The Death of Art

The entertainment industry is booming. It's currently an almost 30 billion-dollar industry, and it shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. Actually, it shows signs of nearly exponential growth. For many people this is a good thing; they get more movies, music, and stories, but for artists, this is starting to slowly kill their creations. As America grew and became prosperous, Americans began to look for fun things to spend their wealth on. Movies and novels quickly cemented their place as a cornerstone of the industry. For a long time, this was a good thing. The concept of a poor artist started to become almost non-existent as more and more ways to make money from their visions became a reality. Just think of your favorite movie, can you even begin to imagine how many writers and actors worked on the story, how many sculptors and painters worked on the sets, and how many fashion designers worked on the costumes, the musicians who worked on the score, as well as hundreds of other necessary artists such as animators, went into making that film? None of that would've been possible if they hadn't been able to make money from their creations by marketing them in the movie. However, with the rise of streaming companies such as Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney Plus, this is starting to become bad. These services hungrily devour new content to add to their streaming services and boast about in their ads. They need subscribers, and if there are no fresh new faces being added to their catalog then the subscribers will leave, and new ones won't come. This means artists are pressured to work as fast as they can to get new stories and movies finished, so they can be hungrily devoured by streaming services, and that means they aren't spending the amount of time to do the story right. Netflix is infamous for just throwing whatever creators can think of onto their platform and hoping something sticks, but that's not art. Stories created in this way are starting to become content instead of real art. Think of the difference between watching a movie and simply opening YouTube and hitting whatever looks interesting. Creators on YouTube are constantly thinking of crazy things to do to get attention and ad revenue. They just need you to click and keep watching. If you decide to watch a movie, you'll likely watch the whole thing, even if you end up not enjoying it that much. That is because movies are stories, and stories are art. You get invested in them in ways watching YouTube content doesn't, but that's what stories are starting to become. I think that's why Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power flopped so badly because they didn't really care about making a good story, all they wanted was the name and reputation of The Lord of the Rings to get people to subscribe.