Art is Dead. Long Live Art.
Exploring the economic and cultural catalysts that shape how and what we consume
A recent blog by music critic Ted Gioia, first published on his Substack then syndicated in the Atlantic, turned me on to this interesting statistic from the music industry.
For the first time since MRC Data began tracking streaming music in 2008, the audio streaming of Current music (music released less than 18 months ago) actually declined. This led to a significant increase in Catalog’s share of the audio on-demand streaming universe, with 70% in 2021 vs 65% in 2020. 1
It wasn’t that 2021 lacked new music; some of the biggest artists — Drake, Taylor Swift, Adele — released new albums. Still, people listened to less new music than ever before.
Gioia is quick to identify contributing factors: the increased popularity of vinyl, young audiences who discover old artists through TikTok, 1960s artists selling their catalogs, record labels unwilling and uninterested in taking risks with new artists, and radio stations who rely on old hits in their shrinking rotation, to name a few.
These factors mainly revolve around the business decisions made by music industry gate-keepers, though some, like vinyl and TikTok, are cultural trends, developing from the bottom-up, not the top-down. Gioia doesn’t offer much explanation as to why these trends occur, only the results of their impact.
Speculating on the “why” is as interesting to me as the outcomes. For example, in addition to all the reasons Gioia lists, maybe the pandemic has made us nostalgic for older songs or given us more time to explore the deep recesses of Spotify and Apple Music. It’s a wholly subjective exercise to ask why but one that’s enjoyable to think through as a thought experiment of sorts.
In this post, I’ll look at four different art forms—fine art, literature, film, and music—and propose an argument about the current state of each discipline. Then, like Gioia, I’ll look at the industry and cultural shifts to attempt to answer “why”. I’ll also point to a single moment or year that encaptures all the changes I’m describing.
Fine Art/Painting
Argument: Popular audiences don’t care about contemporary art.
Fine art is the best place to start because of the four art forms, it experienced the biggest shift in consumption in the last 100-200 years. To put it bluntly, fine art is dead to popular audiences.
What do I mean by dead? Try to answer this question: name a famous painter born after 1930. Better yet, name a famous painting from the last fifty years. It’s nearly impossible. The closest thing we have is Banksy. Does graffiti count?
Let’s make a distinction before going any further. Most people are quick to say, “I hate modern art” or “I don’t get modern art.” What they really mean to say is, “I hate contemporary art.” Technically, we’ve left the modern period, and while it was still polarizing for many audiences, it’s where we find our last commonly-known art figures, people like Mondrian, Lichtenstein, and Pollack. All of them were born before 1925 and did most of their work before the 60s.
Contemporary fine art still exists, and for a certain sliver of the world, it has relevance. Additionally, talented artists continue to paint in more traditional styles and make a living. Nevertheless, most of us stopped caring about new art a long time ago, or at least we’ve never bonded as a culture over a single art piece or artist.
Why this shift? And what were the trends that led to fine arts demise in the zeitgeist?
If I were to pick someone who personified the shift from modern art to contemporary art, it would be Andy Warhol. He’s perhaps the last massively popular artist. Warhol tested just how far your average art appreciator would be willing to actually call something “art.” Pollack’s wild smatterings of paint, Mondrian’s tidy squares, and Lichtenstein’s cartoons were already pushing their luck. But a can of Campbell’s soup? That was the beginning of the end.
The Campbell’s Cans qualifies as art to me because of their commentary. They blur the lines between mass marketing, art, and consumption. At the same time, Warhol essentially said through this piece, “anything can be art!” And so it sadly is today. If you want to be annoyed with contemporary art, look at this collection presenting some of the National Gallery’s best pieces since 1950. You won’t find much beauty in the traditional sense.
There are other trends worth mentioning that led to fine arts diminishing relevance. Perhaps color photography, television, or movies turned popular audiences away. Another trend is the popularity of art museums. When the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim opened in New York, did that not signal the end of an era? Modern art was now firmly in the past, out of the gallery and into the archives, taking with it the appreciation for newer pieces.
Literature
Argument: The great American novel has disappeared.
I can start talking about literature with the same question I asked about fine art. Can you name the greatest novel published in the last 25 years? It’s a hard question to answer. Some might come to mind, but would your neighbor agree? Would any of your friends have heard of the book? Literature isn’t dead (it probably isn’t even dying), but there’s never been a wider gap between “great” literature and popularity.
To be clear, amazing works of fiction arrive every few years and there’s a debate over the modern classics. This list gets it pretty close by aggregating other top lists, and while the order is arbitrary, the top sixty or so books are what most critics today deem the best novels published since 1970. The problem is, almost none of them are best-sellers.
The literary world has always had an obsession with hierarchy. Words like classics, the greats, the canon creep into every English course. Critics and scholars love to debate which books are “in”, and which books are “out.” It’s not a wholly unproductive debate, either. Those who wish to abolish any mention of a literary canon fairly argue that it’s dominated by white men and a few white women. Those who wish to keep the canon argue that only white men wrote novels for two centuries anyway, and that a canon creates both a standard of quality and helps us remember great works.
The canon debate is a modern one. Traditionally, great works of fiction were also very popular. Their popularity is, in part, what made them great. Think of all the books you hated reading in high school—The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn—these were all popular when they were published. Of course, there are outliers. Some classics were never popular in their time, and not every popular book from the 1700 and 1800s is considered a classic. In general, however, there seemed to be greater overlap between highbrow fiction and popular fiction in the past than there is today.
In fact, one might argue that as soon as you start talking about a canon, you’ve essentially closed the door on any newcomers, just as a museum of modern art signaled the end of modern art.
Still, modern classics do exist, and even up through the late 1900s, popular audiences seemed to acknowledge them by buying and reading a copy. Here’s a great example. In the 1960s, Herzog by Saul Bellow had a twenty-nine week run at the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Have you read Herzog? It’s a slog. Introspective, tedious, heady, elitist. It’s not a fun or even rewarding novel. Yet it killed it in book sales and received critical attention. Herzog is one of the last examples of this, and even by the 60s, it was rare to have such a literary novel sell so well.
At some point, like fine art, popular audiences finally said “enough” and the popularity of literary fiction, the type we might one day canonize, started to decline.
This time, I’ll pick both a year and some books that symbolize the shift. Take a look at the following chart which shows the number of books occupying the top spot on the New York Times Fiction Best Seller list in their given year.
Right around the early 2000s, you start to see more and more titles take the number one spot each year. Fewer books capture the public attention for as long as they used to. Even the most popular books don’t stay at the top for more than a few weeks. There are few novels that are truly, globally popular anymore.
Two novels, both published within a year of each other, capture this cultural shift. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in 1996 and J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter in 1997.
Infinite Jest is sort of the “Campbell’s Soup Can” moment of literature. I can imagine the collective sigh as readers thought “yeah... I’m not gonna read that.” It’s a long novel with footnote galore. Interestingly, the novel was heavily marketed and Wallace made out to be the next big thing (not saying he isn’t). It’s almost like the industry and critics pushed this beast of a book onto the world with little regard for what audiences would actually want to read. All in all, the book sold 44,000 copies its first year (good, not great), and to date has sold around a million.
Harry Potter needs no introduction. Book one, The Sorcerer’s Stone, has sold over 120 million copies to date (including 300,000 in its first years).
Great works for fiction have been published since Infinite Jest, some of which might just end up being a classic novel in another 50 years. But for now, our literary landscape is dominated by the Hunger Games, Twilights, and 50 Shades of Greys.
Film
Argument: There’s no variety in modern cinema.
I choose the phrasing above carefully. For example, I do not mean all franchise films are bad. Many are good, even great. Others are not. Looking at you, money-grabbing Disney remakes. Additionally, original, creative movies are made each year but are not as commercially successful or popular and therefore have less impact on our cultural conversation.
If we take the position of the film snob, there’s a temptation to ascribe to cinema the same trajectory as the novel, where the high-brow, artistic films that once competed commercially have lost out to other genres and types. Cinema has even adopted some of the literary terminologies, changing author to “auteur”, a word for a director with a distinct vision and style.
There is data to back up this elitist perspective. If you compare the number of original screenplays from the 1970s to the 2010s that were in the top 10 highest-grossing films of their release year, you’ll find a huge drop. From 1971 to 1980, there were roughly three-to-five original screenplays a year that were in the top 10 box office hits, or thirty-plus for the whole decade.
From 2010-2021, there were only eight. Avatar (2010), Inception (2010), Ted (2012), Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), Tenet (2020), and Free Guy (2021). This demonstrates that the majority of original screenplays that breakthrough to huge box office success are made by very recognizable directors — Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Alfonso Cuarón, to name a few. 2
The last decade has been dominated by superheroes, adaptions, sequels, and franchises. Again, it’s not that fewer truly original movies get made, only that fewer of them are as popular. Why is this?
On one hand, it’s the simple economics of the industry. Superhero films are huge moneymakers but are also expensive to create, so they have to do well at the box office to get a return. This leads to additional marketing that drives up even more interest. Theaters are raising ticket prices for the biggest movies of the year, which audiences are happy to pay, and adds to the revenue.
Technology has played a role too, like affordable televisions and improved watching experiences from home, streaming, smartphones, other video content YouTube and TikTok, to name a few. Essentially all of these add up to make it easier not to go to the theater.
You might ask, why does it matter? If interesting films are made each year, who cares if you have to watch them at home? Who cares if they aren’t the most popular movie?
Let me give two reasons.
Repetition is truly a crime. Why, for the love, do I need another two-to-three superhero movies a year crammed down my throat? Why do I need a live-action Lion King, Jungle Book, Aladdin, and Dumbo? Ignore it, you say? Impossible. They enter the cultural conversation. There’s nowhere to hide. I’m suffocating! Somebody help!
It’s like everyone decided mashed potatoes were the most amazing food in the world. Sure, I like mashed potatoes, sometimes I even love them! But do I need them every meal? Why are we all talking about mashed potatoes? Why are mashed potatoes trending on Twitter again?!Most importantly, it means interesting films can’t be made with the same big budgets, because those are reserved for the mashed potato projects, the franchises and the remakes. The odd original screenplay might get a big budget, especially if it’s made by an auteur, but mostly, the greatest films will stay out of the cinema, out of the marketing cycle, and out of the cultural conversation.
Let’s identify the moments that have led to this shift away from variety to a reliance on box office guarantees. I’d choose 2009-2010 for a few reasons.
In 2009 and 2010, Inception and Avatar were released. Both were significant harbingers of the success auteurs would have in driving revenue and turnout.
On the flip side, Iron Man 2, released in 2010, officially kicked off the start of Marvel sequels and its cinematic universe. Since then, Marvel has released twenty-seven films (about two a year) and announced another twelve films. Five of those twenty-seven films are in the top ten most commercially successful films of all time.
Sticking with Disney for a moment, in 2009 they acquired Marvel. In 2012 they acquired Lucas Films and the Star Wars franchise. Both delighted audiences and led to franchise film domination. Pixar, though a few years earlier, has given them a trifecta of box-office hits.
Netflix streaming revenue first outdid their traditional DVD delivery business in 2009.
YouTube reached cracked one billion in revenue for the first time in 2010.
There seems to be no slowing down of any of these trends. Original screenplays by auteurs will continue to succeed above other indie films. Marvel, Star Wars, and other franchises will continue to be safe and lucrative investments for studios. And streaming, both of film and other video content will thrive in a mobile age. Great films are out there, you might just have to look a little harder.
Music
Argument: New music isn’t as good as old music.
This brings us back to music. I started this post with the stat that suggests new music streaming declined in 2021. It’s a bit early to say whether or not this trend will stick, though I think it highlights something unique about popular music that you don’t find in any other art form.
Of all the art forms, popular music has the thinnest line between high brow and low brow tastes. There’s hardly any hierarchy. I’ve already shown that literature is very hierarchal, and to an extent, so is film. And the term fine art encompasses the entirety of the highest echelon of art while things like Etsy serve the low-brow side.
Within popular music, it’s hard to say what would be high class and what wouldn’t. Could you even compare across genres? Is alt-rock more sophisticated than country? Is rap a more elite genre than top fourty pop? Impossible to say.
It seems that rather than a distinction between high and low forms, music is much more preoccupied with time. There’s a tendency to idolize the past and consider it a more “true” form of music. The best example is your uncle in his 50s or 60s who only listens to Zeppelin or the Stones. To him, anything newer than 1979 is trash.
Truth is, we all have a bit of that annoying uncle in us. Call it nostalgia, but everyone is fond of the music they grew up on. What if there’s some validity to our sentimental side? What if music truly was better in the past?
Some evidence suggests that music is getting more repetitive and less original. The visual journalists at The Pudding put together this cool essay that explores the rise of repetitious lyrics. Since 1960, lyrics have become 20% more repetitive. A similar trend seems to be happening in chord progressions and melodies.
However, I’m not as concerned about these trends as I am with film. Sure, you may have to look outside the top charts for music, yet doing so feels less inconvenient than film. Nor does it feel as if popular music is stuffed down your throat as much as film. There’s no equivalent to the cinema in music, especially as radio slowly dies. And the barriers to entry to create new music are much lower than film, so there’s always something out there, even as the record labels become risk-averse.
There are several technology trends that altered the way we consume music. Many of them are the same as my list in the film section. The biggest change is the decline of the album and the importance of the individual song. Earlier tech changes from vinyl to cassette and cassette to the CD maintained the album’s significance. Yet after iTunes came around and offered the individual download, it wasn’t long until that trend led to its natural place: streaming.
Take a look at this video below. Can you believe that it wasn’t until 2012 that revenue from individual downloads overtook CD sale revenue? Then less than five years later, individual download revenue was overtaken by streaming revenue.
Is there something about the focus on the song over the album that adds to this trend that Gioia laments? Something about an album that explains our own affinity for older music? I don’t really know. Maybe the focus on the song has made us pickier since we can choose a new one with such ease. Perhaps musicians made better/different music when they knew people would listen to a whole record from start to finish. None of this is too convincing, especially since many of us likely listen to select songs from our old catalogs, not entire albums.
As the greatest factor impacting our music consumption, streaming really started with Spotify. They launched their streaming service in the United States in 2011 (though the company started a few years earlier). Spotify’s rise aligns with a similar rise in the most impactful musicians of the last decade.
In 2010 and 2011, Drake released back-to-back albums, each hitting the number one spot on the Billboard Top Album. He is easily the most streamed artist by a wide margin with forty-four billion streams on Spotify.
Taylor Swift, the other patron saint of the streaming era, transitioned from country girl to pop powerhouse with a slew of number one albums, including Red in 2012.
Of the top ten most-streamed artists on Spotify, really only one, Eminem, started making music before 2010.
Music today remains dominated by a select few artists who’ve ridden the wave of widely accessible streamed music. Will this change? Not likely. Thankfully, streaming has given more artists the opportunity to create music and spread it to the masses.
…
As I’ve spent the last two months thinking about the way our appetite for art morphs, I’ve felt strung between two modes of thinking: declinism and evolution. Sometimes it does feel like our culture is in decline, treading feebly to the end of significance like the slow demise of the Roman empire. Other times, if not optimistic, I am more rational and understand these shifts as an evolution of our artistic expression.
Perhaps one should not hold too tightly to any one form, mode, genre, or type of art. My favorite, the English novel, is only a few hundred years old. Film is even newer. At the risk of sounding too sentimental, humans will always find a way to tell stories and use written, verbal, and visual language to communicate thoughtfully with each other.
In writing this, I also learned that I don’t know all that much about the art forms I’ve discussed. Someone steeped in an individual discipline will likely see flaws in my logic and possibilities I’ve overlooked. To that end, I’ll be studying each a little deeper the rest of the year, starting with film.
Stayed tuned for my next post dropping in the next few days where I interview Kamiko Adcock, co-host of the Sweet Film Talk podcast, and correct many of my misconceptions about the film industry.
I’ve left animated films off this list, but aside from films by auteurs, they’re some of the only movies that consistently perform well at the box office.
Thanks to Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash for the cover photo.