There's nothing quite like a painting. Even though photographs can depict reality better than paintings, the very fact that the painting isn't a photograph, makes the quality all the more impressive. There are also abilities painters have that photographers don't, for instance the representation of mythical forms and settings. Paintings can also determine moods and atmospheres through the use of their colors and techniques. Entering a church adorned with rich paintings in all directions is something a photographer couldn't do, no matter how many pretty settings he uses. All photographs are basically cold, austere things. Even so, it's obvious painting has lost a large market share to photography. Portraits, for instance, aren't very useful anymore. Of course, most art today is done digitally on computers, but it can still be considered a painting if rendered by the human mind. Computers are just another tool. There is still plenty of work to be done in this art form, from cartoons to computer graphics in movies and video games, to simple advertising brands to picture-books. Artwork has such an ingrained appeal to people because it works through our most powerful tool in terms of interacting with and understanding the world, our eyes. Music works through our second most powerful and important tool, our ears. It is unlikely there will ever be another painter in the veins of Rembrandt or Titian. Some monstrously popular artist who spends endless time on a few dozen pictures of waves, faces, farms, or fruit, with no particular context, meaning, or story. That era is done, it's obsolete. What people are looking for now is massive amounts of pictures that tell a story. They don't have to be super amazing, just pretty, appealing, or cool while also informing us of the current situation.
Most people have little interest in wandering through a museum looking at still-life pictures of random things or people. Even if they are told that the art is super-amazing and worth hundreds of millions, people will only half-heartedly ooh and ahh for the sake of social approval. No one spends hundreds of hours viewing art museums, at most you go once or twice in your lifetime and look at each picture for a few minutes. But plenty of people spend hundreds of hours viewing cartoons, even for individual series. Plenty of people spend hundreds of hours living in the artistic computer graphics of final fantasy or world of warcraft. In short, paintings are a small niche and the painting's creators hardly deserve the legendary status they once held, even though artwork (ie man-made visual media) still has profound importance in people's lives. The ridiculous amount of money people spend on art is just a bubble sustained by status seeking and speculation that the price will continue to rise.
The reason some painters have been popular for so long is their competition (photography and visual media) hadn't been invented yet. The moment new options opened up for people, they turned to comic books, artistically rendered video games, Magic cards, cartoons and anime. Even though governments around the world spend endless subsidies on museums of old art, it can't compete for people's leisure time against today's products. Many people have fond memories of disney movies they watched when kids, or cartoon series they got addicted to, or card games they played with their friends, or beating a boss in World of Warcraft with their friends. I find it very unlikely the 'visit to the art museum' was a more joyous memory than any of those. New visual media can be combined with music that fits the mood and the story being told. Music is an innate pleasure to the ear, just like flowing water or an hourglass figure is an innate pleasure to the eye, and causality is an innate pleasure to the mind (ie a story with plot, pattern recognition, ethical consequences to people's actions). How can paintings compete when they are so drab as to be motionless and silent and story-less, just sitting there forever on a wall?
The best paintings tend to be portrayals of famous scenes from famous stories, like the birth of Venus or Jesus. Without the background of the story, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting paintings. But a single still life of a single famous form can't compete with an animation of the entire story with music playing in the background. What's the use of pretending otherwise for the sake of sophistication?
Aside from a church, which cares about stillness and eternity and quiet, sublime imagery, paintings just don't perform well. It's no surprise that most important artwork was drawn to adorn various churches.
I've been to art museums and flipped through picture books of famous paintings. I admit they are very pretty and can even captivate you for minutes at a time. But I'd rather keep in my memory any of a variety of animated stories than all old paintings combined. Even the french ballerinas, the starry nights, and the creation of Adam have never taught me profound insights, plumbed the depths of my emotions, or entertained me for endless hours of relaxation. So why does Charles Murray treat painting as an important category of human accomplishment? To me, all humanity accomplished in the visual arts in the past is trivial compared to what's come out in just the last few decades. Everyone but sophisticated 'experts' would agree with me. If normal people were given an option to forget all the old paintings they'd seen, or all their favorite cartoons or video games or playing cards or comic books, what would they do? Where does their heart reside? Cold, old paintings from a dead world? Or moving, musical stories from the present?
The same is true of most other ancient art forms. Take plays for instance. Because we lacked any recording devices, whenever we wanted to watch actors, we had to go to a play. There were many famous plays in the past, from Shakespeare to Euripides, but hardly anyone prefers plays to movies in the present. A good movie is more popular than any broadway show that might be going on at the time. Operas have the same problem, as do ballets. Performing arts live in front of human beings are all inferior to recorded movies. It can even be a movie of the exact same thing, that people can watch comfortably at home on a couch, stopping to eat or go to the bathroom whenever they need, that they can re-watch as often as they like. Or it can include more sophisticated props, special effects, careful editing and retakes -- the whole world opens up. The product is so inferior in scale that no matter how good the old masters were, they could never compete evenly with the technology of today. But Charles Murray treats masters of plays and operas seriously, like Shakespeare and Wagner, while completely ignoring movies that entertain many more people much better. How is this fair? Again, the best litmus test is to ask normal people which they would rather forget -- the greek and shakespearian plays they read in high school, the random play/opera/ballet they saw once in a blue moon, or every movie and tv show they've ever seen. Who would really prefer the past to the present?
I think most people admit video games and animation have surpassed paintings and movies and tv have surpassed plays and operas. What of classical music? This is a more interesting competition, because there haven't been many advances in music since the symphony was invented in the 1700/1800's. One way of comparing ancient to modern music is the number of people who listen to each of them. It's rather obvious modern music wins in this category. But this could be because people have no 'taste' and don't get enough access to classical music they would have liked if they had the chance. It used to be every home had its piano or fiddle so that people could play and listen to classical or folk music -- now everyone has a cd player, or an ipod, and the pianos? The village dances? Not so much. People are voting via their leisure time what they really prefer to be listening to.
There's another reason to look down on classical music, however. Apart from a few pieces, most of it is just plain Boring. And even amid some of the best songs, classical has no concept of 'getting to the point.' It can wander around for 10 minutes before reaching the melody that made it famous and appreciated. People have to wander through a desert of notes to reach the oasis of true music. Nowadays music starts strong and covers a tune of only a few minutes a piece. Most likely, amid those minutes, it repeats an even shorter melody many times. Modern music gets to the point, and soon. It doesn't waste the listener's time. To make up for how short it was, it's catchy enough to listen to hundreds of times, a rush every time. It's also accompanied by so many other songs by the same artist that you can listen to hours of music by an artist, just like with classical, but actually be reaching crescendos every couple minutes -- unlike classical. Classical, of course, has one more flaw -- it generally lacks the most interesting instrument of all, the human voice. Modern music lives by the singer's voice -- and not a highly trained voice like with opera. A voice that's naturally beautiful, full of emotion, and singing some lyrics that tell a meaningful story. Its lack of training just makes the singer and the audience feel closer to each other -- there's no barrier of artificiality, of overly gaudy tricks, of form overwhelming function.
As a mental test, we can again ask ourselves, would we rather forget all the classical or all the modern tunes we've ever heard? And yet Murray lists all sorts of classical music composers and not a single composer of modern music. Who is he fooling? Isn't that just elitism? This isn't to say I don't like classical music, I love it. I even spend days listening to it exclusively. It's just that I love modern music even more -- and I suspect most everyone feels the same.
As a final category, we can look at books.
Let's compare that to movies:
http://www.mpaa.org/USEntertainmentIndustryMarketStats.pdf
If you scroll to page 25, you get a useful graph. Consumer spending per person per year on various products. Books average $101.23. Home videos average $118.39, and TV averages $333.79. The novel was invented in the 1700's and once was the primary entertainment device. But soon enough, stories began to be told over the radio, then on television and movies, and books have been losing ground ever since. Charles Murray has a whole section of human accomplishment devoted to literature, where great writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky dwell. I have nothing against this, because I really liked those authors too. I'd even say I like old authors more than the current writers of fantasy and science fiction. But of course, the serious story-tellers aren't writing books anymore. They are writing screenplays. They are writing plots for video games, movies, comics, and tv serials. The writing is then combined with special effects, acting, music, costumes, and lord knows what, like a giant hotpot. What comes out is a wonderful stew of pure pleasure that hits the viewer/listener with everything at once. Though it's difficult to convey information (like textbooks) through visual media, or abstract philosophy through anything but abstract words, the vast majority of writing was simple story-telling. And just a few passages from books describing people's faces or dresses or sword fights can quickly teach people how much more appealing just looking at the face, the costume, and the light-saber duels truly is. Reading a book has a fundamental barrier; reading can only uptake information very slowly as compared to our senses, our main information processors. It can take ten pages to give people a vague sense of what a place looks like that a single picture could convey in a split second. Information density translates to entertainment density. No one wants to spend endless time reading a book when they get the same amount of information watching the two hour movie translation.
Charles Murray ignores these facts and lists famous authors as champions of human accomplishment, while the public has largely moved on already. They expect more, faster, better from their entertainment devices than an endless string of words, words, words, that take months to find the time to complete and only leave vague impressions of what the world and characters must have looked like. The novel was only a recent invention, it had its heyday in the 1800's, and has slowly receded ever since. The best use of books today is a template for a later movie or tv series adaption. On its own, it's just an obsolete technology suited only for technical projects like history or philosophy. Even the book as entertainment device on airplanes is dead thanks to the gameboy, the iphone, the laptop etc.
Charles Murray conveniently cuts off all accomplishment at 1950, and doesn't include any movies or music that came before then. It's been 60 years since then, more than enough time to show if something was a 'hit' or a 'classic' or not. And yet he refuses to consider anything a 'hit' or 'classic' on par with the artists of the past. That's hard to swallow. If we look at audience, revenue, leisure hours, 'mental space' share, everything favors modernity. Even the morals and beliefs of people are largely recent, with little contributed from the past. In short, old art has left no impression on the human heart, so why should it be considered our 'greatest' achievement? Whose? Who really treasures those things? Just because a few smart people decide, between each other, to value old things more than new things, it's hard to believe the 7 billion people on Earth today can't come up with even a single story to match the tiny population of the ancient world. In fact, I'll flatly deny it's possible that in a truly merit-based competition, no matter how it is judged, the modern world hasn't produced a single story as good as the ones listed in Human Accomplishment. It's absurd. It's also deceptive to downplay our modern age's accomplishments so far. We have plenty to enjoy and admire. We have our own stories, our own morals, our own heroes, our own epics. They're better than ANYTHING that came before and the proof is in the pudding -- the consumers are consuming today's art more than yesterday's. It shouldn't take sixty years for people to realize a good story is good. In fact, watching it the first time should be good enough. But just to be sure, we could try watching it ten years later, or reading it multiple times, or whatever, to make sure we weren't swept away in the moment. Guess what -- Star Wars is still popular! It still shows on TV all the time! And people still love it who watched it decades ago. Star Wars has more influence in popular culture than Emerson or Mark Twain -- but we all have to pretend otherwise. Why? It's stupid. People living in an ivory tower who write essays on the 'meaning' of some ancient play are no better than anyone else at determining a story's value. The real value is how moved someone was, how many people it moves, and how long they remember the joy they took in it. It's subjective to start listing some people's opinions as more important than others. The best measure is to simply add up the objective numbers. Whose taste has the right to be supreme? And why would those supreme tastes just happen to always prefer the past and always be against popular opinion? Wouldn't popularity be right even once, if only by accident? Preferring old works to new is just another attempt at status inflation.
Unfortunately, the cost of status inflation in this case is too high. If we refuse to value the art that's all around us, we grow to hate and despise the culture, and people, we live around. If everything we produce is inferior, we must also be inferior. If we haven't made any progress, that must mean everything about our society is flawed. It creates a sense of nihilism and despair to always prefer the past to the present. If our best days are behind us, why not draw the curtain on the world and call it a wrap? If we can never match our golden age, why bother living out the brass? We need people with the confidence to love the present more than the past. We need people with the honesty to admit they really do prefer catchy tunes to stuffy symphonies. We need people to admit that they didn't bother reading the book and just waited for the movie to come out. We need to endorse existence. Charles Murray's book condemns all of it, stem to stern, leaving nothing at all to be proud about today. He doesn't even allow in a token figure that might justify the lives of all 7 billion people living today. We're all worthless worms to him. And that kind of thinking is dangerous for an entire culture to have -- people need to be proud of themselves, not others who lived hundreds of years ago. Their own lives, their own culture, their own countries need justification -- those who are dead justified themselves long ago.
Nor is our 'worthlessness' reflected by our improvement in other intellectual fields. Our chess and go players are better than the chess and go players of 100 years ago. Our athletes are better than the athletes of 100 years ago. Our scientists are studying things much more complex than the scientists of 100 years ago, and understand reality much better. It would be strange if our art, and our art alone, had only decayed while all measurable progress had improved. Because art is subjective, Murray can get away with saying all of it is worse. But what are the odds? When all objective tests show our people, and our top performers, are smarter than ever? Why would we play better Go games but come up with worse stories?
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