Sophistication, or Just Plain, Old Negativity?

Last night I watched two nature films. The first one was about flamingos in Africa, The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos. It was rivetingly beautiful, but about half-way through the filmmaker began focusing on the chicks who had built up crippling salt deposits on their legs, and the chicks that were being killed by storks and eagles. There were approximately 250,000 chicks to film, but rather than filming the healthy, thriving chicks, we saw the chicks dying, being left behind, being killed, or being left to starve alone because of the salt deposit buildup. So rather than focus on what's right with the world, the filmmaker focused on what is wrong with the world. Our intellectuals are completely infected with this pseudosophistication of believing that they are more aware/honest/sophisticated because they have gnosis (secret wisdom) that the pathetic bourgeois who want to see the happy side of life are too dumb to appreciate. 

The second film I saw was by Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World. It was just as beautiful, but not so obsessively occupied with the "red in tooth and claw" aspect of nature. Was that because he doesn't have anything to prove, or because the Antarctic has fewer opportunities to show seals and penguins being killed or dying?

 I think that the driving force for the negativity is part of a spiritual illness in the arts community as a whole. The visual artists focus on the ugly, proclaiming that art is only art if it is different from everything that proceeded it. For some reason, the only new things seem to be ugly. The film artists focus on the dark side, with members of every earlier white culture portrayed as filthy, having terrible dental hygiene, greedy, prone to rape, dressed in ragged, dirty clothing, and hairy. Remarkably, most women and members of other races are clean, intelligent, and have acceptable values. Musical artists are pretty much wrapped in rap. Rather than being sophisticated, artists are the victims of a spiritual/mental illness that is close to or equal to despair/depression. The world is just not that bad a place. It is full of light, love, and joy, even when bad things happen to good people and good animals.

I would love to see some real artistic sophistication, where people think outside the box, and see the world for the beautiful place that it is, and always has been. I heard a statistic once, 95% of the things we worry about never happen. Well, a correlation to that would be that when bad things happen, they only happen about 5% of the time, so the world is beautiful, nature is mostly pink in tooth and claw, most of the babies are going to survive, and most of the people in the past were clean, reasonable, and kind, just as they are today.