Why has Creativity in Arts Mostly Disappeared over the Past Two Decades?

In an older post, I wrote about how movies and television shows made before the mid-2000s were much more relatable and based in reality than whatever “content” has been produced since then. I also wrote another one about why the 1990s was the last great decade for living in the USA or West. Both were about the profound and widespread technological and creative stagnation in the West for past two decades. This secular stagnation has affected areas as diverse as drug discovery and computing to movies, TV shows and video games. Notably, it has gotten especially since 2008. While I intend to, one day, finish the series about why the 1990s was the last great decade for USA and the West, this post is about something a bit different. Specifically, what do readers think are the main reasons driving this profound technological and cultural stagnation in West? And it is restricted to the West, since the rest of the world is doing just fine.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I am sure you must have noticed that most movies nowadays are superhero movies, live-action cartoons, crappy reboots, shitty sequels and prequels.. in other words, anything that lacks originality and creativity. The same is true (albeit in different ways) for TV shows, whether on TV or streaming platforms such as Netflix. While live-action cartoons are thankfully missing from this segment of the entertainment sector, they are chockful of poorly written, produced and generally uninteresting sequels, reboots, rehashes, expanded universes and tons of SJW-inspired crap which few want to watch. Sure.. some decent shows can be occasionally found in this debris field- but they are almost always cancelled by the second or third season. Now I am not claiming that most TV shows in the pre-2000 era were good- indeed, most sucked and were therefore promptly cancelled. But it is equally true that good shows with reasonable popular appeal were nurtured and promoted.

While the internet is full of theories about what is behind this unfortunate trend, there is no doubt that it is real. Explanations have ranged from aging populations, social media, YouTube, TikTok, Netflix’s business model etc. While many explanations have a grain of reality to them, none can explain the loss of creativity in multiple areas of the arts. For example- NetFlix’s business model has definitely hurt mid-budget movies and HBO, they are certainly not responsible for the lackluster video game “content” coming out of big video game studios. Indeed many video games released in the past few years are actually inferior to their prequels released a decade or more ago. This has occurred in spite of a significant increase in the graphical and rendering capabilities of game consoles and PCs. In my opinion, this widespread lack of creativity comes down to financialization, oligopolization and excessive corporatization of creative industries. Therefore, we now have a system which promotes bullshit markers of “progress” (amount of CGI in movies, diversity in TV, photorealism in video games) over those which matter (good story telling and relatable characters in movies and TV, good game playing mechanics and visual design/styling in games).

What do you think? Comments?