Something I've been noticing a lot in any sort if discourse on art and pop culture is a shift from seeing things as art to seeing them as simply media. This essentially combines all art forms while also including other "consumable" forms of expression such as news. While this is useful to talk about their similarities (a recent post here talked about collecting physical media such as CDs or DVDs), it seems to me like it degrades art of its value. Maybe this is the result of a history of debates about what's "real" art and what's just dumb entertainment, or maybe the roots of this lay in our increasing focus on constant consumption. I think the grouping of information and art (entertainment?) is sad enough as is, but it also creates a strange link between art forms that have little in common.
Am I just misunderstanding a term here? Who knows. Here's a sun bear I named Media
