People often lament how art and media seems to be so terrible nowadays, and reminisce about how much better things were in the past. This is an understandable sentiment, but it’s worth noting that this is a sentiment that has been around for as long as human civilization has been.
Reminiscing about the past can be useful, but it’s a mistake to believe that everything was better in the past. There are varying reasons for why art in the present may not seem as good, but broadly speaking it all comes down to survivorship bias.
If you think about films from the 1980s you are probably thinking about things like “The Princess Bride,” but you are probably not thinking about films like “Leonard Part 6.” If you think about films from the 1990s you are probably thinking about things like “The Shawshank Redemption,” but you are probably not thinking about films like “North.”
In general every era has had lots of good art, lots of mediocre art and lots of bad art. But the crucial difference is that the good art gets remembered and passed on, while bad and mediocre art tends to fade into obscurity and be forgotten.
So when we look to the past we are likely to see the artworks that stood the test of time and overlook the ones that didn’t. This creates the illusion that art used to be better, when in truth art in the past has simply had enough time for its actual quality and relevance to solidify.
This means that art in the present will always be at a disadvantage, because it’s still at the phase where it’s hard to tell for certain what is good, what is mediocre and what is bad.
There hasn’t been enough time for hype to die down or for word of mouth to draw attention to more obscure things that did poorly during their initial release, nor has there been enough time for the bad art to have faded from memory.
So it is not that art is worse nowadays, it’s just that time is an extremely effective filtering mechanism for quality, and present art has not had enough time for this filtering to take place.
But the good news is that the present keeps turning into the past, and so there will always be new art to experience and explore even if you don’t focus on every brand new release. So perhaps the cure to thinking that modern art sucks is simply to take a break from it, and focus more on the curation the past has to offer.
Erik Larson, reporter
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