On the Death and Revivication of Art

I've written before about the death of Hollywood. Though there seem to be folks breathing new life into that corpus (YouTubers making movies, as in Iron Lung, Backrooms, and Obsession). Expect Hollywood to take the wrong lesson from that, as is traditional. But even if that artificial respiration takes, it seems to me that the movie as an art form is dying out.

I have my worries about music too. Rock and Roll sounds different from The American Songbook did, and Punk Rock and Metal, even Rap or Dubstep — they were different sounds. These days if you take a generic pop song, it sounds like a generic pop song stretching all the way back to the nineties. Possibly longer; I'm not the one to ask.

I don't despair for Art. There's a line in the Declaration of Independence where Jefferson describes the legislative power as 'incapable of annihilation.' You can't get rid of the legislative power by dissolving legislatures. You can't kill off capital-A Art by destroying any one art form. This post will look at new forms as they emerge or revive. Art is eternally young; the mechanism is the human need to create. Anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances (save, perhaps, nigh infinite constraint) can create art of some form or another. The world will throw up vast barriers, but all those barriers are between creating the art and getting paid for it. They can't stop you from creating entirely.

I'm not positive that art forms are ever truly created or destroyed. Perhaps when the first homo-whateverus smeared a berry on a cave wall, he invented painting. Perhaps when the Great Judgement Day comes, painting will die. In between it may become more or less popular, more or less studied, and greater or fewer purchases may support greater or fewer numbers of painters living in garrets. People will still put brush to canvas, however those are defined, and people will still like to look at pictures. But if art forms never truly die, then they at least hibernate, spending long years in between moments in the public eye.

Perhaps AI will end all that. I don't think so, but perhaps we can get all the creative value we need by looking at things generated instantaneously by supercomputers. That won't kill the human need to create. If every art form goes dormant, if no one can scratch out a living doing anything creative, then people will still go on creating things regardless. Fulfilling the need to experience art doesn't take away the need to create art.

Here's the test for life in an art form: How many living [X] can you name? How many living poets? Zero — if you don't count Taylor Swift. I count her as a pop musician. Perhaps a hundred years ago I would be reading the wrong stuff, but I could have probably pulled Rudyard Kipling and G.K. Chesterton out of my hat. How many living Rappers? At least Snoop d-o-double-g. Out-of-touch conservative as I am, I know that much...though he's getting old. Who can you name that has written an opera? None, although I think I heard one on Chris Scalia's podcast. Speaking of, I can name several living authors, but all of them are working in 'genre,' and none in the 'novel as literature' category. Living actors and directors? Plenty. Living sculptors or painters? None.

I take that back; I can always bring to mind Charles Urbach, the man who painted the Ghor-Clan Rampager for Wizards of the Coast. I ran into him at a Sci-Fi con in Madison, where @RandyWeivoda had organized a Ricochet meetup. He drew me a lovely sketch of said beast rocking out. But if you asked me to name any painters with the stipulation that I had to avoid Magic Cards, I'd be stuck.

(How many living scientists can you name? Does that mean anything?)

If artists can make a living doing it, that means people are getting some creative sustenance out of it. If an otherwise unengaged member of the public can name an artist, it seems that there's some life in the old girl yet. But there are two basic problems with that quick-and-dirty test, both encapsulated by the Jack Sparrow meme: "You're the worst pirate I've ever heard of." "But you have heard of me." The first is obviously that you may have heard of someone terrible at their chosen calling. Maybe the art form is alive, or maybe they're really good at self-promotion.

The second is inherent in the form of the meme; nobody knows who makes those. (By 'meme' here, I'm using the common definition of a picture with words on it.) Oh, we all know someone who throws some text on an image and shares it, but do you ever know who made those that go viral? The closest I've ever seen was when Jon Gabriel photoshopped Trump Tower onto Greenland. Broadly speaking an art form can be anonymous and still important.

But wait, you and I still know people who generate their own memes. They might not be famous, but they're making at least a crude form of art. If we're going to accept folk art and tribal art and banjo music and the Neolithic Venus and, to put it bluntly, stuff that's not very good, then we should think of the meme as art.

If we do, then suddenly the daily meme posts you see around here add up to quite a bit. If a gang of fuddy-duddy conservatives exchanges and appreciates bits of artwork amongst themselves, then surely that ought to imply something about the broader society. If mankind requires a certain amount of creative stimulation, and feels the need in turn to do a certain amount of creating, then on both ends some of that is taken care of by a legion of faceless memers.

Memes are not new with the internet, nor is using them for political ends. One can readily identify the political cartoons of Thomas Nast as falling into that category. If we ignore the picture, we rely on the ability to spread ideas through a pithy and humorous thought, and then you can find many other categories. In 17th-century England people would write political couplets, leave them to be discovered in prominent places, and rely on the rhyme to allow a mostly illiterate populace to remember and repeat them so the best ideas could go viral.

When Adam delved and Eve span Who then was the gentleman?

That was some incendiary political rhetoric at the time. Going even further back we can find memes in Jewish puns in the Bible. Baal, the local pagan sky god, had several titles. One was Baal-zaboth, which means I don't quite remember what. Lord of light, perhaps? Anyway, the Children of Israel instead referred to him as Baal-zebub, the Lord of the Flies — or more explicitly, that which the flies tend to congregate around and 'worship.' That was a meme literally talking crap about the other nations.

Moving on from the meme, there was another modern form of art which was briefly really popular, but I suspect has been strangled aborning. That is the blog post. There have been some blogs that have done very well over the last quarter century, but many, many more that have died forgotten. I think the first hit was the relentless demand for 'content,' meaning most people weren't able to produce enough good stuff to keep people coming back. When they segued into mediocre stuff the people eventually left anyway because what good was the site doing them then? Add to that the hassle of search engine optimization (which leads to longer, predictable, and less useful posts), and crowding ads to make it pay, and eventually you drive any readers away. It may be that AI content generation deals the death blow here. Expect to find some notable standouts *cough* Ricochet *cough*, but perhaps the era of independent, pseudonymous blogs is already over.

(Historically, blogposts would take the form of essays. I bet Samuel Johnson's blog would survive the culling.)

The third burgeoning art I see these days is the podcast. In ages past, these would be referred to as public lectures, possibly demonstrations when you consider some of the YouTube channels out there. Thirty years ago, when you got into your car, you listened to the local radio station. If you listened to people talking at all, it was Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, or NPR. Despite Limbaugh's noble attempt he couldn't be on the air 24/7, so if you happened to be driving at odd hours, it was back to the music channels. Or if you were a long-haul trucker, Coast to Coast AM.

These days all of those are podcasts. Political red meat you can get many places on Ricochet, next to the highbrow stuff. Long-form interviews? Rogan. Shock jocks? The Unsubscribe podcast. Coast to Coast? The Why Files. Whatever radio shows you can think of from the days of your youth: You can find more of it, in more shades, on the internet right now.

This is partly because of the great democratization of art mentioned up above. All you need to start a podcast is a microphone and an idea. There are plenty of barriers, sure, but these are mostly in front of getting paid. Creating the stuff is easy. You might say that any three knuckleheads could do it.

Which brings me to the secret agenda behind this entire post. My brothers (@SamRhody and @MnemonicDevice) are launching our own podcast: The Eminent Dead and Friends. We're reading through the old books, the ones in the public domain, discussing them with each other week to week. I've just started posting episodes. We're reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton.

It's an absolutely lovely book that I'd never even stumbled across until I started looking for things to read. Part of the gag is we're reading great books none of us have read before. It allows us to be stupid, to make wrongheaded predictions, and hopefully mutes the temptation to dominate the discussion with loads of prior knowledge. If you'd like to read along (and I recommend that you do), read the first section of the book and then follow along with the next episode.