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Right now, we are at a place of polarization, yet all of our art sucks (my opinion obviously but it seems to be shared). If you look back at the last time our country was this divided in the 1960's, we saw some of the greatest output of music and literature we have ever seen. We had incredible artists like the Beatles among others. Then of course that was probably the peak of black culture with incredible artistic output that they will probably never reach again. This was probably the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts. If you take it back to the French Revolution, you saw some of the best political philosophy ever created such as with Rousseau. Political discord creates art and philosophy that has usually never been seen before, but today we don't see any of that. Even Monty Python is more subversive than anything we see today. Clockwork Orange was more subversive than anything we see today. Why aren't we seeing a peak in art again like the time should predict?
I disagree. We're in a golden age of artistic and political output, you just have to look harder for it. Everything from e/acc to esoteric Hitlerism, primitivism to safetyism, it's all there.
There's thousands of tiny, niche bands on youtube you'd never be able to find 20 years ago. Everyone and their dog has a substack these days, half the people on this forum do, a few (Kulak and TracingWoodgrains) are mildly influential thoughtleaders. We're literally doing novel political theory and discussion on this forum right now. Nobody could dream of anything like this in the 1960s.
Just because hollywood megacorps aren't making a bunch of great movies, it doesn't mean great art isn't being made. Webnovels, fan films, twitter, 4chan boards, discord servers, memes. There's more subversion than you can poke a stick at. With a decent GPU and very limited technical skills you can make your own art.
And there are new kinds of art. Dogecoin has a market cap of 11 billion USD, Shiba Inu is at 5 billion. What is that if not performance art on a grand scale? Art doesn't stay the same, you don't just get new kinds of old things. We had the Beatles, Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings, Top Gear and we're not going to get them again. When we do, they won't be at the level we remember.
I agree there's new and exciting things happening in political discourse, but art is still lagging behind, unless I've missed some great niche stuff (but in my defense - it is niche...), and if 4chan, discord and memes are art, it's the absolutely most shallow form of it (with the possible exception of Capture The Flag, but that was already ages ago).
Even outside of niche I think you’re still ignoring a lot of mainstream art.
What about the Golden Age of Television we’ve had this century? Before shows like The Sopranos and The Wire came along, TV programmes were mostly formulaic, episodic time-fillers and even the best were severely constrained by the need for each episode to be a self-contained narrative, and to stretch the budget across 24 episode per season. Now the most prestigious cinema has mostly migrated to the small screen and the shows we’ve gotten in the last 25 years could never have existed in the 20th century; the 90 minute Hollywood film is no longer as relevant and it’s normal that it peaked in the past.
What about video games? In terms of revenue they now completely dwarf Hollywood and the music industry combined and again the kinds of stories and experience we have today would have been completely impossible in the past. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3 are amazing works of art not just in the visuals but in their narrative.
CG animation in general is an amazing new medium and I’m often impressed by even random animated shorts I find on YouTube, let alone big budget productions.
To me what you’re saying would be like a Medieval English bard time travelling to 20th century and complaining that we don’t make good art anymore because we haven’t produced any better epic poems since Beowulf; that’s normal, people move on to new mediums. And before you deride TV, video games and CG as “not real art”, know that previous generations said they exact same thing about films, photography, even novels. The written word was derided by the Ancient Greeks as causing forgetfulness and that true wisdom could only be taught orally; by their standards, the works of Rousseau or any modern philosopher would be worthless.
I’m sure that in the future when we’re all playing fully immersive virtual reality experiences, people will look to the current day with nostalgia and complain that art is dead because we don’t make good video games you can play on a flat screen anymore.
I agree to some extent with your post bit the narrative and the writing in general in BG3 was decidedly not amazing.
It's a great game but the narrative isn't the strong part.
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Died a horrible death with the fifth season of GOT? What are the hot new shows nowadays?
Talk about formulaic... I couldn't make myself finish the Witcher 3, the writing was pretty good, but it didn't cut it for me as a game. By the time we got to Cyberpunk 2077, I was thoroughly burned out on AAA stuff so I never gave it a go, and never heard anything about it that would make me reconsider. Every once in a while some decent niche stuff comes out, but nothing "great".
Impressive how? Every once in a while I bump into something I consider pretty neat, but we were talking about "great".
That's not the issue. My definition of art is pretty expansive, to the point that I don't know if I could actually pin it down. Basically, anything meant to express something could be art (like I said I consider 4chan's Capture The Flag to be art, probably the best performance art I've ever seen, though I tend to hate performance art so maybe it's not saying much), and even then some things that weren't meant to express anything are sometimes taken as an expression of something, and maybe they're art too? Hell if I know, a question for the philosophers.
In another comment I mentioned hype, it might not be the best way to measure whether something is great, but it's something. The logic here is that if someone sees something they consider great, they'll talk your ear off about how awesome it is. The last great piece of art that I saw was Psycho Pass, I rewatch it periodically, and I could still write a several thousand word essay about how great it is. This is something people used to do all the time. I'll accept several-hour-long video essays if you tell me that Zoomers can't handle that much text, but show me something that shows how excited you are. In the last few years it seems like even paid shills don't have it in them to shill properly.
What died with GOT was a singular, high quality show dominating pop culture, but there’s been spectacular shows since. Better Call Saul, Mr Robot, Dark, Queen’s Gambit are all post S5 of Game of Thrones, and in terms of ongoing shows, there’s Arcane, which is an artistic masterpiece that has no right to be based on League of Legends, there’s also Severance, Andor, two new Star Trek shows that are actually respectful of the source material, The Last of Us, 1883…
I’d argue TV is only getting better (although maybe the recent writer’s strike will put a stop to it). But the point was that we peaked in the 20th century, so even GoT disproves the argument despite only being good until 2014.
That’s a matter of personal taste then. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an incredible work and calling it “niche” would make that word meaningless given that it was the #1 best selling game on Steam on launch and won numerous high profile awards.
Sounds like a “vibecession” of art rather than any real artistic decline. Maybe you’re also just suffering from nostalgia?
Or maybe one of the problems is the death of a mainstream media culture, which I agree had its last major hurrah with Game of Thrones. There’s no single “hot new show” anymore, there’s a ton of shows with a few incredible ones amidst a sea of trash, and you can’t rely on what’s #1 to tell you what’s good or bad.
O_o Honestly that statement seems indefensible to me, there is very little original material and so much of what we get pales in comparison to the source. You listed twelve shows, out of them a grand total of two were not based on pre-existing ip. And in my opinion, very few of them even understand the concept of respecting the source material, they are just varying levels of cargo culting what came before, because they are produced by creatively bankrupt corporations rlhfing every show into the same hr designed slop.
Edit: hyperbole toned down
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Dark was meh, and I'm having a hard time believing that the girl-power fake bio-flic was "spectacular". The other ones I admittedly didn't watch, but how many things do I have to try and say they aren't any good before I'm allowed to say they're not making good things anymore.
I think we had someone geeking out over Arcane over here, so I can grant that one, I heard Andor and some of the latest Treks were good, but this was after a series of disappointments, so I'm not sure how high the bar is. The rest I hardly heard anyone talk about at all
I agree it's not niche, but nothing I heard of it would classify it as incredible. It seems on par with all the other Forgotten Realms RPGs that came out over the last couple decades?
I don't know... The TV show was made in 2014, the books it's based on started in the 90's and themselves have been declining after the turn of the millennium, and it doesn't look like they will ever be finished.
Not really, I prefer the unfamiliar to the familiar, and the constant attempts to cash in on nostalgia is what turned me off from modern culture to begin with. Even when I watch old stuff, most of it is from before my time.
Maybe. I'm hardly one for longing to be part of the mainstream, but I do feel somewhat disturbed by the utter lack of excitement in normie culture. Can't help the feeling that it marks some form of cultural decline, even if there is good art still being produced.
Its much much better than anything else FR the last two decades at least. Its a great and expansive game with overall mediocre/serviceable Larian writing (but this time with a few stand out moments that actually are good).
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S'all opinions, but nearly all the new Trek stuff is awful to varying degrees. Strange New Worlds may the best of the bunch (not saying much) by virtue of not being a nihilistic, mean-spirited mess, but you get the impression the writers would rather be penning Buffy. I'm not dead set against a musical Trek episode, but when you have your Klingons mimicing KPop instead of Klingon Opera - without even the presence of Q to justify the absurdities - it's just a lollygag.
If you have any fondness for TNG, S3 of Picard is surprisingly decent, and probably the best sendoff for the cast under these current conditions. But even so, it feels more noteworthy as an impressive salvage operation given what came before. It's also bittersweet seeing the flame flickering on the candle again, knowing it's soon to be buried in turds as if to apologize for being decent for one single season.
Also, spoiler for the ending dilemma if you'd like a little thematic titillation: The youth of the Federation has been infiltrated and brainwashed by an alien enemy to destroy it from within. Space Boomers need to save the day.
Gotta say I found this pretty bold in today's age where media goes great lengths to kiss younger generations' asses, and I'm surprised I've barely even seen it discussed! There's no moment where the plucky young cadet winkingly upstages the Enterprise crew, thank fucking God.
What do you think about Lower decks?
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In the case of Severance, that's legitimately a shame. It's really, really good. Arcane likewise was unbelievably fantastic.
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