Are there any books about the artistic decline of culture?

>Afghanistan
>middle east
you fucked up

>Though the style of the ars antiqua went out of fashion rather suddenly in the first two decades of the fourteenth century, it had a late defender in Jacques of Liège (alternatively known as Jacob of Liège), who wrote a violent attack on the "irreverent, and corrupt" ars nova in his Speculum Musicae (c.1320) vigorously defending the old style in a manner suggestive of any number of music critics from the Middle Ages to the present day (Jacobus 1955–73, book 7, passim). To Jacques, the ars antiqua was the musica modesta, and the ars nova was a musica lasciva—a kind of music which he considered to be excessively indulgent, capricious, immodest, and sensual (Anderson and Roesner 2001).

Wrong generation fags have always existed

I hate the sentiment conveyed by you people. That people have been complaining about youth forever so it doesn't matter. The pace of change has accelerated. The old and the young of today are not just different, but divided.

information is now easy to pass around and you can get some in just a single click away without going town to town doing shit, can't blame technology for the cultural decline, only the people since due to popularity can be achieved by just flashing your tits in front of the camera saying "Make me a famous person!" and capitalists would move in to gain profit from it. culture however is not gained in an instant (well large scale culture anyway), it only grows over time.

short version, don't give a damn about it just make memes and fuck around.

>you fucked up
Didn't say Afghanistan was part of the middle east. I'm just predicting that when future history classes talk about the war in Afghanistan it won't be as an entirely separate event but as part of the rise of militant Salafism and greater troubles plaguing the Islamic world.

It's only because problems in the middle east will overshadow central asia. I'm guessing it'll be how people view the Spanish Civil War in relation to WW2, the testing ground for ideologies.

Dividided how?

Not him, but nowadays a person born in 2005 is going to have a lifestyle utterly different from a person born in 1955, not to mention 1905. Smartphones, computers, news aggregation, "memes," access to porn and drugs, government surveillance, the obesity problem, the diabetes problem, the sedentary lifestyle problem, the ever-increasing need for higher levels of education to get a good job, the postponing or elimination of marriage and childbirth, the mgtow movement contrasted with the radfem movement, the migration of peoples from failed states to developed states and the mutual cultural destruction that ensures - all of these are a small segment of what makes the culture of 2005 and 1905 a thousand times more different than the culture of 300 BC and 200 BC.

These are the good posts.
Same thing happens with every improvement in informations technology. There is a brief period of anarchy before the cultural standards come in and tidy everything up

Yeah, those good old day when fucking barbarians would come from the mountains, burn your town to the ground and rape your mother in front of you as you're squirming on the floor with a javelin impaled in your ribs.

All you said is literally just technology and you being too much of a retard to accept that people embrace it

>drugs, government surveillance, the obesity problem, the diabetes problem, the sedentary lifestyle problem, the ever-increasing need for higher levels of education to get a good job, the postponing or elimination of marriage and childbirth, the mgtow movement contrasted with the radfem movement, the migration of peoples from failed states to developed states and the mutual cultural destruction that ensures

This sure sounds like technology.

1/?
Holy fucking shit. How retarded can you get Veeky Forums?

Welcome to the narrative of the progression of the average life, where as a youngster you have things available that your parents did not have. You obtain "edgy" (by the time's standards) morals, behaviors, and music made by and for other youngsters which your parents are "oh god why"-ing about and grandparents scoff at and both are flabbergasted by the world around them compared to their childhood and call for a return to their own generation's stuff out of nostalgia but are amazed by technology's progress. Then you mature, settle down, have kids, and then you become the parent trying to raise the teenager while trying to instill your own morals, but, guess what, there are other edgy youngsters that repeat this cycle. As your kids level out and have your grandkids, you're now your grandparents scoffing at your grandkids' own little thing but can't comprehend what the world has become and want to return to the good old days. It's all different things--Flappers had dances, hippies had psychedelics, and we have silicon--but it's the same concept.

This is just life. Shit like Pokemania, John Wayne, grunge, and hair metal will be squished together in the same timeframe 200, 500, and almost forgotten 700 years from now in some history class as irrelevant fads even though they're completely differentiating from us to our parents (or grandparents or kin, depending on your age).

I fucking guarantee you if went back in time and you compared three or four different generations from 100 BC to 50 BC you would find some other dumb petty shit that defined and happened a generation that the oldest scoffed at, the middle "oh god why"-ed, and the youngest thought was cool. Shift the timeframe 20 years on, and oh look a cycle. We don't see these ancient fads because there's so many that we just group them into antiquity. Do this ad infinitum and the differences become petty. Maybe some big changes, such as a pre-vs post- Industrial Revolution thing or a shift in political power did influence a generation but the cycle holds.

3/3
Nothing has accelerated (except technology), but we arguably just hit another big milestone with the Silicon Age. It's still the same goddamn cycle that has and will occur ad infinitum

Culture is huge now. The sheer amount of stuff that is on the internet totally eclipses the past. If Leonardo da vinci was alive now he would be an artist on deviant.

I don't agree at all. A defineable youth culture has only really existed at all since the 50's. Before that teenagers were just small adults. Culture hadn't been commodified to the same extent had today where people's nostalgia often involved remembering products they owned and consumed when they were young. I'm certain that your Greek farmer in 200bc did exactly the same shit as his grandfather did and when both generations grow and remember their youth there would have been a very small difference between them.

>The earth is degenerating in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption abound. The children no longer obey their parents. Every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is speedily approaching
Clay tablet, 2000 years before Socrates

>children of tribe have big mouth and little mind. all day they smear on cave wall and talk over glowing pit. no good hunters either. no respect for chief ungabunga when he enters cave. they even try to raise wolf like child. no more tribe if this no stop.
-Unknown, 11,000 BCE.

This quote is falsely attributed. It's from a Cambridge student's dissertation, circa 1908.

[CAMB] 1908, “Schools of Hellas: an Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 BC” by Kenneth John Freeman, (First impression 1907), page 74, Macmillan and Co., London. (Google Books full view, Internet Archive)

in contemporary times you get to see people as people i.e. shit and nonsensical, rather than a neat narrative of select examples. we live in one of the most anxious and exciting times in history right now

Fucking retard. The world has NEVER been like this.

now that media is so widely available and now that we live in a mostly capitalists free trade governed society it becomes much much harder to create or inspire new artistic and ideologically concepts.

Why make a new genre of novel when you can just vomit forth another trashy crime thriller? hell, even the publishers would rather have trash they know then innovation the don't

why risk making a new song, lyrical or oral beat when you can just spew forth the same shit that sells without any of the risk?

why sit down and write a philosophical concept? that's not going to make any money!

now that money is the leading motivation for society we no longer see attempts to further ideologically or artistic fields. Wheras prior to the second or first world war we had states and nations that vied to be the most artistic, the most innovative, the most advanced. Society's aim was to further the field for their nation, or to create new art under a wealthy patron. Now that national or spiritual movements have toppled and that free society individualism has developed, innovation is no longer necessary. hell, it's downright counter productive; make a new artform and then the market has to adapt to it, create a new power source of combustuion system for a car and then the industry had to radically evolve. Meanwhile, static saturation has none of this hassle, and all of the profit; it's more profitable stagnating then it is innovating.

That in a nutshell, is the downfall of western society.

>the only reason people do anything is for money

>you can only achieve anything you want to do with money, therefore everyone's driving purpose is to make money

No, a stopped clock is. A broken clock is always wrong.

What if I want to become the next Christopher Mccandless?

then you provide no benefit to society at all

if your answer to the stagnation and breakdown of western culture is to retreat from it, you're going to have a bad time.

What makes you think that was my answer to your invented condition of western culture? I'm asking what about somebody like Christopher who gained nothing from what he did.

Here's my answer:

His goal was not in the pursuit of money, and therefore he died.

So any pursuit that's objective isn't obtaining money results in death?
Like charity? Romance? Being a neet off mommy and daddy for the rest of your life?

If your pursuit in life is merely charity then you will die as you have not enough money to live for yourself.

If your pursuit in life is merely romance then you will primarily not have the finances to further your romantic interests, and again will die from lack of money to subsist on

If you merely live off your mommy and daddy for the rest of your life, your aims and goals will be limited to the wishes and desires of your mother and father. Therefore, you will not truly be living but existing merely off the desires of others.

the first two concepts cannot be completely and utterly followed without the assistance and support of money. You first need money to give charity or you yourself become charity. You need money to live long enough to have a romance, or even to acquire the opportunities for romance to flourish.

The Last concept is merely the fact that you resign yourself to exist off others and lose absolute aims and agency, you cease to live but simply exist in stagnation.

In short, all these concepts alone are untenable for people to live from, and all must be achieved in society through the pursuit of money.

culture.vg/features/art-theory/on-the-genealogy-of-art-games.html

Nobody will read this but this internet eccentric wrote a really fucking great essay on this subject.

To paraphrase what I remember from it: Has art peaked? No. Have certain art forms peaked? Yes.

How can you look at Shakespeare or Ulysses and compare that to current literature and think anything other than a decline has happened? Or Beethoven and Mozart with current music? I know you'll say that we're comparing the best of the past with the average today, but he gives solid reasons why and how the cultures of art forms decline, meaning that new Shakespeares are not possible within those art forms.

If you are one of those people who insist that Tracey Enim's unmade bed is on par with Michaelangelo's David, you will dislike the essay. If you wonder why an opinion like that could be taken seriously, read the essay.

Unironically recommending Spengler's The Decline of the West and Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Neither is a perfect work and both should be used as instruments in gaining a better understanding, not as definitive texts.

Google Peruvian art architecture or w/e; we had the inca and preinca culture and the remaining slaves aren´t able to repeat the same artworks, they barely can with help of colleged people
We also had Spaniard influence but the "new" inhabitants are .....meh

That's bullshit.

Do you remember anything from the 60s that wasn't genre-defining, controversial or objectively good? Do you remember the Billboard Top 40 from the 60s? 70s?

Fucking hell, do we even know of anything remotely popular with the middle class in the Victorian era, save for porn and penny dreadfuls and bodice rippers, and those were the norm.

People ALWAYS had shit taste, user. We're the only generation I know of that either wears it as a badge or call one another out on it.