You assume that people are making Tik-Toks and apps instead of making art. And old people in the 50s thought that the youngsters were making rock and roll and dadaism instead of art. There’s plenty of new art unlike what came before, but you’re just not recognizing it, because it’s new art unlike what came before.
The “singularity” would be better called the “horizon”. It’s always about 30 years away, and everyone’s always crossing what was the horizon 30 years ago, and never noticing as they’re doing that. If someone from 1990 went to sleep and woke up today, they would find things to be so different as to be incomprehensible. And the same thing happened from 1960 to 1990, and 1930 to 1960, and so on (and all the years in between, 1970 to 200, and 1980 to 2010, and so on), and the same thing will happen from 2020 to 2050, and 2030 to 2060, and so on.
Chronos your bit about 1990 to today ties in with my theory of how immortality would be unbearable unless you utterly ditched your whole life every ten years or so. Part of me feels like its still 1990 or so, and i take with me stuff along the way I enjoy (streaming, news through YT, videogame advances*…) the rest i ignore. The result?
An increasing inability to even understand the people who live under my GD roof! (the kids)…nevermind the people who dont.
*Though I’m paralyzed by all the great choices, so i just stick with what I know, Diablo…FM Manager…
I’m with those who have said that music, movies, and shows have continued to improve in distinctive ways, but yes, art - by which I mean visual art, i.e. paintings, sculptures, and general aesthetic design elements used in architecture and consumer products like cars - HAS, indeed, stagnated.
In my mind’s eye I can see distinctive forms of “pop art” for the 20s, 30s - 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. (And maybe the early 90s). I’m talking about stuff like the way movie posters, book covers, magazine advertisements, and for later decades, stuff like electronics and computer software, looked. Once it gets past the late 90s I have a very hard time picturing the distinctive style.
If this applies even to design that’s created for facile consumer marketing, it is doubly so for “fine” art, like paintings, sculpture, and architecture. I’m at a loss.
The Tik-Tok apps I said talent is going into? Those Tik-Tok apps? The ones I said couldn’t be the total repository of new art in the current world? Those Tik-Tok apps?
How do you shock the rubes, when the rubes grew up with Picasso and Pollock?
For several centuries, artists strove for realism. In the 20th Century, abstraction became desirable. Today, realism is fine, abstraction is fine, and everything in between is fine. What else is there? And were the 20th Century artists really doing anything that the Celts and Vikings hadn’t done a thousand years earlier?
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun.”
The 1980s and 1990s did have plenty of change up until around 1999. It’s the stuff since then that has been stagnant. I think the OP was just off by about 20 years.
I find this claim extremely difficult to square with the facts.
The rise of computer animated films is a completely new type of film, and has included movies of towering brilliance.
Independent cinema went mainstream.
Television in the last 20 years is so beyond anything that came before it that one has to significantly handicap the field to even begin to compare them.
Music is simply NOT the same. It just isn’t. Hip hop today does not sound .like it did in 1990. Young people do not think the music of 1990 or even 1998 sounds like it does today, and old people just can’t hear music all that well.
As Chronos points out, movie franchises, like Marvel or DC, are really very much on another level now, and are interrelated and tied into TV shows as well, to an extent unprecedented before 20-odd years ago. This started with James Bond, and really took off with Star Wars, but what we’ve seen in the 21st century is light years past that.
And, just to loop that last bit back around to the first part: the latest Avengers movie, the highest-grossing blockbuster ever, didn’t just have lots of special effects; it’s expected that Doctor Strange does special effects, or that Thor does special effects — but Thanos, like the Hulk, simply is a special effect.
part of the problem is we became used to huge technology changes and things have advanced to the point they hit a wall and you have to be nitpicky to notice the changes
for example, look at a pc game in each stage … there are CGA, EGA, and VGA and SVGA graphic standards … each standard came every 5 years and looked totally different from the previous version…
Now look at a game from 2015 and one from 2019 there’s almost no difference except a bunch of tiny little things like how smooth it moves and how detailed it is … Hell even sony and ms arent even touting the graphics on the new systems because there nor honestly much different that the ones before it at the base level
Same with movies even with digital there’s a point where film quality is going to be as good as it gets unless there’s a technology change on the way
So part of it is most people can’t see what changes we are getting these days and part is well somethings cant get any better then they already are
I tend to agree with the 1999 or 2000 cutoff. I’ve mentioned before on these boards that I generally only watch movies from 2000 on.
The 90s are borderline for me. 90s TV is far more dated than 90s movies, but by and large if I’m watching some new-to-me indie drama or horror, and I can choose between something from 1997 or 2003, I’ll pick 2003 every time. The 97 would probably feel like a different era, while the 2003 movie will feel like the era we’re currently in. (To me, at least.)
The 1980s are like an entirely different universe, utterly different than the 90s in pretty much every way, and the 90s are pretty distinct in their own right. But then 2000 to now is just kind of “the modern era” in my mind. Look at still frames from movies and you’ll immediately think “EIGHTIES” or “nineties?” based on clothing and hairstyles alone. Especially hair.
For a quick example, compare Final Destination from 2000 (watch the trailer for clothes and hair) to the similarly-themed but way more awesome Tell Me How I Die from 2016. Aside from suffering from teal overload like most modern movies, the clothing and hairstyles wouldn’t be out of place if you mixed and matched between them.
You know, it would be nice if instead of this, you’d actually link to some examples of this new art. And then explain what’s new about it, whether it’s part of a movement or just an individual’s expression, and if other media are also picking up on this new art.
Meanwhile…parts of the comic book industry have gone right into the shitter…while other parts (most notably Hickman) are right up there with Alan Moore
One of the more interesting threads. It is very hard to distinguish ‘whats weather-what’s climate’ at such close distance and I think some people are mistaking newness for difference - there will always be this year’s model, but its still just a car / pop song / edgy rant / art movement. I tend to agree that the emergence of new art has stalled as Andersen suggests.
I believe art happens on the margins and only sometimes it becomes mainstream and influential [punk, rap, political documentary-making, New Journalism etc]. One effect of the internet has been to make the margin far more accessible, and probably diluted the very characteristics that give niche art strength and make it able to exert influence.
That doesn’t explain the stagnation that happened in the 1980s-90s. Maybe when Francis Fukuyama saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the end of history’, what was actually happening was the end of Art. If I can suggest an argument I don’t particularly believe myself, maybe Art relies on liberal democracy being under threat or there being tension that has stopped being there in the same way with whatever happened in the late 1980s. Maybe its that marginal art has nothing to react against, because now anything new is immediately accessible and likely to be picked over straight away for interesting riffs / techniques / memes / talent.