When your generation doesn't have a voice of its own, the generation's artists don't either. But it's not their fault. When you're going 10,000 mph, you're bound to hit the end of the road soon enough.
All the arts are a victim of overpopulation, over exploration and the scorch earth policy of capitalism and marketing and ease-of-access technology. It's a blurring effect. Everything is now so completely disposable that we have no vision, no opinion and no creative outlet that can't be ravaged in a weeks time by the populace, by marketers, by "artists" and wannabes, and ultimately can't be easily deduced as a rip-off of what has already been done, because it has. We're in scraps mode, artistically speaking as a culture because our culture went too fast for too long and has stalled.
In other words, we went from being so creatively "freed" by technology and social changes and population growth in the 20th century that we went from just doing classical musical and cultural heritage music for thousands of years (and nothing else) to creating jazz, rock, rap, techno, etc and all the subgenres thereof in less than a hundred AND exploring them rather fully AND getting tired of them just as quickly. We were going 100,000 miles per hours creatively, of course we were going to find the creative wall within 100 years. What should have been thousands and thousands of years of discovery was crammed into a few after the industrial and artistic revolutions of the 20th century.
Same thing happened to fine arts (from impressionism being considered a ridiculous concept to dadaism in 100 years!?...holy shit), fashion (orange is back, and so is the 80's again because the 2012 doesn't have a look because we're out of ideas. So, next year, let's bring back the 50's. Why not.), storytelling arts (sequels and remakes anybody? Fantasy, sci-fi, etc couldn't be any more repetitive than it is and yet we make more of that drivel than ever before).
Wanna blame something: blame archiving. We archive EVERYTHING now. There is no such thing as rediscovery. There was when somebody came up with Hercules when Gilgamesh already existed 2000 years before. People weren't aware of Gilgamesh, so it was ok. AND it was coming from a different culture, a different world with a true-to-the-time spin. Can't do that anymore. We know Hercules. We know Gilgamesh. We know everything AND the context AND the history. We got it all archived and we'll never forget.
Music is awful these days because it's obsolete. It's obsolete and yet we ramped up the quantity to compensate. It's already blurry, so who cares if it's blurrier? Our culture's creative and expressive prime is behind us. Our culture, artistically speaking, should have been dominated by now by people who think and work completely differently than us...but it hasn't. We're stuck with 7 billion people, still going 10,000 mph and yet have no where to go but back in time. You are not to ask what the point is, or the relevance of going back in time over and over again, you just need to consume. Buy that 1970's style shirt and shut up. It's not new. It's not relevant (it's "the in thing" because it is "the in thing"...it ultimately has nothing to do with the world around you) Buy that mp3 of a song that sounds like the Beatles again, or N*Sync again, or Dr. Dre again, etc. "But Jimmy Hendrix/Metallica/Miles Davis/Dylan/80's pop represented a time and place. You can't just replicate it and expect similar results." Shut up. Consume it. You like Jimmy Hendrix. You buy!
We live in the age of nostalgia. What's next? More nostalgia.