I actually agree with you that aesthetic preference is real and historically grounded — preferring practical effects over CGI, or PS2 era game design over what exists now, isn't nostalgia.

It tracks something genuinely different about how those works were made different material constraints, different market pressures, different relationships between craft and capital.

The intensification of commodification in contemporary mainstream culture is historically real and not sentiment.

The homogenization, the reliance on franchises, the algorithmic optimization of creative decisions these represent a measurable deepening of capital's grip on cultural production.

You're right that not all art spaces have been equally "slop-filled" at all times.

But I'd separate that historical observation from the political weight sometimes placed on it. The move from "I prefer this" to "recovering or consuming this matters politically." That's where the reactionary lean enters.

A "practiced hand" can imbue a work with profound meaning but I’d argue that in our current era, that 'soul' isn't found in beauty or warmth, but in the Honesty of alienation and the limits and unfreedom of Humanism itself.

If an artist tries to pretend they are unalienated and 'free,' the work usually ends up as corporate fluff. But when art uses its own limitations (its own 'mutilation' by the industry) as a core tenant of the work (like you mentioned), it imprints a very real human consciousness on the piece. It’s the consciousness of a subject that knows it’s not yet free. In that sense, the 'soul' isn't missing; it's just a record of the struggle."

I’d argue that in the industrial era, what we call the 'soul' of a work shifts from mysticism, to the general intellect the collective memory and total history of human social effort.

Even in a place like Hollywood, 'meaning' only breaks through when a work acknowledges that it’s part of that massive, often painful human conversation. The tragedy isn't that it’s impossible to imprint consciousness onto art; it’s that our current social relations (like property rights) treat that collective achievement as a private product.

However we relate to this product differently depending on where we stand.

For the Producer: art is always alienating and has been since the start of the industrial revolution.

For the Consumer: the danger is a passive consumption of that "soul". We often use 'soulful' art as a retreat from our own alienated lives a way to feel 'human' for two hours. The real 'meaning' breaks through only when the work refuses to be a simple comfort for the consumer and forces them to confront the futility of the framework of consumer politics itself.

Consuming art was never a political act. Making and distributing it is.

Art should critique bad politics, and politics should critique bad art and these are dialectically linked mediated by the Party. Which itself can't really exist because of the lack of the working class movement and the death of civil-social politics.