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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).
Niche stuff is where it’s at. Not just for the
hipster credthrill of getting there first, either! When the mass-market incentives break down, you get weird and wonderful nonsense. The discords, like the subreddits before them, or the single-topic forums which still hang on, aren’t themselves art. They are the vehicle which perpetuates art on the smallest scale.More options
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