Is Art in Decline?

The main thing that society respects at the moment is science like what an engineer does. Engineers are smart and they put rockets into space, and they make electric cars. All of that requires expertise, whereas art and religion are viewed as less serious. It's not worth funding museums, theaters, churches, etc. because those things are considered subjective. Their value is hard to quantify, and people can debate about it. If there isn't such a thing as value, art becomes superfluous because nothing is exemplary. We start to think that culture is a luxury of wealth, instead of the cause of wealth. Culture is necessary for progress. We need to know what's worth studying.

To put a positive spin on the decline of art and religion, we pretend that the normative role of knowledge is oppressive. It's not that society is failing to teach Rembrandt and St. Augustine, it's that we don't need to study those things because it limits us creatively and ethically. Since it's all a matter of opinion, I don't need to listen to anybody else. Who are you to push your views on me, “you tyrant”. Bye to the disciplines of art, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, really everything except some of the hard sciences, and even those fields are losing prestige. The loss of meaning trickles down to everyday life. Without standards, there's no way to measure success.

We should recognize that quality exists. Preferences also exist, but we can separate them out. There are distinctions in terms of value, even if we subjectively are bad at recognizing the difference. That's the point of learning—to bring our subjective selves up to higher objective standards. Once we admit that art can be better and worse, we don't need opinions about "what I like" regarding quality because it's a legitimate subject that can be studied. Our opinions say more about us than they do the things we're referencing. Public discourse means analyzing reality scientifically for everybody to consider, not making proclamations as if we determine reality.

As far as I can tell, Monet paintings have more value to society than my paintings. That's not a proclamation because I admit that I could be wrong. However, it's an easy comparison because even a child knows that Monet is a better painter than me. That's why Monet is in museums and I am not. I don't know how Monet compares with Van Gogh, because that is something for experts to decide. The museum may be wrong, but institutions generally prioritize quality. We don't have to defer to experts because who am I to say who the experts are? We use scholarship in the form of citation analysis to filter quality, not my "opinion" on who is worth studying.