And I'm finding more and more that comprehension of what is written is flawed or misinterpreted. Comprehension is a childhood skill. What is happening?
Overlooked in this essay is the REAL economy. Money, or lack of it, makes it difficult to attend high-priced performing arts. I have been producing and presenting the performing arts for 50 years and have seen audiences to opera, ballet and classical music evolve from broad middle-class (with children) to much older affluent retirees. The problem: Ticket prices which have outpaced wages. Something had to give in the family budget. Taking a family of four to the ballet or opera is a $500 plus hit. On occasions when event producers make those events inexpensive, specifically to attract young and new audiences, they sell out.
There are other factors such as lack of early exposure to these so-called high art forms. Not as many schools take their students to see live performing arts as before. And there are not as many school band, orchestra and dance programs as there once were.
Fortunately, there are other types of art: performing arts, visual arts AND experiential arts, that are not expensive and which younger people find their way to in droves. Creativity will live on.
You’re right about the practical barriers. The cost of going to the opera or the ballet has become unreachable for many families, and that changes who we see in the seats.
Making the arts accessible again matters. But money might not be the whole story. Even when performances are free, something deeper feels missing — the sense that beauty itself is essential.
Even poetry, which once lived in classrooms and voices, has faded into something we study for grades instead of something we feel. Maybe part of the real work now is to help beauty feel alive again. When teachers risk reading verse out loud, when families choose a concert simply because it nourishes them, when artists create with sincerity instead of cleverness, people begin to remember why art mattered in the first place. Beauty (I would like to think) wakes up through example, not promotion. I am telling myself now to trust: maybe it only needs a few of us to treat it as food for the soul instead of decoration.
[Nodding] I understand that feeling. Much of what comes out of Hollywood does feel tired, either trapped in ideology or chasing profit instead of meaning. But maybe that’s the deeper problem? We have lost the expectation that art should feed us rather than flatter us.
What we call “quality” isn’t just about budget or craft. It’s about honesty, conscience, and a kind of inner beauty that can’t be manufactured.
Perhaps when those qualities return, whatever labels or politics surround a film won’t matter as much. People can sense sincerity; it reaches them in a way agendas never can.
In my experience, it isn’t an attention-span problem. Long form interviews & debates have never been more popular.
It’s that people are sick of Woke lectures. Hollywood & High Art have both made it their core aim to ‘educate’ society (in Gay-Race-Communism) rather than offer mirrors to our nature or even some Catharsis.
OK, Boomer. (I am 64.). My three children, ages 30, 26, 24, are much more focused on experiential art consumption. Festivals, combining art and music are sold out globally. Take a look at Lightning in a Bottle on Instagram. It’s amazing. And the focus is on real-life, person to person contact. It’s a deep and engaging experience, and they often last 3 to 5 days. The festivals are global, and they range from Coachella, which is huge, to much smaller festivals. My daughter is an EDM (electronic dance music) agent, which is one of the most popular segments of this market. The arts are far from dead … but the arts of the past centuries are moribund. What is Art, if not a new perspective?
I think you just described what most people who value art, talent and artistry avoid. Coachella, "Glasto" etc...global, like a virus, and about as enjoyable. Overpriced, preachy and all about the "experience" for a not-so-small fee.
To the contrary. Coachella is the apotheosis of commercialization. There are many other festivals that are much smaller and much more affordable, many of them presenting cutting-edge art and music. The “algorithm” - Spotify streams, YouTube views - is feeding you Taylor Swift. But have you listened to Rufus du Sol? Or the amazing music coming out of Nigeria? It is possible to honor and enjoy the classical while opening our ears and eyes and minds to the new, and especially to the less commercialized. Art is here to move us, to manifest, magnify, and glorify the human experience. There will always be great creators. And although I love the classics in all fields, if we allow art to become ossified, we too become fossilized and stagnant.
The "apotheosis of commercialization" charges between $549 and $1250 a ticket, and the smaller festivals of this nature simply ram the arm in as much as possible, 'though to a lesser degree. "Cutting edge" is a matter of taste. I am not being "fed" anything. I choose what I listen to, and watch and read, and Taylor et al don't figure! I do listen to music from around the world, I do make art, I do write. The Classical is the foundation on which western civilization rests. There is nothing ossified in the classics - far from it - classicism is as relevant today as when created. But, hey, if wading around a campsite eating a $30 vegan burger floats your boat, enjoy!
Thankfully the arts of the past are NOT moribund but in greater demand because of their innate value and supreme importance. The audiences may be smaller but the contents and meaning of the old persist and are sought out by those who value history. My condolences to this person whose life lacks the things that make life precious. Caravaggio, Dickens, Brahms are what keep me breathing. They will never be discarded except by those who are too lazy to open their eyes and ears.
We can appreciate the classics, as well as the new. After all, the classics were once breakthroughs or even heretical. The article was addressing the lack of appreciation for Art in general amongst the young. I have no doubt that the classics will endure, but they can exist side by side with the new. I fully endorse the teaching of Western Civilization and its expression in art, music, literature, and architecture. But Art is a reflection of the culture. And as always, our contemporary forms of art are trying to tell us something.
As Jonathan Haidt emphasizes, it seems that many of the ills of society go back to Silicon Valley. I’ve spent a significant amount of time in Silicon Valley, and the interesting thing is that the tech gurus disallow their own children to use the very tech and algorithm driven platforms that the parents themselves have designed.
Forgive me if this sounds harsh- I teach classical drawing and painting, and I will only teach homeschool students now. I used to teach public school and private school students, and somewhere around 2019, the large majority of them lost the ability to focus, and simply could not follow a task through to completion. The common ingredient in public and private school kids? Smart phones.
There’s no need to be a Luddite, the point is to just live with intention. Though homeschool kids seldom have smart phones, what screen time they might have is typically limited to, say, math or physics instruction. I myself have an online classical art education website, used by many homeschool students. What is significant is that the homeschool culture in general eschews social media for children. I have a class of over forty homeschool students that I teach, and they are fantastic, and their ability to follow through and complete an assignment is wonderful. And they have a deep appreciation for the art they are studying.
In this context one of the greatest books ever written is Closing of the American Mind by Bloom - he documented this massive decline several decades ago, and labeled his Ivy League university students as functionally illiterate. The book includes chapters on e.g. literature, where he notes how the study of "difficult" literature like Shakespeare is being lost because it is "too difficult or claimed to be not relevant to the modern age" but in the old days it was recognised that there were enormous benefits to this study in developing the mind, the language etc. He develops his thoughts on why this has happened, the central thesis being perceptions of equality between people, which has resulted in the dumbing down of society as the unintended consequence. The book was castigated by academia which tells you something!
Thank you so much for suggesting this book, Chris, I am going to purchase it and read it right away! I’ve been hoping to come across something like this, it is kind of you to suggest. It really does feel as if some massive sheet of sandpaper is scrubbing down all the peaks and filling the valleys, until all is one bland, unthinking plain. I will send a message when I’m finished. Sorry for the delay in replying on my end- the stomach bug, mixed with five kids, is a doozy.
Culture has changed, yes, and we’re drawing from everywhere now. That can be rich, but when influence replaces depth, art may start to feel thin. What matters is not which culture we draw from, but whether we approach it with care and understanding. Depth (and possibly rootedness) gives art its life.
Yes! I feel that too. The shallowness we see everywhere is really a hunger that hasn’t found its food. When the world feels overstimulated, what we may need isn’t more noise but depth of meaning and beauty that asks us to slow down and feel again.
Comprehension was taught in schools. I am 65. I recall a (state) education system that mirrored as far as it could the classical liberal education of the most illustrious British public schools. I left in 1980 with a knowledge of Latin, sciences, modern languages, literature, and the ability to analyse, research and debate. I left with a sense of values intrinsic to a civilized society. Then I went to university, and found it had already become infected by Marxism. History was being re-written, the values I held were unfashionable and "fascistic." And Hollywood played its part - the worship of the "anti-hero" and celebration of al that was "alternative." Popular music too - politicized to within an inch of its life, a platform for "change" that few wanted. Chalamet and his kind are the result. Young people who worship the small screen are the result. How ironic that a little false god like Chalamet should mourn his own death! A population programmed to consume, demand, repeat is not interested in history, or even HIS story. They want to be the star of their own sad little side-show - 15 seconds of dubious "fame" on TIK TOK or some other bilge factory their ultimate "nirvana." It is not High Art that is dead, it is the education system, and society, that is dying. Western society has bred generations of dysfuntional, greedy, needy androids - connected to their source of faux life by their thumbs. I attended an opera last night, in a small auditorium in a small town in northern Spain. It was received rapturously, attended by a multi-generational audience. These are the pockets of resistance in a world consumed by consumerism and ruled by false gods.
Your point about distraction touches something real, yet attention itself is not the final cause of decline. We lose artistic vitality not only because we scroll or have gotten used to shorter forms but because we no longer believe the act of seeing can reveal truth. Once that trust in perception is lost, opera, poetry, and painting etc can no longer speak convincingly to the soul.
The deeper loss comes from an ideology that traps us inside the philosophy of suspicion. It teaches that every form hides manipulation and every beauty conceals power. Under that view, wonder itself becomes dangerous. The result is cultural anemia: people stop attending the high arts not from boredom but from disbelief.
The crisis of art is spiritual before it is neurological. What has withered is devotion. Without it, attention becomes mechanical and memory collapses into data. Rudolf Steiner called the antidote the moral imagination, the inner faculty that restores meaning by uniting thought, feeling, and will in acts of creation.
Totally agree with this. Limited attention span is seriously damaging the world of arts. Writers are struggling to play the role they used to have in society. That’s why I’m very sceptical of progress in this internet era.
Another boomer here, I want America 🇺🇸 back. “Social engineering” is behind what I see is the crumbing of our culture. It all started with the brainwashing of children, “common core”, and lowered standards for both teachers and students with the expected outcome. There’s no room for exceptionalism and individualism in Marxism which is what we’ve been fed. I still recall my introduction to the theater, a school trip, in the 9th grade, to the Orpheum theater in SF, to see Camelot and Fiddler on the Roof. More and more people have tuned out of their movies, theater, and their awards because we reject their “WOKEISM”! My community theater is doing just fine.
"When a culture loses the ability to sustain attention, it loses the ability to transmit meaning... What’s at risk is more than entertainment: it’s our capacity to converse, to feel deeply, to reflect and draw connections, and ultimately, to make meaning of our own world and our place in it."
I've never heard it summed up better. The expression "You don't know what you've got till it's gone" comes to mind, on multiple levels.
Another practical barrier: many performing arts live in symphony halls and theaters in the legacy centers of Woke cities that have permitted a breakdown of public safety. Performances happen mostly in the evening, after dark. Public transport is dangerous. Driving in from the suburbs is no better: where is a safe place to park? Is it worth it to risk getting mugged?
And I'm finding more and more that comprehension of what is written is flawed or misinterpreted. Comprehension is a childhood skill. What is happening?
Overlooked in this essay is the REAL economy. Money, or lack of it, makes it difficult to attend high-priced performing arts. I have been producing and presenting the performing arts for 50 years and have seen audiences to opera, ballet and classical music evolve from broad middle-class (with children) to much older affluent retirees. The problem: Ticket prices which have outpaced wages. Something had to give in the family budget. Taking a family of four to the ballet or opera is a $500 plus hit. On occasions when event producers make those events inexpensive, specifically to attract young and new audiences, they sell out.
There are other factors such as lack of early exposure to these so-called high art forms. Not as many schools take their students to see live performing arts as before. And there are not as many school band, orchestra and dance programs as there once were.
Fortunately, there are other types of art: performing arts, visual arts AND experiential arts, that are not expensive and which younger people find their way to in droves. Creativity will live on.
Thank you!
You’re right about the practical barriers. The cost of going to the opera or the ballet has become unreachable for many families, and that changes who we see in the seats.
Making the arts accessible again matters. But money might not be the whole story. Even when performances are free, something deeper feels missing — the sense that beauty itself is essential.
Even poetry, which once lived in classrooms and voices, has faded into something we study for grades instead of something we feel. Maybe part of the real work now is to help beauty feel alive again. When teachers risk reading verse out loud, when families choose a concert simply because it nourishes them, when artists create with sincerity instead of cleverness, people begin to remember why art mattered in the first place. Beauty (I would like to think) wakes up through example, not promotion. I am telling myself now to trust: maybe it only needs a few of us to treat it as food for the soul instead of decoration.
Fair enough but I would also mention rubbish quality and wokery out of Hollywood.
[Nodding] I understand that feeling. Much of what comes out of Hollywood does feel tired, either trapped in ideology or chasing profit instead of meaning. But maybe that’s the deeper problem? We have lost the expectation that art should feed us rather than flatter us.
What we call “quality” isn’t just about budget or craft. It’s about honesty, conscience, and a kind of inner beauty that can’t be manufactured.
Perhaps when those qualities return, whatever labels or politics surround a film won’t matter as much. People can sense sincerity; it reaches them in a way agendas never can.
In my experience, it isn’t an attention-span problem. Long form interviews & debates have never been more popular.
It’s that people are sick of Woke lectures. Hollywood & High Art have both made it their core aim to ‘educate’ society (in Gay-Race-Communism) rather than offer mirrors to our nature or even some Catharsis.
OK, Boomer. (I am 64.). My three children, ages 30, 26, 24, are much more focused on experiential art consumption. Festivals, combining art and music are sold out globally. Take a look at Lightning in a Bottle on Instagram. It’s amazing. And the focus is on real-life, person to person contact. It’s a deep and engaging experience, and they often last 3 to 5 days. The festivals are global, and they range from Coachella, which is huge, to much smaller festivals. My daughter is an EDM (electronic dance music) agent, which is one of the most popular segments of this market. The arts are far from dead … but the arts of the past centuries are moribund. What is Art, if not a new perspective?
I think you just described what most people who value art, talent and artistry avoid. Coachella, "Glasto" etc...global, like a virus, and about as enjoyable. Overpriced, preachy and all about the "experience" for a not-so-small fee.
To the contrary. Coachella is the apotheosis of commercialization. There are many other festivals that are much smaller and much more affordable, many of them presenting cutting-edge art and music. The “algorithm” - Spotify streams, YouTube views - is feeding you Taylor Swift. But have you listened to Rufus du Sol? Or the amazing music coming out of Nigeria? It is possible to honor and enjoy the classical while opening our ears and eyes and minds to the new, and especially to the less commercialized. Art is here to move us, to manifest, magnify, and glorify the human experience. There will always be great creators. And although I love the classics in all fields, if we allow art to become ossified, we too become fossilized and stagnant.
The "apotheosis of commercialization" charges between $549 and $1250 a ticket, and the smaller festivals of this nature simply ram the arm in as much as possible, 'though to a lesser degree. "Cutting edge" is a matter of taste. I am not being "fed" anything. I choose what I listen to, and watch and read, and Taylor et al don't figure! I do listen to music from around the world, I do make art, I do write. The Classical is the foundation on which western civilization rests. There is nothing ossified in the classics - far from it - classicism is as relevant today as when created. But, hey, if wading around a campsite eating a $30 vegan burger floats your boat, enjoy!
Bravo! You are right. The arts will always be there for the young and those who remain curious.
Signed: A Boomer
Thankfully the arts of the past are NOT moribund but in greater demand because of their innate value and supreme importance. The audiences may be smaller but the contents and meaning of the old persist and are sought out by those who value history. My condolences to this person whose life lacks the things that make life precious. Caravaggio, Dickens, Brahms are what keep me breathing. They will never be discarded except by those who are too lazy to open their eyes and ears.
We can appreciate the classics, as well as the new. After all, the classics were once breakthroughs or even heretical. The article was addressing the lack of appreciation for Art in general amongst the young. I have no doubt that the classics will endure, but they can exist side by side with the new. I fully endorse the teaching of Western Civilization and its expression in art, music, literature, and architecture. But Art is a reflection of the culture. And as always, our contemporary forms of art are trying to tell us something.
As Jonathan Haidt emphasizes, it seems that many of the ills of society go back to Silicon Valley. I’ve spent a significant amount of time in Silicon Valley, and the interesting thing is that the tech gurus disallow their own children to use the very tech and algorithm driven platforms that the parents themselves have designed.
Forgive me if this sounds harsh- I teach classical drawing and painting, and I will only teach homeschool students now. I used to teach public school and private school students, and somewhere around 2019, the large majority of them lost the ability to focus, and simply could not follow a task through to completion. The common ingredient in public and private school kids? Smart phones.
There’s no need to be a Luddite, the point is to just live with intention. Though homeschool kids seldom have smart phones, what screen time they might have is typically limited to, say, math or physics instruction. I myself have an online classical art education website, used by many homeschool students. What is significant is that the homeschool culture in general eschews social media for children. I have a class of over forty homeschool students that I teach, and they are fantastic, and their ability to follow through and complete an assignment is wonderful. And they have a deep appreciation for the art they are studying.
In this context one of the greatest books ever written is Closing of the American Mind by Bloom - he documented this massive decline several decades ago, and labeled his Ivy League university students as functionally illiterate. The book includes chapters on e.g. literature, where he notes how the study of "difficult" literature like Shakespeare is being lost because it is "too difficult or claimed to be not relevant to the modern age" but in the old days it was recognised that there were enormous benefits to this study in developing the mind, the language etc. He develops his thoughts on why this has happened, the central thesis being perceptions of equality between people, which has resulted in the dumbing down of society as the unintended consequence. The book was castigated by academia which tells you something!
Thank you so much for suggesting this book, Chris, I am going to purchase it and read it right away! I’ve been hoping to come across something like this, it is kind of you to suggest. It really does feel as if some massive sheet of sandpaper is scrubbing down all the peaks and filling the valleys, until all is one bland, unthinking plain. I will send a message when I’m finished. Sorry for the delay in replying on my end- the stomach bug, mixed with five kids, is a doozy.
The arts are failing because culture has changed. Culture change geared to absorption
of culture other than European
Culture has changed, yes, and we’re drawing from everywhere now. That can be rich, but when influence replaces depth, art may start to feel thin. What matters is not which culture we draw from, but whether we approach it with care and understanding. Depth (and possibly rootedness) gives art its life.
Very true. World views lack depth of understanding. Responses reflect shallow thinking. The media is catering to that lack of attention span.
Yes! I feel that too. The shallowness we see everywhere is really a hunger that hasn’t found its food. When the world feels overstimulated, what we may need isn’t more noise but depth of meaning and beauty that asks us to slow down and feel again.
And good riddance. May something less corrupted of purpose and much less perverted arise out of their ashes.
Comprehension was taught in schools. I am 65. I recall a (state) education system that mirrored as far as it could the classical liberal education of the most illustrious British public schools. I left in 1980 with a knowledge of Latin, sciences, modern languages, literature, and the ability to analyse, research and debate. I left with a sense of values intrinsic to a civilized society. Then I went to university, and found it had already become infected by Marxism. History was being re-written, the values I held were unfashionable and "fascistic." And Hollywood played its part - the worship of the "anti-hero" and celebration of al that was "alternative." Popular music too - politicized to within an inch of its life, a platform for "change" that few wanted. Chalamet and his kind are the result. Young people who worship the small screen are the result. How ironic that a little false god like Chalamet should mourn his own death! A population programmed to consume, demand, repeat is not interested in history, or even HIS story. They want to be the star of their own sad little side-show - 15 seconds of dubious "fame" on TIK TOK or some other bilge factory their ultimate "nirvana." It is not High Art that is dead, it is the education system, and society, that is dying. Western society has bred generations of dysfuntional, greedy, needy androids - connected to their source of faux life by their thumbs. I attended an opera last night, in a small auditorium in a small town in northern Spain. It was received rapturously, attended by a multi-generational audience. These are the pockets of resistance in a world consumed by consumerism and ruled by false gods.
Your point about distraction touches something real, yet attention itself is not the final cause of decline. We lose artistic vitality not only because we scroll or have gotten used to shorter forms but because we no longer believe the act of seeing can reveal truth. Once that trust in perception is lost, opera, poetry, and painting etc can no longer speak convincingly to the soul.
The deeper loss comes from an ideology that traps us inside the philosophy of suspicion. It teaches that every form hides manipulation and every beauty conceals power. Under that view, wonder itself becomes dangerous. The result is cultural anemia: people stop attending the high arts not from boredom but from disbelief.
The crisis of art is spiritual before it is neurological. What has withered is devotion. Without it, attention becomes mechanical and memory collapses into data. Rudolf Steiner called the antidote the moral imagination, the inner faculty that restores meaning by uniting thought, feeling, and will in acts of creation.
I recently explored this idea on my Substack, reflecting on how moral imagination might heal the split between intellect and wonder that both Chalamet and your essay describe: https://substack.com/@avamikael/note/c-227369875?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=fhj2v
Very thoughtful. Thank you.
Great to read and ponder. Thanks
Totally agree with this. Limited attention span is seriously damaging the world of arts. Writers are struggling to play the role they used to have in society. That’s why I’m very sceptical of progress in this internet era.
Another boomer here, I want America 🇺🇸 back. “Social engineering” is behind what I see is the crumbing of our culture. It all started with the brainwashing of children, “common core”, and lowered standards for both teachers and students with the expected outcome. There’s no room for exceptionalism and individualism in Marxism which is what we’ve been fed. I still recall my introduction to the theater, a school trip, in the 9th grade, to the Orpheum theater in SF, to see Camelot and Fiddler on the Roof. More and more people have tuned out of their movies, theater, and their awards because we reject their “WOKEISM”! My community theater is doing just fine.
"When a culture loses the ability to sustain attention, it loses the ability to transmit meaning... What’s at risk is more than entertainment: it’s our capacity to converse, to feel deeply, to reflect and draw connections, and ultimately, to make meaning of our own world and our place in it."
I've never heard it summed up better. The expression "You don't know what you've got till it's gone" comes to mind, on multiple levels.
Another practical barrier: many performing arts live in symphony halls and theaters in the legacy centers of Woke cities that have permitted a breakdown of public safety. Performances happen mostly in the evening, after dark. Public transport is dangerous. Driving in from the suburbs is no better: where is a safe place to park? Is it worth it to risk getting mugged?