The main reason why entertainment on the screen has gone to weird extremes is complicated. But fundamentally, the philosophical poverty in creative thought is to blame for the phenomenon now prevalent in the world of entertainment. Therefore, it is essential to eradicate this phenomenon by changing the philosophy of creativity that seems to rule society today, says an article in People's Daily. Excerpts:

In the past, we used to categorize literature and arts in terms of politics and went to the extreme of replacing aesthetics with political criterion. But now, we have gone to the other extreme of setting absurd benchmarks for entertainment in a one-sided pursuit of audience ratings dictated by market economy.

The result has been as expected: the earlier neglect of aesthetics and audience satisfaction has changed to deliberate pursuit of sensory stimuli. And spiritual aesthetic sensibility has been lost in the trash generated for the silver screen and TV.

Film and TV program directors and producers have veered away from rigidly respecting traditional classics to deconstructing and turning them upside down for eye-catching effects and from building almighty image of romanticism to creating characters that are neither good nor bad. These run counter to the mission of "improving the nation's quality and helping build noble characters".

Originally, one of the key topics in historical materialism and reception aesthetics is an emphasis on appreciation. But ideological and artistic quality, being the historical and aesthetic quality of an artistic work, are objective constants while audience appreciation is a variable dependent upon an audience's life experience, culture, aesthetic taste and the background in which a work was created.

Therefore, to solve this problem of reception aesthetics, everyone involved in the performing arts industry needs to add value to the larger entertainment environment and make efforts to elevate appreciative ability of the audience.

Ratings, as an important indicator of public acceptance, needs to be calculated in scientific statistical terms. The sampling method used now lacks representation and authoritativeness.

We have long pursued unification of ratings and program quality, but there exist programs with high ratings but low quality. Because excessive pleasure is usually followed by a recession in spiritual reflection, it is time to call an end to excessive and mindless entertainment on the screen.

(China Daily 11/04/2011 page9)