The entirety of capitalism is so much more insidious than just "capitalism buys something original and turns it into pastiche". For capitalism and everyone living under it, the world is nothing but unrealized profit, waiting to be squeezed out. And once you have squeezed the world, its people and its thoughts for profit once, you squeeze it again and again and again. It's not just art, it's the world which has been dying. The world outside and inside us is less and less inspiring and alive than it has ever been. Instead of there being actual youth culture, capitalism sells every youth and every generation the same toys, the same music, the same clothes, but all with the message of "this is your music, your culture, don't you want to be cool? this is your generation". instead of actual historical progress the world gets divided by marketing trends, selling the same thing over and over and over again. there is no way in hell anyone could seriously tell me that our current art and media landscape is even a fraction as vital, creative and good as the 60s. That's when things changed, when the capitalists realized they could sell everything like they did fashion, a year and a trend at a time. And now we've come to a point where technical progress has slowed and the (comparably) pure and unfiltered creativity that still managed to exist so many decades ago and that artists used as a well spring of ideas has run dry we'll get nothing but slop. And the sad thing is that we are the stragglers that still care, for the average person there is no difference between slop and art. They don't know that there is good music or bad music, or good films and bad films, that there is something more to art and to life than to just consume mindlessly. Maybe it was television that killed everything.