Literature is dying because the humanities have been severely emasculated...

bah. art aint dead, only sleepin. wait till the towers crash and the moon glows green and the pen will creep in the night. you'll see.

And those people with an actual job will eventually be replaced by technology in the furure, rendering your 'only useful to society' point nil. If you live in the western hemisphere, and you are not contributing to art, then you are contributing to a dying society.

I think you are talking about literature in terms of revolutionary ideas and new ways of thinking?
I believe this 'death' of literature has come about because we don't wonder about what the sun is anymore, or the stars, or what the desk we are sat at is made of. We have a deeper understanding of our world now in terms of science. We no longer have to ask the deeper questions because the majority of the questions that were asked have been answered. Now we find authors writing in a more introvert way. We are looking within ourselves and trying to explain who we are, and why we think. I think authors now feel more of a need to be understood on a personal level and write from their own experience. Humans now have turned their eyes at understand each other and human nature rather than life's existential questions.

So I don't think art is dead at all it's just becoming a story because we have already solved our reality.

The human eye can't see reality at a quantum level you nonce.

Yes but our brains understand the quantum levels. I'm not saying we have progressed into the atomic matrix.

Literature is dying because all the people with talent are working with newer media that are more financially rewarding. 'Passion' doesn't mean dick if you can't feed yourself.

Regardless, the mechanics of science are only measures to describe the how of reality. It says little about the why or what of reality, which art does.

The reason art is dead is not because we have already solved our reality, but because we believe we have solved it. Art will be born again in a new age of religion.

And my point being that before we understood the how of reality there were more questions to ask, thus creating interesting ideas about that subject. Now the subject has changed and the art is just describing something else.

Art will be that which articulates the feelings and thoughts of spinning energy drinking rotten milk.

Like the bible again you mean?

Empedecoles hypothesised the atomic nature of reality in 600 BC. What does that say about the heavy religious themed art of the renaissance?

I wish young people would stop fetishizing the culture of past decades and find something worthwhile to like now. There's plenty of great music, literature, and visual art coming out today, yet people are somehow still hung up on basically a couple dozen greats from the past in each field. The internet is in many ways an equalizer -- anyone can push their shit to a global audience. It gets hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, but when people say that art died in the 90s, it indicates either a lack of genuine interest in the field, a desire to seem cultured by only consuming works from best-of lists, or a measured cynicism with regards to the arts (also stemming from a desire to seem cultured)

> an actual useful purpose?

what purpose?

This is my point. It was hypothesized. An idea so profound was thought, it's almost like we are supposed to uncover this information over time, like how we use mathematics to explain the universe.
It was an idea then and an incredible one.

good post desu but you're gonna get shit on by pseuds

Literature is dying because it no longer belongs to popular culture. There's no reason to read for enjoyment anymore because superior entertainment platforms came to exist (movies, vidya, drugs etc). Literature is purely niche now.

Exactly. I honestly find a lot of this is a total over complication of subjects in an attempt to appear more intelligent. Like you say, there are some greats works of art being produced to this day just different subject matter.

Personally, I believe we will, at some point in the far future, reach a new way of seeing the world, a new plateau of being human. From that change onward, a new great religious movement will naturally follow and with it a new art. Most people today, myself included, live their lifes quite passively.
Oh yes, an apple: nice! gulp. What the fuck is a tongue sticking out of infinity? Life is crazy as fuck.
(These are the three opening sentences of the neo bible)

Now it is like this: I'm a human being.
Then it will be like this: I'm a human being.

Atoms aren't that unnatural, imo. The idea of the universe having a minimal building block is not that weird, even though we don't quite know the whole story yet. Quantum mechanics and relativity are way more unnatural.

See that sounds like an interesting sci-fi book that I would read. From my understand of Veeky Forums, anything with a genre is frowned upon and considered less art and made for the masses.

Your idea is new, just like the literature of old and like another person said the atomic nature of reality was being hypothesized as far back as 600BC. Your idea to some may be no less revolutionary than that but in a totally different era.

Write the book, call it sci-fi, and who knows one day it may become reality.

I think though before it was even suggested the idea of an atomic level of life would have baffled people.
I'm sure there will be some great discovery soon, probably something to do with CERN and it will blow our minds. Then in the future people will grow with that knowledge and it won't seem so alien to them, and art will follow them.

I find this post to be very true.

The odds of new physics at CERN are extremely bleak at the moment, so I wouldn't count on that. It is unlikely that we will see anything new in high energy physics for the forseeable future unless the Chinese are willing to drop a ton of money on a collider.

I think developments in artificial intelligence and genetics are more likely to provoke new thought.

Yeah that is true, the AI field is looking very interesting. I was reading Musk now wants to connect the human brain to an AI, after warning us against it. Interesting times.

He's already infected

We haven't solved our reality... what are you on about?

I more mean we have a much deeper understanding of our reality now, so the things that were once hypothesized about have become scientific fact.

I think there are many potentially interesting developments, but they would fall under "science fiction".

For example:
>the human/AI distinction has been treated over and over again in science fiction, but I think this will become blurrier when people come to understand the extent to which genes are human programming.
>how meaningful are works of art when we can create machines to ape (and possibly surpass) the greats?
>the morality of genetic modification of humans more generally

He is. His self driving electric cars are actually his robot army. And when I say 'his' I actually the reptilians.

I think the machines art would have to separated from human art. There may come a time when we have to concede that the machines are just better than us, possibly creating an almost hipster movement again. "I liked human art before the robots, it's more authentic". While others may chose to just accept technology and just appreciate a machine as a human work of art in itself, so the art from the machines is almost human anyway.

I think Musk is heading into implants territory. Like cybernetic arms and robotic eyes.

We don't live with the machines, we become the machines.

Our scientific understanding is purely intellectual. Intellectual understanding means very little in day to day life (read: in reality). Art isn't so much about intellectual understanding (although it can be), but about being conscious, existing, raising awareness of some thing, make you feel. Back in the day, art brought religious ideas into everyday life. Maybe tomorrow, art will bring scientific understanding into reality.
"This is you: an empty mass of energy, changing all the time, intertwining inward and outward, closed but open bodies exchanging into each other, one faceless mass: smelling and breathing; at the same time not smelling and not breathing. blubblubblub

There is literally nothing left to write about.

Art (all art) is dying because of equality and the publicization of the arts.

I agree. Imagine, in a hypothetical world, if some miraculous scientific study found everything there was to know about the human mind, not on a physical level but on a conscious level. Would there still be a need for people to puzzle and question the conscious mind?
My point being that the more science proves, the less questions there are to ask. Then again though that's not to say that art is dying as has been suggested in this thread. I personally believe we just turn our questions elsewhere.

I know this isn't what most people on this board want to hear, but art has migrated. Now many artists are moving towards film, video games, TV, and other forms of mass media. I know some games get drummed up in nearly every discussion about games as art, but I would suggest taking a close look at games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne. This new wave of art is -well- new, but that doesn't make it invalid. Check into the music, art, level design, and other parts of modern video games. These games are the beginning phases of much more thoughtful game design and perhaps a more artistic medium. Even shows that I don't cat much for such as Steven Universe are very impressive milestones in artistic design in television. I think you could be right about literature in of itself, but I think that art is also moving in directions that better help artists express their visions.

Look at this moron.

The problem of literature is that it has been perfected over and over again. The sheer amount of written works and the span of time that has been spent writing is just overwhelming. Video games and TV can rehash what would have been stale ideas and present them in a new environment, keeping them fresh for the viewer. They are cookie cutter art forms slowly evolving into real art over the next ten - 300 years. Which is not to say Vidya and TV haven't produced artistic products on their own, but the bar hangs pretty low, to be honest. The 'artistic value', or 'deepness:^)', of a game like Bloodbourne is jack shit in comparison to Finnegans Wake. Art hasn't migrated. Art died and sunk to the bottom of the ocean like a whale's carcass, on which smaller fish feed.

maybe someone should write an aesthetic manifesto for them, so they get their shit together and leave behind the amusement park tier antics.

The dominant ideology pretty much ensures that anything popular or critically acclaimed will be extremely dull, and the people that oppose it aren't really capable of producing a good work of art.

I'm sure there's still good stuff being produced, but it's probably hard to find.

>Now many artists are moving towards film, video games, TV, and other forms of mass media.
What great works of film have been produced recently?
> Even shows that I don't cat much for such as Steven Universe are very impressive milestones in artistic design in television.
What milestones are those?

>What milestones are those?

Smash Bros Melee streams and Game of Thrones.

> communists hate artistic endeavors.

Millennial barbarians have no ideology apart from consumerism and Facebook. It is them that have oiled the machinery of the great cultural leveling process.....our is because of them, not the limp wristed faggots of academia that we no longer have great men of literature

Video games and comic books are as good as books

You answered yourself there. Video games, TV, ect. don't have thousands of years of tradition backing them. I don't expect there to be REALLY quality forms of these mediums for at least a hundred years, if not more.

This. So much this. If we want to see any movement towards refinement in the field then we need more talk about it. I do think that YouTube is doing a great job of allowing people to get their critiques out there.

>What great works of film have been produced recently?

That depends on how you define recently. Seeing as film isnt even 200 years old, I would say quite a bit in the last 200 years (considering that this would encompass the entire medium).

>And what milestones would that be?
In the case of Steven Universe, that show has set the bar very high for cohesion between music and set pieces. It also has a higher overall quality than many movies of years past (barring its complexity [or lack thereof] of subject depth). Listen to some of the background soundtrack and look at some of the background sets; they are very fine achievements in their own regard, not to mention how well they mesh together. My point being that these parts have elevated the genre to new realms of idiosyncracity and refinement.

I wonder what you do when you don't work

beside being here sharing your view through those words

Its funny because actually many people still like art.

We consume art like we never have, that's dumb, littérature is not dead, there are writers everywhere now because people want to be entertained each seconds of their life

This is really really cringing

>Average right wing wage slave

Nah, it's you.

oh cool. another death of art rant. you have a long and storied history. cicero would be proud.

Have you noticed that every new endeavour (even art form) is dismissed by supporters of previous and similar endeavours as first irrelevant, then nerdy / neckbeardy / childish, and is then criticised using the same criteria used for previous endeavours (or art forms)?

Have you noticed that after many years, many academics (containing a strangely disproportionate amount of women, in contrast with the endeavour's early days) swoop in to try to become the supreme authority on how this endeavour is to be appreciated and enjoyed?

Have you noticed that as every previously popular endeavour goes out of fashion it is marketed less on its merit of potential for enjoyment and more on its alleged "moral" or "spiritual" improving properties?

Have you noticed the cycle always starts again and is always ongoing?

give examples

>mfw all these pseuds who don't even appreciate the Pipe Strip

I wish people would stop nlrmalizjng music that is just "good" or "moving" and proceed to throw in the trash everything that came out from the XX century and start again from the classical/romantic period.

The absolute best albums that came out from jazz, rock, hip hop and all of their derivatives are (maybe) as sophisticated, moving and well crafted as the most boring and simple Beethoven's piano sonata. The best /mu/core albums are as good as a collection of minuets written by Mozart. Should we really care about the best music made by dumb people? Or should we immediatly strive for the top?

Feeling is not enough, we should look for talent once again, collectively.

You are entirely wrong. It would, however, be advisable to slowly influence mainstream taste towards refinement in their respective genres, which is to say destroy the hedonistic drug abusing youth death cult that has lost its productive soul, hence producing nothing and consuming only.

humanities lost all intellectual rigor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Do you ever feel there's a certain level of anti intellectualism where you live?
I once used the phrase "comment on" as and got laughed at.

>You are entirely wrong.
I'm talking from experience: I have spent the first 25 years of my life listening avidly to all the music I could find, always focusing on post 1950 music, in all its form.
At 26 I listened once to Bach, and then 20 times more, and at the end of it I was fully aware that most of the music I did listen up to this day was deeply formulaic, unoriginal (even when you take the most original reveered works that came put of rock the scope of the deviation from the norm is always laughable), and basically empty

Now, you can link to me many good albums, stuff that made you cry, think and wonder about music, but for everyone of those albums there is a minor work composed by a minor composer that already magnify what that piece of music was about. The only thing that changes is the timbre palette (and to this day I've never found a timbre combo that pleased me more than a string quartet, or a piano, but this is subjective) and the post-african rythms, which more often than not are completely wasted by mediocre composers (virtually all of them).

>advisable to slowly influence mainstream taste
There is no mainstream taste, and the musicians that are drawned by this music (virtually all of it) are not musically and artistically competent enough to do anything worth taking on a desert island.

What should people do is to stop normalizing both mediocrity and "just being good". There are already extremely high standards of sophistication in the Western canon (mainly in classical music) and we should hold them when jusdging new musicians, while still keeping in mind that they're probably doing something different. If you think that this is a contradiction just keepin mind that Mozart started from minuets in galant style, and did what he ended up doing, Beethoven started from popular German songs, Wagner started with marches and inauguration tunes. What they ended up achieving, in their own, personal, groundbreaking way, was a direct consequence of that first impulse, that is even less complex and sophisticated than the starting point of virtually every major rock and jazz musician: blues impovisations.

People mostly know that what they consume is mediocre, though, that it's normal music and nothing special (although special to them). They know Bach is in another 'realm' of joy and uncontested, if they think about it which they often dont. You can talk all day about the fullness of classical music: It does not mean anything to anybody except you and people like you (in this regard). You are an aristocrat frowning upon a peasant dance. Mediocraty is normalcy. Most people are pretty normal (normal being a wide margin).

youtu.be/6w2ABeV8lRQ?t=21

Look at critically acclaimed contemporary artistic works in any era. Then look at the same era in the context of hindsight.

A good means to do this is with early Nobel Prize winners, who are mostly not acclaimed as classics. Pic related is the first 10 years of the man booker.

As with these examples, the hidden literary jewels of this era will be found after decades of academic assessment.

>The only thing that changes is the timbre palette
This is just silly. Every genre, every artist, every song has it's own unique emotional space. It is not a different timbre palette, it is a completely different experience. I guess what you wanted to say is: 'this rock song evokes anger, but this classical piece magnifies the same emotion much better'. As I said: 'just silly'.

youtube.com/watch?v=bZHTebd56cU

fuck off postmodernist shill
you have to be a literal retard to believe that.

it seems to me people literally don't give a shit about anything except their little bubble but i'm sure the majority of people has always been retarded anyway.

I live in a small NH town with 7% doctoral population. Everyone is at least well read re: contemporary novels, and public theater and folk music are huge draws. Our "coloured" population are all Indian and Arab doctors who are on H1-B Visas. The cops harass anyone who doesnt look like they belong. Pretty much paradise.

This song confirms virtually everything I've said. Formulaic, repetitive and unoriginal.
You're probably not enlightened yet, at least the other user that responded to me was able to see the limits of this music.

>Mediocraty is normalcy
That was precisely my point.

>Most people are pretty normal (normal being a wide margin).
most people are just oblivious. Look at the user above, he's completely clueless about why would I ever criticize such music. I'm pretty sure that by making him listening high music while explaining to him the greatness (both in sentiment, originality and craft) would be enough for him to reevaluate all the music he has listened so far.

>That depends on how you define recently. Seeing as film isnt even 200 years old, I would say quite a bit in the last 200 years (considering that this would encompass the entire medium).
What great films were made after 1999? I can only think of three or four.

>There's plenty of great music, literature, and visual art coming out today
Like what?

>This song confirms virtually everything I've said.
That's why I posted it. I'm a degenerate, you are a patrician. Monteverdi makes my ears bleed. Dj Skinhead gives me hard ons. I'm the only one talking to you. I wonder why. Your path leads to loneliness, which you love, and then you die, what do you get? Don't hate on peoples tastes a dingus.

youtube.com/watch?v=vSgGNd6thrc

In my opinion the pianist Dustin O'Halloran have made some beautiful piano pieces, at least, for my taste. I'll share some.

youtube.com/watch?v=Dcefk91YhKQ

youtube.com/watch?v=fgiQtmszK5w

Hope you enjoy it.

ITT

pretentious waffle

Yi yi, In Vanda's Room, Platform, Unknown Pleasures, Pulse, Millenium Mambo, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, Come and Go, Miami Vice, Colossal Youth, Don't Touch The Axe, Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, A.I Articificial Intelligence, Tokyo Sonata, A History of Violence, Zodiac, Syndromes and a Century, He Fengming.

Among others, that's just off the top of my head.

Well how the hell do you overcome nihilism then? I can't and won't force myself to believe in a god, either the spiritual (Allah or Yahweh) or the material (cult of personality ala Hitler or Mussolini, monarchism or fascism). So how do you get over the chaotic, random nature of the universe and the relative pointlessness of life in comparison? Please tell me.

>

Almost, but 'the humanities have been severely emasculated' has a cause as well.

>no ... attempt to convey an important message

Untrue. Hint: art isn't its object.

Your two points have always existed.

WHY IS ART SHIT?

SOCIAL MEDIA
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Literature is dying because it couldn't successfully transition to the 'new realism' of postmodernism. The rest of the arts thrived.

>Sophistication

So what

This reaction has existed for at least a century

It's a stupid nostalgic argument for pseuds

>It's a stupid nostalgic argument for pseuds
Not really. The reaction pseuds is to defend whatever mediocrity we celebrate today.

There are pseuds on both sides. Non-pseuds don't compare different music produced by different means for different audiences. They are historically and contextually aware.

Not really, you're just putting arbitrarily a continuum between popular music and classical music, and this is not the case.
It would make more sense to do it when talking about contemporary art music, but even then, most of the post-50 post-Webern contemporary music has nothing to share with classical music, it's a clear cut from the Western tradition.

>Non-pseuds don't compare different music produced by different means for different audiences.
This is what teachers teach to children in order to avoid hearing all day long dumb ideas about why this and that sucks. Once you get accostumed to the medium doing comparative judgement is not only allowed, but even productive. Of course a simple-minded brute like you will just think that I hate modern band X because they're counterpoint game is weak. The truth is that you're too stupid to see the parameters of excellence in every genre and artistic voice.
In the same way I can compare Mozart and Chopin, even if their starting point is different (galant style vs salone music) and so is their goal (apollonian aesthetic vs sentimental romanticism).
Basically you are a absolute relativist when it comes to aesthetic, and an absolute ignorant when it comes to art critique.

>They are historically and contextually aware.
Had you been historically aware you would have put a continuum between lieders/folk musicand modern popular music. You didn't, because obviously you're not familiar enough with the historic canon and its influences.

>the parameters of excellence in every genre and artistic voice.

That's what relativism is.

>You didn't, because obviously you're not familiar enough with the historic canon and its influences.

I did, just not overtly.

A for effort though.

You don't get over the pointlessness unless your will flows strong enough to take from you all idle time. Now you're not a nihilist yet. You're still looking for something, happiness, fulfillment, whatever. those are the ends. the means people tend to confuse the ends with, which is an alright enough mistake, as long as you just enjoy the ride and cultivate your body and mind.

Don't be a little bitch user. Nihilism is for the slothful and the uninspired

>Nihilism is for the slothful and the uninspired
What's the point of being active and inspired?

>That's what relativism is.

Not really, this is just saying that most pieces of art are different. Relativism is saying that they're all equal, at least in this context.

>I did, just not overtly.
You actually did the opposite, read your post again.
If you meant something else, state it.

To either produce or experience great art.
if you're a nihilist be aware that all the major nihilist thinkers got to the same conclusion.