Any deliberate expression of actual skill - or actual INTENT - is merely a distortional filter that hides true excellence.

This is why Pollack works so well as modern art: His work consists usually of paint flingings, deliberately consciously out of control, with the intended idea that it is his *subconscious* that is directing the flingings, and therefore creating the great art.

Link

The perspective of that picture is specifically designed to center around Christ’s haloed head under the arch. The lines are so sharp and level that you might even think it was CGI generated.

My thoughts on this mostly involve our culture’s desire for instant gratification. The other factor is that arts and entertainment now exist to support, in large part, advertising.

Most consumers of art, music, and entertainment don’t expect to spend much time thinking about the experience. They want to enjoy something and move on to another experience. They won’t sit around with their friends and deconstruct the experience over a meal, or during an evening’s socializing. They won’t sit and analyze the product, or ponder over hidden meanings.

The same mindset permeates many who want to become artists - quickly. They don’t want to spend years developing the skills that everyone else labored over in the past. So they decide to express themselves using some sort of shocking (new) medium and technique. Negative emotions are the easy to portray, and bodily fluids are readily available.

And besides, there isn’t much payoff in laboring over a TV script, or a 3 minute song. It only has to hold the audience’s attention long enough for the advertising to appear. The standard 3 minutes time limit is imposed by commercial advertising, and it shapes the attention spans’ of the masses. What motivation is there to develop one’s skills?

In times past, before the obsession with speed, projects were expected to take much longer. During the renaissance a painting might take years, and a cathedral might take centuries. No one today would initiate a project lasting beyond their lifetime. Our marketing base economy wouldn’t support it.

Dumbing down music is one thing, but when things get so that actual musicians don’t get it just by hearing it, then you know something has gone out of whack.

Well, I’m going to have to eat my words in my previous comment. I just went from writing that comment to watching a really excellent show, Stephen King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes. The quality of these shows were just superb and the stories as or more compelling than the original Rod Serling Twilight Zone episodes. I just finished watching two of three DVD’s. I rented them so I couldn’t plow into the third one yet. That’s for later.

Now, I’m going to have to swing in the other direction (but not too drastically, mind you). There is quality stories are art out there, little gems embedded in this cacophony of gibberish. But when you find them, boy, are they a treat.

This is a topic I’ve thought about for quite a while. My friends and I have called it the “dumbing down” of America for over eight years now. In my grimmer moments when I think of the kinds of movies and shows we’re producing, I think that, like entropy, our civilization is winding down to where we won’t have the capacity to tell compelling stories. Every once in a while I run across a compelling show on tv or in the movies, but it’s getting farther and farther apart each time.

In my more optimistic moments, I can see that the vignettes and the conceptions of some of the stories are as compelling as anything we’ve ever done.

But there is no question that our arts are dwindling in quality, like infantile regression. Indeed, most of our major movies are junior high level conceptions. I think this degeneration is separate and apart from any politics. I think that our arts are a reflection of where we are at as a culture, and I don’t think there is any escaping that.