My explanation for the decline in american entertainment is that most narrative art creators and all the gatekeepers have been mindkilled by politics, TDS and the Culture War.
Something like that has happened before. About 100 years ago the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture became dominated by leftist radicals that wrote political manifestos and who captured the key artistic institutions and pushed out the technically skilled artists (and spatially tilted) that were continuing the previous artistic tradition. The result has been a century of ugly art and misanthropic prestige architecture initially justified with marxist verbiage than by sheer institutional power. The verbally tilted used words to beat the spatially tilted out of art.
Classical music suffered a similar sad fate around the same time.
The radical innovators tried the same with literature but back then leftists couldn't gatekeep it effectively as the public kept buying the novels they liked bypassing the critics.
Funny enough ballet, the most aristocratic art form, survived because it had continued support from Lenin and Stalin with whom the "innovators" didn't had the balls to argue so ballet is one artform in which classical and modern styles are peacefully coexisting.
While the current decline in narrative arts is steep I argue that it has been going on for decades as the Overton Window of permitted artistic discourse became narrower and narrower.
The fractal, chaos, wordless anime, shortform are here.
The entertainment complex is trading dead, inaccurate hazy skeletons jammed with backstory, plot, archetypes, stereotypes dressing mythological thought.
Hollywood never recognized it was a language factory, it blankly remained mining stories, and no one wants them anymore. Problem is, no one knows what to replace them with.
I blame, personally, the disappearance of tastemakers, and the "great opening of culture", and the ensuing conformism-enforcement of the oversocialized (especially women). I can easily imagine "oh my gaaawd he drivin a green car hahahahaha" being a thing, just like how consuming certain oriental media gets one branded a "diddy ahh blud". Far worse, these types have now climbed to decision-making positions. This means that the bar for eccentricity is basically on the floor, and anyone even slightly original is essentially blacklisted from life.
Anyone who really wrings their hands over this so-called issue doesn't play video games or only plays call of duty and ubislop and literally nothing else. Seemingly every week some crazy masterwork of uncompromising vision drops outta nowhere and it's not slowing down, in fact it's speeding up. I have nothing but optimism here.
You may have mentioned it in part 1 but i think the biggest driver of the decline in creativity has to be size creep. Designs by a committee tend to be much more uniform than works by a single creative, and now we have more workers than ever per tv show or movie. It’s why lots of big innovations in art come from one to five man teams. One of the big reason movie trends follow books is because it’s easier to innovate with one writer than an army of writers.
Fisher argues that sometime after 2008 new songs - and books, movies, fashion, television - ceased to cohere into successive eras. This is obvious in movies: prior to 2008-2012 films can be easily dated to a period: the '70s, the late '50s, the '80s. After 2012 life is stuck in an endless present. A 2015 film is little different from a 2025 one, beyond some minor changes to brands and visual gloss. I find the same in anime: everything post 2013-4 feels like this weird monoculture of pseudo-starbucks, empty streets, generic cars, and bland skyscrapers. Similarly, consider how boring and sterile the world of Invincible is.
Humorous names for this period are "nowpunk" and "Y2K timetrap." Fisher claims we are 'trapped in the 20th century'; that the 21st century is just '20th century on higher definition screens.'
Is this related to your sense of cultural decline?
My explanation for the decline in american entertainment is that most narrative art creators and all the gatekeepers have been mindkilled by politics, TDS and the Culture War.
Something like that has happened before. About 100 years ago the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture became dominated by leftist radicals that wrote political manifestos and who captured the key artistic institutions and pushed out the technically skilled artists (and spatially tilted) that were continuing the previous artistic tradition. The result has been a century of ugly art and misanthropic prestige architecture initially justified with marxist verbiage than by sheer institutional power. The verbally tilted used words to beat the spatially tilted out of art.
Classical music suffered a similar sad fate around the same time.
The radical innovators tried the same with literature but back then leftists couldn't gatekeep it effectively as the public kept buying the novels they liked bypassing the critics.
Funny enough ballet, the most aristocratic art form, survived because it had continued support from Lenin and Stalin with whom the "innovators" didn't had the balls to argue so ballet is one artform in which classical and modern styles are peacefully coexisting.
While the current decline in narrative arts is steep I argue that it has been going on for decades as the Overton Window of permitted artistic discourse became narrower and narrower.
The fractal, chaos, wordless anime, shortform are here.
The entertainment complex is trading dead, inaccurate hazy skeletons jammed with backstory, plot, archetypes, stereotypes dressing mythological thought.
Hollywood never recognized it was a language factory, it blankly remained mining stories, and no one wants them anymore. Problem is, no one knows what to replace them with.
I blame, personally, the disappearance of tastemakers, and the "great opening of culture", and the ensuing conformism-enforcement of the oversocialized (especially women). I can easily imagine "oh my gaaawd he drivin a green car hahahahaha" being a thing, just like how consuming certain oriental media gets one branded a "diddy ahh blud". Far worse, these types have now climbed to decision-making positions. This means that the bar for eccentricity is basically on the floor, and anyone even slightly original is essentially blacklisted from life.
we should talk
I think only smart people can understand this analysis
Anyone who really wrings their hands over this so-called issue doesn't play video games or only plays call of duty and ubislop and literally nothing else. Seemingly every week some crazy masterwork of uncompromising vision drops outta nowhere and it's not slowing down, in fact it's speeding up. I have nothing but optimism here.
Gaming is definitely still alive, I think this is a problem outside of it.
You may have mentioned it in part 1 but i think the biggest driver of the decline in creativity has to be size creep. Designs by a committee tend to be much more uniform than works by a single creative, and now we have more workers than ever per tv show or movie. It’s why lots of big innovations in art come from one to five man teams. One of the big reason movie trends follow books is because it’s easier to innovate with one writer than an army of writers.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp considers his work to be art.
Fefails achieved critical mass in positions of power
Interesting theories. Have you come across Mark Fisher's theory on 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
Fisher argues that sometime after 2008 new songs - and books, movies, fashion, television - ceased to cohere into successive eras. This is obvious in movies: prior to 2008-2012 films can be easily dated to a period: the '70s, the late '50s, the '80s. After 2012 life is stuck in an endless present. A 2015 film is little different from a 2025 one, beyond some minor changes to brands and visual gloss. I find the same in anime: everything post 2013-4 feels like this weird monoculture of pseudo-starbucks, empty streets, generic cars, and bland skyscrapers. Similarly, consider how boring and sterile the world of Invincible is.
Humorous names for this period are "nowpunk" and "Y2K timetrap." Fisher claims we are 'trapped in the 20th century'; that the 21st century is just '20th century on higher definition screens.'
Is this related to your sense of cultural decline?