Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the artistic community has been largely disintermediated. If you want to be a successful commercial creator, the way to get started now is not first to struggle to prove yourself in the closed and cosseted artistic community — it’s to simply throw your work up online and see if it goes viral. If it does, you’re in.
This means that any creator whose goal is to sell out can do so without spending years making art that impresses artists. Of course, some creators still just intrinsically want to impress other artists. But if the money-motivated creators have left the community, there are just fewer people in that community left to impress. It becomes more and more niche and hipster. And there are fewer crossovers from the art world to mass culture, because the people left in the art world are the ones who don’t really care if they get famous and rich.
…But that’s the basic principle — if you want more novelty, I think you’ve got to make the artists work for each other more. How you do that, in a world where technology has made artists irrelevant as gatekeepers, is not something I have a concrete answer for. We may simply be in for a long period of artistic stagnation in America.
To sum up, I sort of believe that cultural stagnation is real, but I also think the root of the problem is probably technological — and therefore very hard to expunge.
Here is the full essay. One question is how much stagnation we have, and I will not address that at this moment. Another is what is the source of that degree of stagnation. I am perhaps more inclined to blame the current quality of audience taste today. In the past, audience taste often did very well, for instance in supporting the Beatles or Motown, or many earlier Hollywood movies, even when critical or artistic taste was mixed. Mozart too was popular with his audiences. Still Noah’s hypothesis is an interesting one.
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