twee as Anne Frank and Kurt Cobain. He early on points out that while everything twee is indie, not everything indie is twee, and then proceeds to ignore his own warning. It all reads as sort of wrong to me, but, then, it may be that we're defining the word twee differently. The Brooklyn hipster scene doesn't strike me as essentially twee, and of every name on the list above, I think only Salinger really fits my definition, although Disney, Seuss, and Cobain had twee moments. (Anne Frank, in the meanwhile? No.)

But, then, I don't think twee is a movement. Not yet, at least, and it may never be. Twee seems more like we have taste buds for aesthetic taste, and some flavors of art and culture just sort of taste twee to us, if you will. There's never really been an overarching movement called "cool," either, but there's a sort of loose consensus around the idea of coolness, and there are artists who are self-consciously cool.

There was cool art before we had the word cool --  Gene Sculatti's 1982 book "The Catalog of Cool" included decadent literature and the philosopher Heraclitus. But "cool" is sufficiently loose an aesthetic to include things that predated the word, because they influenced the modern idea of cool, or they strike modern observers as cool. It's the same way with twee, and so, if one criticism of Spitz's book is that he overreached, I think it is fair to say he underreached as well. His history of twee extensively details the post punk and indie world -- competently, I would say -- but virtually never touches on the arty rock music of the 60s, or children's music from the 40s, or singing cowboys, or any of the myriad other musical forms that seem twee nowadays.

His placing the origin of twee at the end of World War II feels like an invented history to me. Yes, Salinger saw action, and Dr. Seuss ran the animation department for the US Air Force, and Walt Disney likewise made animated movies for the war effort. But only Salinger seemed strongly influenced by his military experiences, and, as I have said before, while Disney and Seuss may have influenced modern twee art, their influence hardly feels dominant. The work of Charles Schulz -- especially the splendid animated television shorts based on Peanuts -- is far more locked into the DNA of modern twee art, and while Schulz was in World War II, he barely experienced combat, never fired a gun, and mostly oversaw surrendering German forces. His work is far more influenced by his childhood and young adulthood in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

(While I may simply feel this way because I am a native Minneapolitan, Minnesota's Twin Cities strike me as being more essentially twee than Brooklyn. I mean, our minor league baseball team is owned by twee godfather Bill Murray, for Pete's sakes.)

But this may be a product of differing definitions. Spitz may, in fact, have done a bang-up job breaking down the influences that go into the making of a sort of Brooklyn hipster. If you think Lena Dunham is inherently twee, then, yes, this book may offer some insights into the world of people like her. Even still, it feels lacking. I'll note that crafting has exploded in Brooklyn, and while the book occasionally mentions Etsy, it fails to offer a history of the growth of this hobby, or that it was largely instigated by women in the Pacific Northwest.

Although Spitz recognizes that some of the criticisms of twee come from people who consider it somehow unmanly, he nonetheless focuses on the sort of arts that have largely been dominated by men and neglects those primarily associated with women. So not only does crafting get short-shrifted, but fan art, online cartooning, Tumble-blogging, the rise of the confessional journal, and other examples of creative spaces claimed by women go unexplored, despite the fact that there is as much twee to be found here as anywhere else. Admittedly, any book on a single subject will leave something out just for the sake of space, but, honestly, if you write a chapter on Kurt Cobain and neglect to even mention Kate Beacon's "Hark a Vagrant," you're working with a definition of twee I don't understand. And there's no Lynda Barry at all. I just, I really don't, it just doesn't.

To Spitz's credit, however, he seems to be the first to notice a sea change and to attempt to capitalize on it: It does feel as though we are exiting a time when artists were accidentally twee and entering a time when they are self-consciously twee. The building blocks of twee art are established enough that somebody can create a new assemblage from them, making, as an example, a film about unhappy but precious children and unhappy and childlike adults featuring an indie soundtrack of music made by wistful nerds, arch dialogue, and stylized camerawork borrowed from the French New Wave by way of Wes Anderson, and there you have it: A film that perfectly mimics twee affectations and ignores content. There are a lot of movies like this nowadays, and they're not often good. For every genuinely great film, like "Submarine," there are five passable films, like "Juno" and a hundred mediocre ones, like "100 Days of Summer."

That's generally how it goes in art, especially when art has a signature quality that is easy to ape but hard to duplicate. Sometimes art doesn't survive this sort of transition, moving from a fringe aesthetic to a popular one to a marketing ploy. I don't know how twee will fare -- at its worst, it can be mindlessly cutesy poo, and at its best it can be aestheticized in a way that many find irritating or alienating.

Nonetheless, it has been correctly identified as a genuine taste, and that sort of thing tends to have legs. After all, we didn't really recognize umami until 1985, even if we were nonetheless tasting it (and fearing that taste, as demonstrated by the hysteria over monosodium glutamate). Now it's hard to imagine cooking without factoring in this decidedly savory flavor.

In the same way, twee has been around for a long time, even if we have just given it a name. It may be that it falls on the dustbin of aesthetics, like kitsch or schmaltz, but I find that unlikely -- too many artists have found twee useful in interesting ways for it to be completely disregarded. But the history of twee is still being written, and its prehistory is still being discovered, despite what Marc Spitz might think.