[stoxascer]

IMO a bigger aspect is just the exhaustion of the artistic medium itself and exhaustion of creative talent.

I think we tend to view the major artistic mediums that we are born into as something eternal when in reality they get stale.

Whatever can be said about movies I am sure people were saying 50-100 years ago about paintings.

Or think about the last great sculpture?

The same thing with movies has happened with music. The LP was nothing until the 1950s but it feels like something eternal. Creative people move on to newer mediums that are a blank canvas so to speak. Youtube, Tiktok, podcasts, long series TV.

I think as you age obviously it becomes harder to impress just from having consumed so many masterpieces of artistic expression. You have a much higher tolerance for amazement.

I think superhero movies are totally unwatchable but I am sure this would be different if I was starting closer to a blank slate when it comes to movie expectations. I love mob movies but there is no grand comment on society that caused all these mob movies to have been made outside a type of fashion trend.

[api]

You know, that's a really great point. In some cases it seems to be cyclic with some artistic mediums falling into and out of fashion as major canvases for artists to express themselves.

Maybe music and movies are just on a downswing for a while, having been thoroughly explored by previous artists.

[runarberg]

I don’t think movies and music are on a downswing currently. I think they the consumption is just transitioning into more and more pulp. If you compare literature and pick a new novel completely by random you will most likely pick a dumb romance novel written in less then a day (perhaps mostly by AI). However that is hardly an indicator of the state of the art. I think movies and music is undergoing a similar transition that books went through in the 1950s. Consumption is getting easier and cheaper with streaming service, and the market is being flooded with cheap and easy productions. However—just like literature—great works are still being made, and will continue to be made into the foreseeable future. It just won’t be as prominently displayed as during the heyday of these mediums.