Ink-Stained Wretches - Body Art: Marks of Identity exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York

National Review, June 5, 2000 by James Gardner

In part, tattoos reflect that convergence of high and low culture that defines much of postmodern society. This convergence ex presses itself in everything from the graffiti art of Jean-Michel Bas quiat to the casual clothes donned in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. By wearing a tattoo, by co- opting the insignia of popular culture, even outlaw culture, one seems to embrace the person at the fringes of society. The process of assimilation is an interesting one. The glamorous world of high fashion and high culture dips into the "colorful" world of the fringes, and five years later these borrowings filter down into the middle class, where they eventually expire. Put another way, piercings and tattoos have passed from bohemia and the inner city into our elite college campuses, only to end up in suburbia.

Perhaps the best explanation of the new fashion is contained in two tiny questions that go to the heart of postmodern society: Why not? and What if? From electronic books to virtual reality, from online universities and same-sex marriages to cloning and S&M, the spirit of the age expresses itself in a restive and reflexive calling into question of all things. The very fact that something is a cultural given, that it has been established for as long as men can remember, is sufficient to make it an object of suspicion and a target of radical revision. Part of what drives the taste for tattoos is the collective awakening to the fact that the body, which Western society has traditionally viewed as inviolable, as the most fixed of all things, can indeed be altered by conscious art. In this sense, body art, like cosmetic surgery, is the flashy epidermal counterpart to pace-makers and a whole generation of cloned and bionic parts that, science assures us, lies just around the corner.

One cannot say how long the taste for piercings and tattoos will last. What is certain is that, with the promise of ever-longer life spans, a whole generation in its teens and twenties will have many years to reflect on, and perhaps to repent of, these all-too-permanent whims of their youth.