Dark Age Of Art

When was the last time you enjoyed a book, or movie or video game or anything, that was truly groundbreaking and influential? Not just good and entertaining - there's been plenty of those - but something that left its mark to the history of arts and made certain none could ignore the footprint it left behind?



I don't recall us having had too many lately.

Maybe it's just me: maybe there's a bunch that I have not noticed because I don't follow the right circles. Or maybe these things can only be seen decades after the fact. Or maybe we no longer get any because we've capped our art, and can now only recycle the same old stuff.

But I've come to believe that it's far more sinister than this. I submit that the reason to the slump is that the modern day simply does not allow for innovation anymore.



We've come to live in this incredibly lame cyberpunk reality, where we're ruled by a few big megacorporations that keep on swallowing one another to become even greater and more bloated - and they're doing the best they can to make as much money as possible with as little risk as possible. And what art can you have without a bit of risk?

Marvel Cinematics Universe is pretty much the single most monetarily successful movie franchise ever, and sure, plenty of the movies in it are pretty entertaining and well-directed and -acted... but they're also about as far from groundbreaking as you can get, barely even staying in your head for much longer after you've seen them, let alone leaving real a mark in film history and culture. In the realm of comics, superheroes rule and continue to rule even though nothing has changed in their worlds for decades. Nothing in the realm of anime has approached the popularity of One Piece, and even that - for all the money it has made - has barely left a mark when compared to its predecessor Dragon Ball. The western cartoons have been running in circles for decades. Dungeons & Dragons has a death-grip on roleplaying games. Among video games we've just got Fortnite, Minecraft, Battlefields and what have you, the same old franchise zombies: The Last Of Us II recently racked in pretty much every reward there was - even making up some new ones just for itself - despite the enormous worker abuse and the fact that pretty much no player actually liked it.

And then books - the reason we're all here in the first place. "Groundbreaking" is a word that comes up a lot in advertisement, and then the book sells like a thousand copies and is forgotten by the next year by all but the most devoted fans. As detailed wrote in the previous post, the art of literature is particularly dead: even in the mainstream it barely sells, let alone being any good.

Then if you do come up with something genuinely new in any of these mediums, you'll be pretty much doomed into obscurity, no matter how good your work actually is: you'll impress a small group of people, but you lack the money and influence of these megacorporations, and your gem will be buried deep beneath the bland inoffensive porridge they promote.



I still think Undertale deserved to change everything about video games. It was the first and only time I've seen a game take full advantage of its medium - outside of brief gimmicks - blurring the line between the player and player character, and even more than that, offering genuinely impactful choices and immense depth of variations that follow from them. But of course such things could never be implemented in the AAA industry, obsessed with special-effect-laden interactive movies as it is. Maybe if it had come out a decade earlier it might have done something. Alas.

And it's the exact same story in every medium. Nothing has been allowed to change for ages. No risks have been taken, let alone paying off. There was a time when the media giants of today - Star Wars, Dragon Ball, superhero comics, Disney Animated Canon, video games as a whole - were precisely the sort of risks, ones that just happened to pay off enormously, all the more beautiful for it. We need more of those. We've forgotten where we came from.

I hope this won't last for long. I hope the people will grow tired of it all eventually and that the status quo will be broken. And I wish to be there to see it when it happens... and to take advantage of the new golden age once it does. Sword and Sorcery will rise again.



Would be nice if I knew what to do to be noticed, though. I feel like a drowning man unable to break the surface: I know what I must do but I cannot for the life of me tell which way to swim or how to swim at all.