Or maybe I have it all wrong and more art is more accessible than ever before. I just see things like how crappy Amazon has become to use and how dominated it is by cheap crap with fake reviews and it frustrates me that that seems to be where we’re headed in general.
These aren't mutually exclusive. I think your inkling about more art being accessible than ever before is correct. I also think your suspicion that we're being somewhat dominated by cheap crap and fake reviews is also correct.
If you talk to any American homeowner, you'll hear them decry how bad appliances are. You used to buy a refrigerator that would last twenty to thirty years. Now you're lucky if you get ten out of one. It's really sad. I don't know when or why it happened, but it seems to be the case that the stuff we're making and consuming is of a cheaper quality in general.
Now, we have extraordinary purchasing power to go about it this way, but the actual quality of the purchases has gone down. Unless you're talking computers or phones. Then, of course, all bets are off. They have folding phones with serious gaming screens now. It's unbelievable.
The one I can't get over is The New Republic. It didn't align with my politics of course, but it was sort of a crown jewel of political journalism that any educated person could enjoy. It got sold a couple of decades ago, became Newsweek, and now apparently still survives in some weird husk form. I understand that the internet was destined to kill off magazines, and that's okay. It does make me nostalgic for the olden days though.
Now to magazines. The New Republic is a travesty. What used to be a beacon of democratic thought is really just a shell of itself. I used to subscribe, believe it or not, and I was stunned when they let go of staff and it began to look like the newspapers of today look—sparse, uninspired, and with articles that didn't provoke any thought but were a reflexive progressivism that the online culture had influenced, rather than the other way around.
But I'm not sure the internet was destined to kill the magazines off. I think it was people's preference in what they consumed that killed the magazines. People don't really want to be challenged in what they read. I'm sure there are houses now with nary a dictionary to speak of (and the internet doesn't get used for that purpose, either). It's a lack of intellectual curiosity, I think. Getting back to what Grove wrote, the internet is akin to music format. It can broadcast myriad things. It can certainly handle long-form journalism. I mean, what better place to put it to be seen, right? It's that people aren't choosing to read those types of articles. And nobody is paying for it. So it's not the internet as a conduit, really. It's what we're choosing.
And off of the soapbox and into the fire. I learned that Pitchfork is dying, too. So even the online publications are closing up shop. Pitchfork will be run by the people running Gentleman's Quarterly, a magazine whose existence surprises me greatly. I learned this when I had to sign up to read an article, something I'd never done before with them. Then I found out they were basically unprofitable and dying, like so many others.
Sad days.