I think the most important thing he says can be applied to all cultural media.
We must support what is good and brush aside what is bad.
Just this weekend read an essay by Andrew Klavan about much the same thing, except he was talking about movies, TV, music, novels, etc. Popular art instead of high art, if you will.
Watching this video it struck me that the degradation of the two related fields has the same cause. And it doesn’t require commies or the CIA to be behind it.
Since the mid to late 19th century, artists, writers and intellectuals in our society have been increasingly disconnected from and antagonistic to the society around them. This was at first a very small group of the avant garde, but after WWI it spread and deepened. Since the 60s it has been not a counter-culture movement, but the culture itself.
It’s based on whatever you should call the opposite of civilizational self-confidence, a gut belief that their own culture is horrible and should be destroyed. This is far below the level of conscious thought, and is so taken for granted that it’s considered a fact of nature.
This is, of course, why we see the constant calls for “transformational change” without any attempt to recognize the possibility that some change will be for the worse. To these people, it is simply an axiom that our society is so horrible that ANY change is by definition for the better.
This is despite the fairly obvious fact that western capitalistic capitalism has provided both greater prosperity AND greater freedom for more people than any that has ever existed.
I have a number of theories on why this rage against their own civilization exists, but don’t find any of them fully satisfactory. Would be interested in opinions. It is, IMO, much deeper than a desire for Marxism. In fact, I think Marxism, feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism and so forth are for most merely a rationale they pick up to justify to themselves their alienation, not its source.