Young Losing Interest in the Arts.
The headline links to a story in the Los Angeles Times suggesting young people are losing interest not in "the arts" but in attending on the arts - a much different thing, it seems to me. And it's difficult for me to see how anyone who's observed the phenomena of blogging and podcasting, YouTube, the vast interactive fictions of Second Life and Warcraft, and the burgeoning libraries of music and photography on the Internet can conclude the youth of today have lost interest in "the arts." Instead, they have discovered a new, shared interest in making art. In entertaining themselves. Which I take as a good thing.
Not all art is "great" art, nor needs to be. "Great" art is great, in fact, only because it's held the interest of generations over time. Shakespeare, for example - perhaps the greatest of all dramatists - has been performed in the English-speaking world almost continuously since his own day. People still flock to see the Sistine Chapel, listen to Mozart, and watch the films Charlie Chaplin made. When that stops happening (not a likely thing, IMHO) those works just won't be "great" any more.
But others will be. And that's what "great" is.
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