I would defend television today vs 1957. Literature - well that is a problem with the book publishing business and the fact that there are very few markets for fiction in periodicals, so a lot of writers can't make a living at it unless the are writing very commercial stuff.

I would certainly agree about Broadway musicals.

Pop music - well, who cares. It isn't about music, its about business.

Jazz - still not commercial, still has brilliant musicians playing every style of the past and new styles of the present.

I think there are whole art forms (digital photography, animation etc ) that just never existed 50 years ago.

But the arguement itself is not a fresh one. I'm pretty sure you can find the same complaint - in Juvenal about 1900 years ago <s>


>This is from todays installment of Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
>
>"Now think what has happened in technical and artistic trends in the 50 years since 1957. Scientific endeavors have made fantastic strides in quality, complexity and significance. Consumer product quality has increased dramatically -- new cars are packed with features unknown in 1957 yet are far safer and more reliable, and the cell phone in your pocket and the computer you're reading this on, to say nothing of the Internet it's transmitted over, would have been viewed as supernatural by the engineers who built Explorer I. At the same time, the quality of art has plummeted. There hasn't been a musical of artistic merit to open on Broadway in many moons -- right now, it's all vapid dreck. (In fact, I think the show "Vapid Dreck," based on a remake of a remake, opens at the Brooks Atkinson soon.) And although good books are still written, what truly great novel has been produced in the past decade or two? Fifty years ago, technical stuff was buckets of bolts and art was splendid; now,
>the technical stuff is splendid and the art is in poor repair. This tells us something -- I just wish I knew what."
>
>http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/071002&sportCat=nfl