Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill

[BidenPresident]

A Times critic argues that ours is the least innovative century for the arts in 500 years.

If the present state of culture feels directionless that is principally because we are still inculcated, so unconsciously we never even bother to spell it out, in what the modernists believed: that good art is good because it is innovative, and that an ambitious writer, composer, director or choreographer should not make things too much like what others have made before. But our culture has not been able to deliver step changes for quite some time.

When you walk through your local museum’s modern wing, starting with Impressionism and following a succession of avant-gardes through the development of Cubism, Dada, Pop, minimalism, in the 1990s you arrive in a forest called “the contemporary,” and after more than 30 years no path forward has been revealed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html

Good point. Our nation is very conservative.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

The reasons for that are many and include:

Corporatism. When large corporations will only allow stuff that they think is profitable to move forward and stifle innovation, there's a problem. Disney is a good example of this in action.

Putting politics ahead of results / outcomes. That is, it has become more important that you are the correct gender, ethnicity, race, socio-economic position, politically correct, etc., person than what you turn out in terms of culture / art. Politics makes it possible for incompetence and schlock to become valued.

Intellectual vapidity. Many museums, libraries, and other bastions of culture and intellect have become purveyors of the worst of pop culture. They pander to the puerile and stupid rather than uphold a higher standard.

 

[BidenPresident]

The reasons for that are many and include:

Corporatism. When large corporations will only allow stuff that they think is profitable to move forward and stifle innovation, there's a problem. Disney is a good example of this in action.

Putting politics ahead of results / outcomes. That is, it has become more important that you are the correct gender, ethnicity, race, socio-economic position, politically correct, etc., person than what you turn out in terms of culture / art. Politics makes it possible for incompetence and schlock to become valued.

Intellectual vapidity. Many museums, libraries, and other bastions of culture and intellect have become purveyors of the worst of pop culture. They pander to the puerile and stupid rather than uphold a higher standard.

"Very unfortunately, this evangelical turn in the arts in the 21st century has been conflated with the long-overdue admission of women, people of color and out sexual minorities into the culture industry — conflated, not least, by its P.R. departments. A gay rom-com is trotted out as “the first”; a Black Little Mermaid is a “breakthrough”; our museums, studios and publishing houses can bring nothing new to market except the very people they once systematically excluded. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/magazine/stale-culture.html