The bleak future of Art in the 21st Century

“Television is dying”

Don’t let anyone tell you any different. It’s not just television that is dying though, it’s entertainment that is going through a metamorphosis that will change what we consider entertainment, and how we will interface with that entertainment, forever.

I had a normal childhood. I grew up and still am very privileged. I found myself watching cartoons at a young age and falling in love with the X-Men and Transformers, which led me to comics. Being an autistic only child, I consumed so much entertainment. I’ve read, possibly, 100,000 comic books. I know the characters up and down. I’ve watched 1,000s of movies. Years and decades of entertainment. Sadly, though, I think we’re nearing the end. Not peak oil, but peak entertainment.

When people say television is dying, they usually mean “cable television”. As in streaming will become the new flesh, as the movie Videodrome once labeled the now dying medium. When I say, “television is dying”, I mean “narrative entertainment on a whole is on it’s way out”. This will have a cascading effect on everything from theater to comic books. Narrative entertainment will be rendered a husk of itself — left limping out of the 21st century to maybe die and pathetic death at some point after.

Because life is not a narrative and it never was. That was the foundational lie of it all.

Ironically, Ben Shapiro and I somewhat agree on something many people ripped him for: “art is inherently right wing”. It is. First, it’s inherently Capitalistic. Ignoring the purest forms of art Bill Watterson and Alan Moore have undertaken after years of proving themselves, have now relegated themselves to obscurity doodling in notebooks or writing volumes about caterpillars, most art is made for public consumption.

All art therefore is made to please an audience, hopefully a large, massive audience, and it does so appealing to “universal truths”. Ignoring whether universal truths or universal narratives are even a thing [outside science, more or less] — they’re not — this involves compromise with the audience, and commodifying the art.

Next art uses tropes of the hierarchy. It uses things like whiteness, straightness, Christian imagery, and other grand narratives as tropes.

Where Ben Shapiro and I would disagree is good art always strives to subvert those tropes. Animal House may seem racist and sexist by today’s standards, but what makes the movie funny is it strove to use those “traditions” to subvert authority rather than uphold that authority *cue Otter’s “then you have a problem with America” speech*

Here’s the problem though: Another place Ben and I would agree, the difference is he thinks this is a bad thing and I don’t. Generation Alpha and Generation Z are way more left-wing than their parents and Millennials ever were, and that is largely what is driving this. It causes them to seek out other entertainment more consistent with those beliefs.

Right now, it’s a great time to get into television if you want to bank on nostalgia. The Millennials are the largest consumer of the dwindling TV landscape, and the unstable streaming landscape, meaning lots of revivals like Fraser and X-Men ’97.

When I went to visit my cousin recently, she had two children. The boy’s favorite movie was Dunkirk, he was ten years old. The bulk of their time was spent watching streamers, Tik Tok, YouTube videos, listening to music, or sports. I’ve heard similar reports from other parents. Sure, they may watch Bluey until they are five, but after that it changes.

The rules of entertainment have remained fairly static for quite some time. What happened was art that kids grew up with as kids’ entertainment, shows like Gunsmoke, led to more adult, deconstructionist takes when those children came of age. This is similarly what happened with comic books and comic book superheroes — a jingoistic form of entertainment, that subverted many of those tropes to spread messages about diversity, equity, and inclusion of other groups. However, modern children are not as easily swayed by concepts of whiteness anymore, or the tropes of traditional, modernist society. The rate of religiosity is plummeting, so say goodbye to Zack Snyder Christ imagery. Heteronormativity is at the core of most romantic comedies, and the tropes make for an awkward fit when navigating the graysexuality of emerging modern life. As these tropes lose their power and effectiveness, what’s the need to subvert them? Film may continue as some arthouse medium in that form, but gone is the need for Avengers to chase down a sky laser.

So what does that leave one with: Sports, Tik Tok, YouTubers, Streamers, Major Network News (yes, I believe it will adapt), documentaries, and, of course, lest we forget, pornography. The most authentic forms of entertainment. One where right-wing ideas have the most trouble smuggling themselves in. If you need proof of this, look at The Daily Wire’s answer to political streamers, by doing a canned, pre-recorded version of someone having genuine reactions. That’s all you need to know.

Never having seen the show, I’m sure some pedantic fan will correct me, but I could never picture the art world of Star Trek (or Transformers that matter during the war, of which I was very familiar). Something about the cool logic embraced or thrust upon those societies made it a tough sell for me. That may have been the appeal of the melodrama of Robotech for me, because it does seem sad, a world nearly bereft of narrative art, or at least where it is splintered, rather than part of the dominant mono-culture, as it seems to have been for centuries. As the grand narrative we have been subjected to is finally deconstructed, so too will the deconstructors be deconstructed.

Although I can’t shake the optimism that humanity will live long and prosper regardless.