Cool is Very French

Feigned diffidence, sprezzatura, ironic distancing, and deadpan detachment are all forms of cool. Cool has nothing to do with style and is all about strategic intent and a sense of cleverness.

We can trace cool back to ancient Greece, but its modern version is rooted in Dada and Surrealism, and previous incarnations in the late 19th century France with Les Arts Incoherents, Alphonse Allais, as well as the 'pataphysicians around the same time (Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp).

To me, Duchamp was one of the coolest people in the last century. He introduced the modern version of artistic sprezzatura, based around new radical definitions which had nothing to do with the retinal and all to do with the intellect--decidedly playful--and suffused with a surrender to the weirdness of the universe--and how the individual mind and group mind interprets it. Cool, in many ways is essentially French, but migrated to the U.S.--especially postwar.

Joel Dinerstein wrote an (excellent) book about this a few years ago on the history of American cool. Cool really started to take hold in the early 50s with cool film stars like James Dean and the whole noir era of cinema, police procedurals, Marlon Brando, Elvis. In art, it was somewhat different, but certainly, artists saw this as an opportunity to be creative—that you could get away with anything simply by seeming not to care. In Chinese philosophy, this is known as wu wei, but is distinctly different, and is at best a weak appropriation. But in a purely metaphysical (and 'pataphysical) sense they are very similar.

Social media extends these ideas with things like hashtags, a medium in which vague meanings become popular. The Pop Art movement ultimately got its name from a similar appropriation--a collage by Richard Hamilton inspired by the elders of Dada in France.

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Incidentally, 2019 is the Centennial of DuChamp's  L.H.O.O.Q. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q.