Stepping into an art fair today is like you go to McDonalds: It doesn’t matter where you are, all tastes the same. Only prices differ. There is a total lack of reference to the place you are, and a surprising lack of orignal ideas. To the contrary, you can see the same stuff everywhere repeated over and over again. Even the people trying to sell the stuff are looking the same.
In the interconnected world we live identity seem to be created by subculture, not by the place where you live. It’s now much easier to connect with people that think alike, spread over the world, then to dispute with your neighbors who think contrarily to you. As the geographic segmentation gets weaker through fast and cheap transport and telecommunications, the ideological segmentation seams to get stronger.
What’s lost is the originality and peculiarity of places, and the exchange of ideas between different types of people. And that’s why arts get more boring all the time.