It's Gone, It's Over Now

Point Art is fucked. Any two-bit ass can slap a little paint on a canvas or strum a couple of notes. Hell, I've done it myself. I don't dare call what I do fine art. I don't dare pretend it's anything but crap. So, where the hell does the average hack get off calling what he does great? How can anybody every claim that, in twenty years, the White Stripes or Moby or Peaches will be anything but embarrassing and dated? I mean, at the time they were actually working, people thought Huey Louis and the News were at least not crap. Now listen to anybody talk about them. A fan of the white stripes, absolutely straight-faced, said to me not two weeks ago, "Twenty years from now, people will be thanking the White Stripes for everything they're doing." No, the truth is, people will be 20 years older in 20 years, and they will either a)remember what the White Stripes are doing now fondly as a "Golden Oldy," or b)think everything about their parents' generation was lame and not worth the time it takes to ignore. Sorry. Them's the brakes. Art doesn't hold up unless it has a huge amount of skill behind it. If Leonardo spat on canvas, threw paint in its general direction and called it art, it would have been forgotten inside of a century. Only because its recorded in books and a hack movie will the work of Jackson Pollock be remembered at all. "You see, kids, in the middle of the 20th century there was a powerful movement away from skill. We called it 'modern art' because 'bag of crap' already meant something else." OK, honestly, no art teacher will ever be so direct, but you get the idea. Those who whine and claim that this is an elitist and exclusionary attitude are right. It is. People who don't have the skills necessary to make art should not make art. They should practice at home and not subject the rest of us to bullshit, unskilled attempts to create some hack meaning.
And don't even get me started on poetry. It's a useless art form on its own. With modern poetry, you can generate a random string of words and attribute any meaning you want, as the medium is garbage. At its best, it approaches music. At its worst it's this:
The buttercup
how like a
train
in a placid
dildo
afternoon.
I mean, what the fuck? Classical poetry isn't any better. It's just somebody's half-assed prose, divided into lines.
CounterPoint OK. So, the problem with this is, you're absolutely right. I can't really add much more.
Pointed Opposition I guess I have to say something here. You have to differentiate between "art" and "pop culture." Mostly all of the examples you're riding rough-shod over are pop culture. They're meant to pander to the LCD and make the common man say something along the lines of "I could do that. I mean, if I wanted to." The People Who Bother create the pop art. I think what you're actually lamenting is the loss of skill in so-called high art. Somewhere out there, somebody is making high art. Yeah, it probably doesn't appeal to any actual persons, but that's why it isn't pop art. The crossover of the two is the reason high art today sucks so effectively. There isn't, and has never been, a lot of money in making real art. In a capitalistic society, whatever makes money is what sticks around because the artist has to get money to fail to starve. The White Stripes, whom you seem to love to pick on, are just making music for the average normal person. No, it's not high art, and no, it won't be kept for posterity in any way other than that in which everything recorded in any way in the last ten years including this will be, but it's popular right now. The News weren't high art either. Popular music isn't high art, and high art tends not to be popular. Need I point you at the novelty act that Phillip Glass and John Cage are, balancing between the popular and the artistic as they do? Of course, much of that garbage leaves the realm of music and becomes performance art, but that's neither here nor there.