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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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