We shopped. Then we dropped. Then we started making culture again — dancing on the rubble of our own excesses, stitching together art from the ragbag of our desires.

Every generation or so, throughout modern American history, the culture of hardship has followed hard on the heels of the culture of consumption and prosperity.

When good times go south, Americans typically have turned for relief either to defiant gallows humor or have sought comfort in idealized visions of a purer, resilient, close-knit Heartland, far from the scoundrels on Wall Street and their political enablers in Washington, D.C.

The financial shifts and shafts of the late 1800s spurred Mark Twain's skeptical wit ("He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty") and Thomas Nast's savage caricatures.

In the 1930s, the banks panicked, the Champagne bubbles burst and our ancestors went from black tie to bib overalls, "Blue Skies" to "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and "decadent" modern art to the reassuring pictorial homilies of Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell.

The inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s sent many Americans scurrying backward in time to "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie," to mind-numbing "soft rock" and patriotic uplift like "Rocky."

So now that unhappy days are here again, some commentators predictably are predicting a coming "culture of restraint," a resurgence of thriftiness, self-reliance and homespun values, as if Americans were going to ditch their flat-screen TVs and gas-guzzling vehicles and take up quilting and reading Emerson by candlelight.

Neither the aesthetics nor the attitudes that underpinned previous cultures of boom and bust apply in quite the same way today. Britney Spears isn't likely to put out a CD of Woody Guthrie covers. Louis Vuitton probably won't sign up Annie Leibovitz to shoot the photo spread for a "Migrant Mother" fall fashion collection.

Yet scattered hints exist of a future culture that might hold mindless acquisitiveness in check.

NO COMMON CULTURE

What's different this time around from previous recessionary periods? For one thing, as University of Texas professor Richard Pells points out, the mass culture of the 1930s and '40s (when 75 percent of all Americans went to the movies at least once a week) has been splintered into a thousand niche markets.

"We don't have the sense of a shared common culture that we did in the '30s or after World War II," says Pells, author of "Radical Visions & American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years." "Movies were always, with radio, the common culture. There's nothing comparable today."

Bye-bye, Frank Capra. Hello, Gizmodo.com.

What's more, Pells says, the dirt-streaked faces of Dust Bowl farmers and despairing Southern sharecroppers lent themselves to cultural iconography during the Great Depression: heroic proletarians marching resolutely in post office murals, as thousands of Okies in Model Ts streamed toward California like wagon trains.

By contrast, the great economic collapse of 2008, with its huge, international cast of players and its abstract jargon ("subprime mortgages," "illiquidity") might be harder for artists and culture-makers to depict in a few simple words or images.

Most important, the United States today is more of a technology-driven consumer society than an aspirational one. When the stock market crashed in 1929, most Americans were agrarian-based and poor by modern measurements. A much smaller percentage owned stocks than do now.

Today, consumption is deeply embedded in virtually every creative transaction, literally hard-wired into the way that culture is produced.

LABELING OF AN ERA

So: Does it follow that Americans, terrified and chastened by the economic meltdown, will go back and consult their Poor Richard's Almanack on the virtues of thrift? Does a 70 percent pre-Christmas sale herald the birth of a spirit of sacrifice and moderation?

The instant labeling of an era is, in itself, a form of commodification, an attempt to brand-name and market a cultural epoch.

But an incipient American (counter)culture might be emerging, based on evolving notions of community, transparency, an emphasis on cultural recycling (fabric scraps, music samples) and a growing interest in the world east of Long Island and west of Hawai'i.

In art, movies, fashion and Internet social networking sites, we can see the vague outlines of such a culture taking shape, less idealistic but maybe more pragmatic than the Hippie Utopianism of the 1960s.

"Slumdog Millionaire," an Oscar contender for best picture, is set in the slums of Mumbai, India, and satirizes the globalization of the get-rich-quick mania.

Another of last year's key films, "Wall-E," warns of a future in which consumer comforts have trapped the human race in a state of arrested infantilism, turning us all into slovenly big babies.

In the 1930s, pop culture invited Americans to escape into suave, Fred Astaire fantasies of the high life or, alternatively, reinforced the idea that people were better off making do with less. Some of this second outlook could return, historian Pells says. "You're getting a lot of talk today about the need not only to reform but to re-examine values."

In yearning for a "culture of restraint" and a spirit of shared sacrifice, some observers believe Americans really are yearning for community.

Alladi Venkatesh, a professor of management at the University of California, Irvine, says that a resurgent American culture in the challenging years ahead might be grounded in small, grass-roots community efforts and experimentation, and in pooling local resources. The Indian-born academic suggests that America's long cultural traditions of self-reliance (Emerson, Thoreau) also could serve as modern-day inspirations.

But, he cautions, "It takes time for people to change their value systems so they can appreciate those kinds of things."

Or, possibly, rediscover them.