Michiko Kakutani reviews the year in arts for the New York Times:

So why do so many newer acts and projects feel so synthetic? The thinking behind movie franchises, certainly, is that it’s easier to sell and merchandise a brand-name product — familiarity, the reasoning goes, makes for bigger opening weekends, and a longer shelf life with spinoffs, video games, soundtracks and other corporate tie-ins. And in the music industry, the growing use of digital processing (using software like Pro Tools, which makes it possible to correct pitch and adjust timing) has made for more synthetic-sounding recordings, while changing the criterion by which singers are judged. As Billboard magazine noted: “Major-label executives readily admit that signing an act now is as much about star presence as it is about the artist’s actual ability to consistently sing the notes.”

As 2002 slouches to a close, however, all was not lost. Amid the cultural wreckage, there were potent albums from the alternative country band Wilco and the Detroit garage band the White Stripes, and novels by Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Flanagan, Bruce Wagner and Alice Sebold that were as emotionally powerful as they were ambitious. Several new television shows like “24” and “Boomtown” tried, however unevenly, to push narrative conventions in new directions; and Larry David’s HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” gave us a hilarious look at the absurdities of modern life, as seen through the eyes of an endlessly put-upon curmudgeon.

Both Kakutani and John Pareles, who does the year-end review of music for the Times, feel that puerile pop is dead, supplanted by “unvarnished sincerity — or a decent facsimile…”, as Pareles puts it. Would that it were so! Many other year-end cultural pundits have made a similar observation, although no one has a plausible explanation for such a hopeful trend in the tastes of Western pop culture consumers.