Aesthetic Erosion

 

Imagine you had a nice summer home on the west coast of Michigan. You converted the coach house to an art studio, and throughout a lifetime you created a large body of work. It also had a huge library and you were enriched by all the knowledge you acquired.

Over the past decade, "social change" has created more storms, and the coastline has receded to the point where the coach house could soon fall off the cliff. You decided to adapt and move both structures two miles inland. Once you settled, a major tech corporation builds a big-box structure that is the new Center For the Digital Arts, the first structure in an industrial park for the burgeoning metaverse. You are excited about the prospects for a new aesthetic vision emerging, and a new 'scenius'. You start to get interested, and you go there every few days to immerse yourself in new artistic vision quests. Then all of a sudden the zeitgeist also slides off the cliff--you're nostalgic for the view from the cottage with lake views. You get the idea that you can do this in VR and it slakes your thirst for the old days. But then you can't remember how you made those artworks 20 years ago, and your skills have eroded along with the shoreline. But you're now safe within the new VR suburbs, supposedly built on a more stable geography in the cloud. You don't need any of that old art history anyway. Sour grapes...