Where has music and art gone?

[john turner]

I have thought about this long and hard, and still havent come up with a remote answer. Why has music and art gone from a standard that exuded much skill, expertise, creativity, and beauty, to the stuff we got today?

there's stuff available today that "exudes much skill, expertise, creativity and beauty", it's just not marketted. and there's always been music that is the opposite, -always-, and it almost always was the most popular music of the day.

very rarely has music of substance been able to gain popularity with any great success. even when pet sounds was released, it failed to hit -gold-, and that was the beachboys' 11th album. you have an album there that was considered by pretty much everyone who heard it to be the pinnacle of pop music (and still considered by many to be one of the greatest albums of all time) and it didn't even go gold on initial pressing.

this kind of thing ("stuff these days sucks, where's the old classics?") has always been the case.