A columnist famed for her genius IQ was asked by a reader why modern art had replaced traditional art. THe columnist replied that people were no longer willing to dedicate the needed time and effort to perfecting technique - the old masters labored for decades and invested their lives in their art. The modern art ‘masters’ want their fame and money NOW and they never intend to develop true mastery - it takes too long. SO they decide shocking, offending, or industrial ‘works’ (did you see the film clip where the skill saw cut in a plaster wall, probably done by a workman mounting other paintings, was itself on sale for tens of thousands of dollars in a chic art gallery?)SHOULD be art, and we SHOULD want repulsive, ugly, canvases and sculptures throughout our houses to ‘reject’ bourgeois culture.
I think the same thing happened to music. This lust for ‘egalitarianism’ (people without talent should be as popular and well compensated as people who spend their lives mastering opera or the violin) brought out this attack on music. And dance became gangsta moves because not everyone is graceful and can keep time, but even a baby can mimic gangsta moves which are intentionally jerky and visually displeasing. And poetry - not everyone is Keats, so poetry must be reinvented as a-tonal, a-rhthmic ‘free verse’ - really any Tweet is now considered poetry. We are lucky that we have musical recordings, paintings, books, poems, and dances that have been preserved for us (for now) beause the young don’t even know they exist or why they matter.
All good points. But something has to be said about European culture. That’s just what we do- Europeans could travel to Mars, terraform it and we’d have a beautiful planet and classical music and within days, there would be people clamoring to try and get there.