I don’t know if this is a universal sentiment, or if I’m just a grumpy old soul ranting from a young journalist’s platform about the changing world, but the state of modern entertainment is depressing. To me, modern entertainment has become a deluge of sex, violence, celebrity, shock and stupidity that has overtaken its past standard: art.
Searching for answers, I accidentally stumbled upon an interesting proposal by Robert Reich in his book “Supercapitalism.”
While the book chiefly discussed the reasons behind our current economic conditions, Reich also discussed the consequences of modern “supercapitalism” — one of which, he asserted, is the artistic devaluation of the entertainment industry.
Reich stated that deregulation of entertainment industries in the 1970s and a broadening amount of Americans investing in corporations such as Fox Entertainment Group and CBS Corporation combined to make a breeding ground for intense business competition, rather than artistic capacity.
He argues that because of these conditions, companies focused on selling entertainment via excessive amounts of lurid content, rather than producing quality works.
This is where entertainment seems to have drifted from being a form of artistic expression to almost purely being a business. Sure, it’s an industry, and the point of industry is to make money.
But it’s a sham to profit off of, let alone produce, such horrid works as “Jack and Jill,” “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and almost any one of the insipid, vacuous clunkers on “hit radio,” which offer no enriching value to the public. Entertainment, in this vein, has become a depressing orgy of banality designed just to sell and make a profit.
Do I have a problem with sex, violence and the explicit in my entertainment? No, not at all. In fact, some of my favorite albums, shows and movies embrace these subjects; works such as the movie “A Clockwork Orange,”The Doors’ self-titled first recordand the television program “Dexter” all lean toward the explicit. However, the chief differentiation I’m making between these works and junk entertainment is their ability to approach lewdness with depth as opposed to merely using it as a selling point“A Clockwork Orange” and “Dexter”use these controversial elements to supplement thematically and to assist in rich character development, while approaches them in a poetically sleazy way, rather than just bluntly blurting expletives for shock appeal.
These works are truly art, and they provide an example for what the entertainment industry should be producing instead of the insubstantial rubbish it now markets for sale.
I’m not saying all modern entertainment is junk. I’m also not asserting entertainment needs to be regulated once again. Nor am I stating that entertainment is hopeless.
But I am concluding that the idea of entertainment as a business is damning to the nature of modern entertainment as an art.
The industry needs to quit spewing out tasteless moldings of obscenity and slapstick for quick profit and revert back to what gave it ground in the market in the first place, publicizing visual and sonic art.
There’s a reason that, in 1969, dozens of albums considered some of the greatest of all time came out within 12 months of one another, and there’s a reason that a majority of the American Film Institute’s greatest films of all time come from the 1930s and 1940s as compared to other decades.
It’s because the business side of the industry could not intrude on the artistic side of it. Now, it’s ruining our generation’s ability to claim and produce timeless pieces, and I sure don’t want to go down in history as what Richard Hell would call a “Blank Generation.” Do you?
Contact the desk editor at diversions@dailytarheel.com.
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