I suspect that the arts are dying in a very literal sense - natural selection is slowly driving the population of artists to extinction. The cause is not greed, capitalism, cultural degeneration, progressive democracy, or the Internet. It is something a lot more down-to-earth: advances in birth control technology. The condom, the pill, abortion etc. are literally killing the arts.

Assuming that the willingness and ability to produce art are in part genetic, it is possible for natural selection to increase or reduce their frequency in the population. This depends on the reproductive fitness of artists and how it compares to others.Historically in agricultural or industrial societies artists were never particularly rich compared to the rest of the population, but they did have plenty of access to sex. In other words, they couldn't afford to raise many legitimate children (aside from exceptions such as J.S. Bach), but male artists had above-average opportunities to impregnate quite a few women and leave them to raise the children alone or, better yet, with their cuckolded husbands. Of course such a strategy wouldn't work well if everyone was trying to do it, but frequency-dependent selection would allow artists (and other sneaky fuckers) to exist as a minority of the population.

These days, however, things are different. Artists still appear to have above-average access to sex, and below-average ability to support and raise children, but one thing has changed. Birth control technology now means more access to casual sex has lost its connection to the ability to produce more children. Artists have more sex but fewer children, and therefore are being driven to extinction by natural selection.

Well, that seems to make sense, but is there any data to back it up? Looking at the art form I'm most familiar with - music - we can find data in the General Social Survey and see if it's good or bad for your ability to get sex and to have children. The GSS includes a question about whether the respondent has played a musical instrument in the past 12 months. That includes everyone from amateurs who've played piano once or twice with full-time professionals.

So, are musicians having more sex than non-musicians? Here is a graph showing the proportion of musicians in groups categorized by how often they have had sex during the past year:

Clearly, the proportion of musicians is higher among people who have sex more often and lower among those who have sex less often or can't get any at all, so musicians do have more sex. Now let's look at the number of sex partners during the past year:

Again, there are more musicians among those who have sex with larger numbers of partners. So far my hunches are being proven correct. But are musicians having fewer children?

Yes, definitely. So, being a musician is bad for your reproductive fitness and it is definitely possible that natural selection is, at least at this time, acting to reduce the number of musicians in future generations. This dovetails with my empirical experience - few women see musicians as good prospects for long-term relationships or fatherhood. There are exceptions to that (gospel music, for example), but from the most part playing music is bad for your reproductive fitness, and any genes responsible for musicality appear to be selected against.

I haven't found data about producing other forms of art in the GSS, but I have no reason to think they would be very different from music. Though the arts could once again become adaptive if they were much less frequent, it's possible that in 500 or 1000 years we will have much less art or no art at all. Effective birth control could prove to be a turning point in human evolution as important as agriculture, and the arts could fall by the wayside.