What will the future say about the arts of the 21st century?

As I talked about my favourite centuries, one person said his was the 20th century.

That’s a good answer. Just cinema and photography are good reasons to pick the 20th century. Explosive.

In music, plenty of things were happening—I myself like jazz—I love John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, etc. But most importantly, technology forever changed music listening. 

In literature, on this side of the Atlantic, the Modernists—especially Joyce, Proust, Woolf, T. S. Eliot—changed fiction and poetry. American literature peaked in the 20th century: Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, etc. Russian literature was no longer the Golden Age but still had great writers—I love Life and Fate. The 20th century was glorious for many countries around the world: France had Proust and many others; Japan had Soseki, Kawabata, and Akutagawa; Bohemia had Kafka; Czech literature had Milan Kundera; Austria had Robert Musil; Norway had Knut Hamsun; Colombia had Gabriel García Márquez; Argentina had Jorge Luis Borges; Yiddish literature had Isaac Bashevis Singer; Canada got Alice Munro (rest in peace); etc.  

South Vietnam also had a great burst of creativity in a very short span of time, sadly not much known internationally. My mum mentions Nhã Ca, Túy Hồng, Nguyễn Thị Ng.H, Nguyễn Thị Hoàng, Nguyễn Thị Thụy Vũ, Dương Nghiễm Mậu, Nguyễn Hương, etc. in prose fiction; Du Tử Lê, Vũ Hoàng Chương, Thanh Tâm Tuyền, Trần Dạ Từ, Nguyễn Tất Nhiên, Đinh Hùng, Trầm Tử Thiêng, etc. in poetry. I would add Bùi Giáng, one of my favourite poets. 

20th century literature was so rich. It just so happens that I feel more at home in the 19th century, that writers such as Tolstoy and Chekhov mean a lot more to me personally.

It’s the same with the visual arts. The 20th century had lots of art movements: Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postmodernism, Photorealism, and so on—there are also performance art, installation art, butoh, etc. but I only like a couple of artists, like Egon Schiele and Picasso. 20th century art generally doesn’t speak to me, especially since Postmodernism, conceptual art, and performance art. Also not a fan of camp and kitsch. 

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(A piece by Jeff Koons) 

So what will the arts in the 21st century be like? What will people in the future say about this century? 

It is impossible to say what will happen in the arts, with the emergence of AI. Will it be an explosion like the Industrial Revolution? Will it change everything like the invention of cameras and music recordings? 

Or will it swallow us all, and destroy everything? 

If we talk about the arts of 2000-2024, I don’t read much contemporary fiction and can’t comment on it—some of it is safe and ideology-driven and there are harmful trends such as sensitivity readers, but I think there are plenty of great talents around. I like Alice Munro, for instance. 

The field I know the best is cinema, and generally I prefer films of the 50s-70s to contemporary films, at least when it comes to American cinema. I do like some recent films: Ballad of a White Cow (Iran), Anatomy of a Fall (France), Shoplifters (Japan), The Zone of Interest (English director), The Taste of Things (France), The Father (French director), etc. Hollywood, on the other hand, is dominated by superhero movies, franchises, and remakes, and I often dislike recent highly acclaimed American films.

I expect people in the future will say that 21st century cinema was brilliant and full of wonderful things in other countries—Japan, France, a few places in Europe, perhaps South Korea, perhaps Iran—but not in the US.

In theatre, nothing seems to be happening. The 20th century had Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett doing crazy things, and there were plenty of great playwrights—the current scene pales in comparison. I’m ignorant, but I guess people who know more than me would probably say that there’s a decline in theatre—London theatres, apart from Shakespeare productions, are dominated by musical adaptations of popular films and rewritten versions of Chekhov. 

The art scene is even bleaker and more depressing. I had followed art pages and gone to contemporary art exhibitions for years, in different countries in Europe, before deciding, after a visit to Wellcome Collection last year, that I would no longer bother to keep up with it. And having decided so, I still went to Saatchi Gallery and a few months ago saw the contemporary section at Tate Britain, so I can say I do have a good idea of what’s going on in the art scene, and it’s largely rubbish. Look at the glorious 17th century! Look at the great artists of the late 19th, early 20th century! Then look at contemporary art—it’s embarrassing. 

What’s going on in music? I have no idea. I’ve got the impression that there are lots of different things, different genres, different styles, but pop music also dominates everything? 

The 21st century however will be very, very different because of AI.

What do you think?