Has art jumped the shark after WWI?

[thesummerqueen]

1) What was the artist trying to achieve or communicate?

So hard to judge that sometimes though!

Just recently, a friend and fellow lover of T.S. Eliot sent me a link where the poster was trying to link Prufrock to today's hipsters.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment...rs/384175/

WTF?

To me, Eliot was describing a very private, personal pain involving social anxiety and the fear of age and the world passing you by and finding you insignificant. I highly doubt that when Hitchens was quoting the poem in one of his last essays, it was because he felt any connection to the purposely disaffected attitudes of today's hipsters rather than the aching slow creep of mortality and inability to halt it.

Seems to me you can't even always judge what an artist was trying to say, because people will interpret it however they please (a symptom of our post-modern era, I'm told).

There's a pop rock band I really enjoy called Silvertide whose songs are mixed in with the Britney Spears in my work-out mix. One of their songs, Devil's Daughter, describes a sexual encounter with a girl who looks angelic, but ends up being sinful in bed. The whole song is supposed to be a metaphor for their experience in the music industry. I wouldn't have known it without hearing that from the horse's mouth, so to speak. I thought it was just a gnarly Obvious Song is Obvious and enjoyed the guitar riffs while pumping weights, imagining great sex.

Aerosmith created "Walk This Way" all because they were drunk and laughed the piss out of themselves over Young Frankenstein. Still an awesome rock song. The lyrics make no fucking sense.

Young Frankenstein is a satire of the adaptations of a classic story and revolves around a series of dick jokes and other low-brow humor, yet manages to be a stunningly hysterical piece of cinema. To that effect, Blazing Saddles ALSO revolves around dick jokes and the repeated use of a degrading label, and not only is even more hysterical than Young Frankenstein, it's a stellar piece of commentary on racism and stereotype. Is it art or nothing but a series of yuks about a black man and his dick?