Culturally speaking, the 2010s are officially over

The virus won't last forever. The question is, what is the world going to look like when it's over?

I believe the 2020s are going to be so perilous that many of us will look back on the 2010s as the "good ole days." The Great Recession will more than likely become forgotten in comparison with the 2020-203? depression. Trump and the GOP will take the blame for destroying the economy much like Hoover still takes blame for the Great Depression to this day. It's going to be years before things return to "normal" and when they do, who knows what "normal" will be. 1945 normal was very different from 1929 normal.

I also wonder if this may be the end of the culture focused on restaurants as entertainment, local mom and pop establishments, craft beer, etc. A lot of those types of businesses won't be there when the virus is over. We may be back to eating at Olive Garden and drinking Budweiser. I think only big businesses are going to survive this unless the government steps in to help small businesses re-establish themselves in the post-virus world.

I can't say I didn't see this coming when Trump was elected in 2016. I'm just surprised it took him this long to destroy the economy and plunge the country into chaos. It really shows how strong of a position Obama left the country in.  It's infuriating that 40% of the country is still more concerned with who is sleeping with who and controlling women's bodies.

Truly tragic.

Almost like I've been saying for years that this Administration was a disaster waiting to happen... 

Anyway, while pop culture seems like a small issue considering all that threatens to rock our society, I think it is worth thinking about how these events promise to transform art and culture in the years to come. For example, take a look at what the rise of fascism in the 1930s did to painting:



This is Picasso's most famous work, and arguably one of the most well-known anti-war paintings in modern history. It's a rendering of the violence and suffering of Basque villagers at the hands of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil War.

The Great Depression gave us more visual breakthroughs than I think modern society was prepared to handle:

Never crawl out of that bubble, friend.

I said this in the "2020s" thread in the music sub-forum a few days ago, but I can honestly see the progression of new developments in music slowing down during and shortly after the pandemic. This isn't a good time for new artists to breakthrough because as @loosebolt suggested, who's going to want to follow the Top-40 charts when there's so much else going on in the world right now? Live venues are shut, concerts are cancelled, people can't go outside. Established artists such as Post Malone, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran etc. will likely stick around in the mainstream longer than they would have otherwise. The current aesthetics and sub-genres popular in the Top-40 right now will linger around for longer too, at least until something else comes along and ushers them out of relevancy, or if we can somehow make it through this pandemic and the current situation in the world changes. 

The music scene will fare a lot better than the film industry though, which I think will undoubtedly be the industry which will suffer the most from the coronavirus pandemic and impending economic depression. March 13-15 was reportedly the lowest box office weekend in the US since October 30-November 1, 1998. Several upcoming films have been pushed back until later on in the year as a result of the virus. The box office had already been experiencing tough competition from streaming services in recent years; now not only are cinemas closing all together due to the pandemic, but the quarantine is going to encourage more and more people to watch all their favourite shows, movies etc. through streaming. The longer this goes on, people's habits are going to change.

Technology has already evolved in such a way that watching a movie on a surround-sound, 4K TV is almost similar to a typical cinema experience. Will as many people make the effort to watch new releases at the cinemas once the pandemic is contained? It makes you wonder, because the threat of coronavirus is going to impact people on a psychological level as well. I can see people becoming much more paranoid about diseases and personal hygiene in the years to come. A cinema is still a mass gathering of people after-all, you can have hundreds of people in a cinema at a single time, so it's possible that people will begin to have second thoughts about going somewhere where there's potentially hundreds of unhygienic people and instead stick to watching the movie they want to see in the comfort of their own home. Who knows, the major film studios may even start to release theatrical films onto streaming services on the exact same day that they debut at the box office. I've always considered that to be inevitable, however I think the outbreak of coronavirus will make it happen much sooner than it would have if circumstances were different. Disney as an example have released Frozen 2 onto Disney+ several months earlier than the scheduled release date.

I'm really not sure where Hollywood will go from here. It almost seems impossible to top the amount of reboots and sequels that were released in the 2010s, but I actually tend to think the tumultuous nature of the present era will result in there being even more reboots released to cinemas in the next few years. The virus is impacting society across the board. People will be wanting things which remind them of the past, when life was filled with more hope and optimism, and what better way to do that than to release reboots and sequels to established film franchises. The recent "reboot" trend in the film industry will only start to decline once economic prospects improve IMO, and people's standards of living gets better as a result. That will take years. The coronavirus pandemic is going to define the economic prospects of the entire decade and of this generation. I believe the major film studios will come out of this a lot better than independent film makers. Really, this era is going to be a tough time for any indie or underground producer to achieve success in the mainstream.

The pandemic will probably hasten the transition to streaming based, online gaming. I've long been a believer that gaming will eventually be something that will exist in the form of new titles being released exclusively to streaming services, such as the Playstation Store. Will the release date of the PS5 be delayed due to the coronavirus? It puts a lot of things into question. 

realistically as some people have said 2017 or even 2018 due to the new president and what not I can agree with that
but it still had a tiny 2010s flavor,  For me personally around May/June when Game of Thrones ended coincidental  personally
and pop cultural I noticed a shift in atmosphere 

Funny you should mention major artists sticking around and the unknowns being missed due to the crises of our times. I actually think the opposite will happen, because I feel like the tone of those established artists will feel “off” or not hit the right note with a generation trying to survive an unstable decade. That is, I think people will feel a sort of dissonance towards the old guard, much as I have described to you feeling “guilty” listening to swing jazz from the hedonistic 1920s, knowing the rude awakening of the 1930s was around the corner.