>>127491016
There's good music made today. I like Arvo Pärt and Agalloch. But our society is fundamentally sick, and the art we produce is by and large a result of this sickness. There's no flourishing of art, there is no great spring out of which a million artists bloom. All of the good art is either isolated, depressive, or derivative. It's smaller in essence than the great art of the past. It's art of contraction rather than of growth, and it's few and far between.
Even the "explosion" of new musical forms in the mid-to-late 20th century was fundamentally shallow, it was the energy of burning your great cathedrals. Good to satisfy you, but it burned itself out almost immediately. I feel a great sense of despair to live in this fractured age, where we tore apart our bonds for entertainment. The only way to produce art here is to wallow in the misery or to start from scratch. The West has truly fallen.