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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?
Two quotes come to mind:
Jordan Peterson's much-memed "There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see"
The Last Psychiatrist's "If you're reading it, it's for you"
It seems obvious to me that anyone with your attitude, living in the current digital age - where it has literally never been easier to create and disseminate works of art - is someone who is actively choosing the role of the curmudgeon. Consciously or not, you are allowing yourself to calcify, closing yourself off from experience, embracing the lazy "nothing is as good when as I was a teenager" mentality. The state of art hasn't meaningfully changed, but your brain and your habits and your openness to experience has. Fight it. Stop being lazy.
Is the contention that the developments of the last couple decades that made things far easier than ever to create and disseminate works of art have not meaningfully changed the state of art? I think it could be true, but it's not obviously true to me, and it seems counterintuitive; surely the absolute explosion of both opportunities to develop one's craft and to disseminate the results of such work would cause a shift both in what types of people are creating art and what types of art those people are creating? But then again, depending on what "meaningfully" means in "meaningfully changed," all that shift might not amount to anything meaningful. In which case it raises the issue that the state of the art doesn't need to "meaningfully" change for this particular meaning of "meaningfully" to change how and how much enjoyment someone gets out of the art.
I will say, personally, I'm agnostic on this question. I think the quality of mainstream films has almost certainly gone down significantly, but I have no way of proving it or even meaningfully analyzing it. But much of the artistry in video has shifted to online video on places like YouTube or Twitch, which have entirely different forms of video art than a film or TV show. The commentary and reaction videos on YouTube are works of art, many of them are essentially professional-quality feature-length documentaries, and they're being pumped out at rates faster than ever before. The streams we see on Twitch or YouTube are essentially real-time reality shows and are works of performance art, again at never-before-seen volume and also production values that match professionals from just a generation ago. Are there some truly great works of art in here that equal the greatness of, I don't know, 2001: A Space Odyssey? Maybe, but it would certainly look very different from a film and likely be unrecognizable as great if judged by the standards of a scripted medium like film.
Then there's all the other mediums like 2D illustrations which has recently seen the hints of the advent of an era that would produce, to quote someone on this forum, IIRC, "beauty to cheap to meter," or video games which are almost a whole new medium altogether compared to a generation ago, and certainly compared to 2 generations ago. But does that mean we just get more and more technically impressive but compositionally/stylistically boring AI slop or addiction-optimized live service games?
Well, that's why I'm agnostic on the matter, I guess.
I think the issue is that getting your art in front of a substantial audience is an issue more than anything else. I can make and record a song, or even a movie or tv series and upload it fairly easily, I cannot so easily get around the gatekeepers and algorithms that control what people see.
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