Artmageddon

An Update on The End of Art

(Midjourney)

A few months ago, I declared the end of art. This is my most popular post and, considering recent news, I can see why it struck a chord.

Recent news?

• There is no money to be made in streaming whatsoever. Which doesn’t affect much except all of film, television and music. All of pop culture, to be succinct.

• After decades of “growth at any cost,” investors are starting to demand actual profits from tech

• With all the hype and excitement over AI, it seems to attract lawsuits more easily than it does revenue

Or, to make this simpler to understand (but no more easy to swallow), nothing in media is making money. Nothing.

So the update that I promised in the subhed: it is not only art that’s dead, but pop culture. Massive blockbusters¹, pop music, a hit sitcom; all of these dreams are now over too.

In the Unherd article linked to above, the writer says the ‘90s was the last truly great decade for pop culture. I would expand that to the ‘00s and just say the turn of the century. It may be true that film and music declined artistically and commercially respectively in the ‘00s, but television was never better and the Internet culture was at its peak.

Funny thing about television never being better: it only got better when it was threatened by DVRs and the Internet. Television shows like The Sopranos gave subscribers a reason to keep HBO. Even weekly potboilers like 24 had a serial structure that threw cliffhanger after cliffhanger at you to keep your interest.

This isn’t the first time that greatness grew from financial disaster. There was talk of movie theaters going extinct back in the ‘60s, before New Hollywood and the American New Wave fixed that. The 1980s may have had megastars like Michael Jackson (much like our current streaming hell currently has megastars like Taylor Swift) but, with studios losing money by making expensive music videos and paying MTV to play them (to say nothing of people recording songs on cassette off the radio) the music industry was not great. In the ‘90s, however, MTV had moved away from music videos and the profit margins of CDs exploded after vinyl became obsolete and tapes were on their way out, leaving no alternative. One last great gold rush before Napster and everything after.

So now here we are. With film as bad as it was in the ‘60s, music as hard to make profitable as it was in the ‘80s and tech and TV both in the red like the early ‘00s. Could this mean a golden age for film, music, tech and TV by the end of this decade or the beginning of the next?

Two things make me hopeful: Barbenheimer not only means audiences like going to movie theaters, but they also like (arguably prefer) non-CGI special effects. Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were made with little to no CGI.

Also, looking back at the “end-of-art” post that this whole thing you’re reading now is an update on, I can happily announce that NOBODY remembers “Heart on Sleeve.” You don’t either? Come on, think hard? Nothing? It was literally three months ago! “Heart on Sleeve” was that fake Drake-Weekend AI song that went viral on TikTok. That was supposed to put them both in retirement. Why are we drawing blanks like we are in a Hangman tournament then? I say we prefer songs that remind us of kissing, revelry, even driving fast out of a Wendy’s drive-thru more than we prefer to remember that time our smug coworker tricked us into thinking Drake dropped a new banger.

But, lets just say it all goes in flames. The shows, the songs, human-created vids, the films. What are we missing exactly? Dave Holmes wrote a great piece for Esquire in 2019 about how 2003-2012 was the era of disposable music. He is wrong only when he says that it ended. Spotify increasingly makes playlists for you. Playlists for your jog, your drive, etc. And wouldn’t you know it, even the songs and artists you do like, they are less about the artist and the album, more about the vibe. No art, just vibes, remember? Does this just apply to music though? What were the best films of last year? Ahh-ahh — NO LOOKSIES! You forgot about Barbarian? So did I. It happens. Wait we LOVED Tar! It was so transgressive.

I say let it burn. I don’t say this like a Christopher Nolan villain, just burning for burning’s sake (“L'burn pour l'burn"). I honestly am curious to see what rises from the ashes. Hopefully something better than your coworker playing another fake banger and saying “GOTTEM!”

1. With the strike, you would do right to see Barbie and Oppenheimer as the end of an era more than the beginning