That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.

(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)

That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.

Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new technology will result in some new classics in the coming years - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.

This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of an issue.

Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.

Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.

Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.

Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time

We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction.

Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.

I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.

Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.

For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.

Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism

Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.

The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss physical magazines though.

I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed).

This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.

As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.

Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know that. There's enough of it that I can find something interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)

No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be culture.

Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.

To do that authors need to very well versed in the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.

I've read a lot of scifi over the past few years. Most books are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level sentence structure etc.)

Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages wholesale.

I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint.

Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.

Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.

Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension:

> A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.]

That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia:

> In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.

If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it.

> “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln

> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...

As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.