Would you pay £17.90 for Bubble Planet? Getty Images.
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Kids like pretending to be adults. They give dolls haircuts and make plastic meals in little plastic kitchens. They gawp in wonderment at diggers and bulldozers, then use miniature versions for their own grand construction plans, building imaginary cities where Nimbys don’t exist. They raid parental wardrobes and prance around in huge, David Byrne-esque jackets, or smear makeup on each other like drunk, giggling Cubists.
At some point after the angsty vortex of teenagerdom, this flips around. Kids who want to be adults grow into adults who want to be kids. Many young(ish) professionals in their twenties and thirties are “kidults”: they spend their free time and disposable income on experiences such as Bubble Planet, which opened last weekend in London. This 11-room “immersive experience” is filled with giant pink balloons, bouncy inflatable clouds, a hall of mirrors, and an LSD sheet’s worth of colourful projections.
There’s also Dopamine Land, an “interactive sensory museum” with pillow fights and musical tiles, and Ballie Ballerson, where you drink cocktails and flail in ball pits with other consenting adults. The London Transport Museum, ostensibly aimed at children, has offered evening “Permission to Play” openings for grown-ups. Kidults are also propping up the physical toy industry, particularly at the higher end of the market — £150 water guns and £735 Lego kits are a bit out of reach for pocket money. “Disney adults” dedicated to Mickey and friends are such an established subculture that they’ve got their own gift guides.
The reason why adults might want to pretend to be children is obvious: growing up has turned out to be a trap. Buying a home, particularly in a city, is nigh-on impossible. With so many young people stuck in a cut-throat rental market, or even living with their parents, it’s unsurprising that they’re getting married and having children later, if at all. Why not spend the little income that doesn’t go to your Boomer landlord on tranquillising yourself with nostalgia?
At KidZania, in the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, children can explore a miniature city in which they do work-like activities and earn pretend money called kidZos. The professions on offer skew towards what kids think are cool (pilots and firefighters), and those that uphold KidZania’s state security apparatus (spies, police officers and bank guards). The kind of midrange email jobs which most kids will grow up to do are absent. KidZania has adults-only nights too, where you can put yourself in “the driver’s seat of your dream career”. Adults are playing at being kids playing at being adults, because the grown-up futures they used to act out were so much more hopeful than the ones they got.
Childishness is also rampant in cinema. Marvel’s all-conquering superhero films, numbering 33 and counting, have generated a combined $30 billion at cinemas. The beginnings were inauspicious: the first movie based on a Marvel comic character was 1986’s Howard the Duck, about a duck from outer space. It didn’t do well. Robin Williams voiced Howard for about a week before quitting in disgust. “I can’t do this,” he reportedly said. “I am being handcuffed in order to match the flapping duck’s bill.” But since Iron Man was released in 2008, things have gone rather better, and Marvel has absorbed practically every A-list actor and director into its sprawling, easy-watching empire. (One notable exception is Leonardo DiCaprio, who once warned Timothée Chalamet: “No hard drugs and no superhero movies.”)
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SubscribeThe problem is not that pop culture is ascendant, because pop culture, by definition, is always ascendant. The problem is that artists today see neither a need nor a desire to transcend pop culture. Shakespeare wrote revenge plays and bawdy comedies, the superhero movies and stoner flicks of his day, but by virtue of sheer art he elevated them from pop culture to high culture. Virtually every aspect of The Magic Flute is utterly ludicrous, yet Mozart took something ridiculous and transformed it into something sublime. What artists today seek to do the same? They’d rather make a buck than make a work of art.
Succinctly (and beautifully) put.
But did people see Shakespeare’s output as art in his own time? Will people see the songs of the Beatles as art, say 200 years from now? Artists tend to get plaudits after they’ve died.
Yes and yes.
Oblahdiohbladahsheluvsyouyehyehyehiwannaholdyourhandluvluvmedo..
“The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud But nobody ever hears him or the sound he appears to make……He never listens to them He knows that they’re the fools They don’t like him
The Fool On The Hill.
I always wondered how Paul McCartney wrote a song about me when he never was within a hundred miles of me or are we all at heart A Fool On A Hill.
You and a few million others. A good song I’ll agree, but Shakespeare? Not.
No and yes
One aspect of this phenomenon that the author doesn’t mention is that kidults quite often display a dislike for, or even hostility towards, real children.
I first became aware of this when a while ago, a demand arose for “adults only” screenings of Harry Potter films, so that “grown-ups” could go and watch a kids film unencumbered by the presence of actual kids. All very strange, if you ask me….
Childhood is wasted on children. Adults are so much better at being children than kids are.
Well we’ve already got the point when men are better at being women than women are so this is logical next step.
When you’re a kid the cool kids (who are also full of pain and anguish) hurt you then when you grow up you realise they were jealous because your Mum and Dad loved you and cared about you.
That’s a huge generalization.
“Youth is wasted on the young”….Frank Sinatra.
I thought it was Zaphod Beebelbrox the Second.
Kidults have the patience of children. And are therefore resentful when they need to show patience to actual children.
They call them ankle biters don’t they or is that Jack Russells.
Are all children secretly Jack Russell terriers in disguise? Discuss amongst yourselves.
Aw,ha ha!
The main danger of this (deliberately imposed?) trend of infantilisation of adults is that people who happily relinquish their adulthood also relinquish their responsibility as individuals with their own agency – a direct way to a totalitarian society, I am afraid.
Precisely.
Or simply a decadent one.
I don’t see any major contradiction here: a decadent society lends itself nicely to becoming a totalitarian one (examples abound).
And for the totalitarian nomenklatura life will be very, very decadent – that’s for sure, I would say.
This isn’t an issue that bothers me too much but I do hate it when some celeb,it’s usually one of those if it’s in the media,when they get in trouble for some appalling action and some yoof style commentator will say ” well they’re a kid,kids do that” and the perpetrator of whatever rude obnoxiousness is in they’re late 20s or even mid 30s!
What you give as an example coincides with a large part of what I said: absolving adults from any responsibility for their actions. I find it reprehensible even if parents act like this towards their children: just shrugging everything off, “because what could we expect from children?”. I think that one of the best things parents could do is to instill in their children the notion of personal responsibility, adapting to the child’s age, but consistently.
Or is it a relinquishing of the self ( think giving authority and decision making over to tech) and, or a lack of strong wise adult leadership.
In our current waters, nobody knows where this ship is sailing.
I think these are all different facets of the same phenomenon: it’s not so difficult to envisage a possible emergence of high-tech/AI-assisted totalitarianism. And without strong, adult and, I would add, principled leadership the ship would hardly be sailing in a good direction. Or would hardly be sailing for long, for that matter.
What strange times when we talk about “high culture”, once a key marker of elite establishment taste, as subversive. And how much stranger that such a characterisation should be accurate.
“Beauty will save the world”. True art and beauty inspires people. That doesn’t bode well for the elite establishment, hence the corporate Hollywood slop and endless TikTok videos that are shoveled down the masses’ throats.
But nobody has to actually watch it,consume it,buy it. I don’t.
Or is it that true beauty in visual art use to speak to something much more sublime and transcendent than what we are currently seeing.
“Arthouse films generally consist of rich Europeans being sad or poor Europeans being happy.”
Effing perfect, and an apt description of leftism generally.
Modern leftism perhaps. Traditionally the left felt the opposite to be true, and felt it to be massively unfair.
The bourgeoisie (for want of a better term) tended to view the poor as having a lower sensitivity to suffering (and just about everything else) than they did. They simply felt more than the brutish lower orders. Your sad rich Europeans are the inheritors of this. And it’s a very odd form of leftism, focussed more on their own sensitivity to the suffering of others than on the suffering itself.
Try watching some A24 movies. That’s what arthouse films really consist of.
Rich people BAD. Poor people GOOD.
The idea I was brought up with.
When I got to meet actual rich people and actual Poor people I found it was the exact opposite. Sorry,but it’s true..
Have to disagree. When I (briefly) worked in the “construction sector” for three years in the 80s I found the kindest, most generous people were those who had the least to share. And vice versa. Not universally but generally.
Ditto. Human beings are a mixed bag at any level of wealth. But as a gross generalisation, the ones with less are nicer.
Virtues & values seem to be the difference, whether rich or poor.
Millennials won’t grow up because they aren’t being thrust into the circumstances that have forced previous generations to grow up. No one in previous decades thought “right. I’m an adult now. Better have kids, start doing DIY and making strained noises when I move”. Those things just happened to them.
Is getting a mortgage the indispensable essence of adulthood? I wonder how people grew up before there were building societies. Or in countries where renting is more acceptable. I guess that explains why German men wear lederhosen, though.
I think renting would be fine if the cost was far lower. But both are through the roof.
The reason I disagree with this take is summed up in the words of Clive James:
“Art does not advance through technique, it accumulates through quality.”
Quality exists in both the avant garde and kitsch (to borrow the terminology used above). The mistake is believing that quality can only exist in one or the other.
I think what you perhaps mean is that there is popular art which is unrecognised (even sneered at) in its day – but which clearly had value. Often this value is later recognised and approved.
But I don’t think that it was ever kitsch.
Indeed, very often some dust has to settle for a work of art to be recognised as such. My personal calculation is that it takes 50-60 years (at least, for visual arts).
As for kitsch, I really don’t know. An opposite example springs to mind: to my taste, all palaces I’ve ever seen, are rather kitschy, but they were not considered in this way at the time they were built (and used). So, maybe some kitsch of today will be (rightly?) admired as a masterpiece in a couple of generations? Who knows?
I think that is the case whenever there is an ostentatious show of wealth and power. It tends to gaudiness. But there is some great baroque architecture which manages to avoid that.
Some things are admired years later because they encapsulate the age they came from, kitsch or not.
I’m more cynical. Taste was a big status marker. Most people could not tell good art from bad unless it was labelled thus for them. And to praise the unapproved, or plebeian could be a social faux pas unless you were really confident in your taste.
The positive labelling of stuff took time.
My personal opinion is that our Crown Jewels look like something from Poundland.
Yeah but come on, they wrote the rule book for Poundland. And Mara Lago.
One of the distinguishing marks of a great work of art (as opposed to kitsch or, for instance, much of the ‘political’ art we see on gallery walls) is that eventually, it comes to be seen as having universality, i.e. applies across a broad spectrum of human nature and beyond the concerns of its own particular era.
This is why it can take some time to be recognised, in the way that Vesselina Zaitzeva suggests.
The supreme irony for me is that Woking Class adults do everything they can to turn children into premature adults! For example, providing kindergarten school children with lessons on how to masturbate (AKA ‘self-stimulate’)!
[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sex-education-lessons-uk-schools-20144000]
The lady in the photo has a rather saucy expression. Not so sure about that it’s so innocent
I almost gave up at ‘angsty vortex of teenagerdom’. Can Unherd writers please stop trying to make the essay “interesting”.