Walk on no eggshells Alex, I’m just about the least easily offended person in the universe when it comes to honest debate about different points of view. The more people disagree with me the more fun things get!
I agree that we’re staring into the abyss as a species at the moment, and it’s genuinely staggering that there haven’t been more widely popular masterworks about WWIII, the nuclear holocaust, global famine, irreversible climate change, space exploration, AI, transhumanism, cyborgs etc.
I think part of the problem is that we respond to emotion and interpersonal dynamics — love, betrayal, friendship, romance, envy, etc. — in stories more than we respond to anything technology-related, no matter how game-changing it is. Same goes for “the issues”: if you set out to write a story or song based on environmentalism, animal rights, tolerance etc., chances are it’ll be less a work of art and more a propaganda piece. Not always true but a good rule of thumb.
And as you said before, we’re running out of new twists on old themes. There really are only so many different ways you can write about love, friendship and all the rest, and after modernism “deconstructed” the traditional ways of telling those stories we were left with nothing much to do.
In a way the emotions I mentioned above are eternal, and in another sense they change with the times (we define romance and friendship very differently to Homer or Dante). To the extent that human emotions and relationships change with the times, we can write new stories based on them. I think this represents a more viable path forward than stories that rely on technology or external catastrophes/innovations for their meat. When you’re reading a book that starts with a nuclear holocaust, your main question isn’t ‘I wonder what the chain of events that led to that were’, it’s ‘I wonder how the protagonists feel about that?’
This actually ties into my theory about hardship producing great art — given that this world is such a mad, sad, bad place, I think human beings are wired in such a way that suffering enriches them, gives them depth, gives them perspective, broadens their horizons, increases their empathy. (People who don’t suffer are often quite insensitive towards those who do, simply because they can’t understand them.) Even famous artists who never struggled financially often went through very difficult upbringings, strained relationships with their parents, or early traumatic incidents, and many carried a wellspring of anger that fuelled their creative drive. This ties into my point because I think it’s this very pain that helped them create work with a broad emotional spectrum — which is what great art is all about.
Which leads me to the rest of the problem: today’s “developed” societies promote and facilitate shallowness. And I don’t even mean because we’re well-off and comfortable— I mean that study after study demonstrates that we have shorter attention spans than ever, that we’re more easily distracted, that we’re getting steadily more addicted to the bright flashing lights of technology. And what are we accessing on our devices? Internet culture, well over half of which is undercooked, quick fix stuff that doesn’t really go anywhere or achieve anything. I think this makes it harder to feel deeply (at least on an aesthetic level), which results in less good artists, less good art and audiences who are incapable of appreciating genuinely great art on the level it deserves. (I’m including myself in all this; I used to be quite the bookworm before all these laptops and smartphones played havoc with my attention span!)
Something I’ve been mulling over a lot is: do you need a big ego (i.e. a craving for attention, a desire to beat everyone else, a need for glory) to be a great artist? If so, does that mean that the most healthy, well-adjusted, ego-less people create boring art? And do they feel less of an urge to experience other people’s art? And if so, what does that say about art?
