A cultural flop era?

No, it’s not another cheap hit on Katy Perry.

This week, Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic’s music and culture writer, published a long piece examining whether the US has entered a cultural dark age. There’s plenty of evidence and anecdotes in support.

A YouGov poll from 2024 reported Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports.

This week’s Met Gala came with high hopes and political intrigue, but as Guardian's fashion and lifestyle editor, Morwenna Ferrier put it “no clangers, but no fireworks.”

An effort to bring BookTok to Baltimore earned the title of the Fyre Festival of Book Festivals, after turning out to be some hastily arranged tables in a brutalist warehouse.

And Trump’s latest tariff tantrum put the global movie industry at risk, including Australia’s burgeoning status as the home of heavily-incentivised blockbuster production. Alas, no more Ryan Gosling being dragged across Sydney Harbour Bridge. 

Kornhaber acknowledges many of these fears, but argues that culture is simply evolving as it always has done, and that much of the hand-wringing is a result of a generational handover and longing for an imagined golden age.

But there’s something going on here beyond technology-driven transformation and millennials entering grumpy middle age.

Culture is, at its core, the expression and experience of creativity. And being creative when everything seems so relentlessly grim is hard. 

Science fiction is an interesting case study for this argument. A piece from earlier this year asks why sci-fi has stopped imaging our future in favour of apocalyptic wastelands (The Last of Us, Paradise etc.) and retrofuturism that reaches for the nostalgia of historical aesthetics.   

This is all, of course, entirely subjective. But it’s also a useful reminder that creativity doesn’t just happen, and to put effort into creating the right conditions for it to thrive. Starting with shutting out the news, even for an hour or two.