I have this pet theory that's been sitting for many years but didn't get solidified until I was done reading The Fourth Turning. I have a hunch that this has been theorized by academicians outside my circle of attention.

I think there's a strong relationship between art forms and human generations.

In that any given art form belongs to a particular generation. The height of an art form is destined to peak at a certain time, after which it could continue to exist without being perceptibly surpassed in achievement by its practitioners.

The golden age will be captured by a certain generation and set in stone.

Let's make this concrete. Take opera (of all kinds). They are still being performed even if not mainstream. Existing performers are probably quite capable, maybe even better than performers in the past. But none of us now would think of opera as being at the height of the art. The golden age of opera might have long passed, never to return.

Dance music performance as an art might have peaked at Michael Jackson. Many people might sing and dance better than him, but MJ will always be the unsurpassed benchmark, perceptually.

It's conceivable that in 50 years time, people would refer to Spielberg's body of work as the golden age of feature length movies.

How all these take place and the implications are more interesting.

I think a golden age has to do with the generation's appreciation of the art than the objective quality of it. The advancement of an art is a feedback loop between the artist and the audience. The more intense the loop the faster the art advance. Therefore the peak of an art form is in equal measure the quality of the work and the feelings evoked in the audience.

In a different time, a slightly superior quality of output may stir no feeling in people at all.

People's appreciation for of an art form is function of the medium. When everybody only watches a handful of TV channels on a little TV in the living room, what gets proliferated is incomparable to infinite channels on YouTube.

Thing is new mediums get invented faster than before. The time gap between words-on-paper to radio is longer than radio to TV. Time gap between TikTok to YouTube is shorter than radio to TV. The next major medium that comes after TikTok may not be decades away.

As a result art forms peak faster than ever before attention goes to the next medium. Golden ages take place at an ever faster rate we don't even notice it.

In fact it could be so imperceptibly fast that inventing new mediums becomes an art form in and of itself. The meta-game is platform creation as the art. How it pans out could be that 30 years from now, the TikTok-raised generations have no shared memories of any commonly watched videos (nobody saw the same thing) but reminiscing only TikTok itself.

So weaving them together, we have distinct generations attracted to different medium preferences, which determines the art forms that get to advance and which gets relegated. I can think of some implications.

We get lower and lower peaks. Mediums compete among each other, golden ages take place but with whimpers not bangs. Art forms don't get enough time to make giant leaps.

Intergenerational divide will be intense. Perhaps for the first time in history, multiple living generations of people do not consume the same media. They become cognitively and ideologically unaligned, much more so than past few hundred years.

Tacit skills get lost at a faster rate. Knowledge preservation isn't so straightforward. Skills don't get passed down the line not because it's not documented, it's because nobody is interested.