Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?

stephen_s

It is difficult to judge at first, but it appears that some music genres (classical and jazz especially) have seen a radically slowed or non-existent output of significant works in recent decades. By significant, I mean works that would be seen in league with the most acclaimed artists in the genre (eg Beethoven, John Coltrane). In a similar way, there is a building popular consensus that Hollywood is not pursuing original ideas as much anymore and is relying on rebooting old stories and franchises. But is this because of a fault of the Hollywood system, or is it because there are few significant movie story ideas left that have not been done?

It seems to me that there are limited possibilities in art (or any field) of what we can discover or create. It appears that the matter and rules of the universe (in concert with human nature) manifests itself into these limited possibilities. When we develop a field or genre, we learn and create at an increasing rate but then eventually "complete" the field (in a boom and bust pattern).

I wrote a brief article called The Big Niche to try and explain this concept.

The relevant questions seem to be:

Do you agree that from experience and observation, we can tell that certain genres or fields appear to become completed?
Does this concept or another concept best explain what is happening?

I'm interested if any of you agree with this line of thinking or have other possible explanations of this phenomena.

I wrote a brief article called The Big Niche to try and explain this concept.

The relevant questions seem to be:

Do you agree that from experience and observation, we can tell that certain genres or fields appear to become completed?
Does this concept or another concept best explain what is happening?

I'm interested if any of you agree with this line of thinking or have other possible explanations of this phenomena.

Not so. Fetishizing extreme 'skill', virtuosity, stardom etc. is a marker of a consumer culture, not a participatory one.

Here you have once again done something that you have done a number of times before, which is to "round off" my meaning to something completely different from what I intended. A skill-level hierarchy is a completely different concept from the fetishizing of extreme skill, to the point where they are almost opposites: extreme skill will tend to be fetishized (as opposed to admired) in situations where ordinary skill is not appreciated -- situations where sensationalistic superstimulus is required for "the audience" to tell that anything interesting is going on at all.

In the early days of video games as a spectator sport, some people wondered how watching someone play a video game could possibly be interesting. The people who wondered that tended to have less experience playing video games themselves than the actual audience did. The increased ability (and, in particular, the detailed ability) to appreciate someone else doing something as the result of having tried to do it yourself is what I am talking about when I talk about there being a hierarchy of skill levels.

Consider something like chess, where enthusiasts who know where they stand via their Elo rating also get more out of watching top masters play than passive audiences do.

But it's quite doubtful to me that even the "anti-populist fortress" of academia (as you put it later in your comment)

You will notice that I said that academia is not an anti-populist fortress. Hence your reversion to far mode to talk about what "most academic composers" seem to be doing or not doing is beside the point. I don't think academia is a healthy system, and I think Babbitt was wrong to expect it to foster his activity. (In fact, it barely did so in his own specific case, as he often complained about, despite the fact that he operated mostly during a time when academia seemed much more promising than it does now.)

Forgive the tu quoque, but I find it interesting that you say

I for one don't think of Ra-worship as especially worthwhile, either artistically or in a broader social sense

given that according to my model, Ra-worship is basically the generating force behind your entire argument. You seem to be uncomfortable with the "messiness" of modernism (which, I claim, is what you're really talking about when you talk about "academia", even though the trend in academia, guided by Ra, is away from modernism and toward promoting people like Part and Saariaho as opposed to people like Babbitt and Ferneyhough), the contrarianness of a stance that says "to heck with mass culture, and the 'trends of our time', I want to be more interesting than that".

It would be interesting to know what you think of the following two claims:

(1) You enjoy mass-cultural popular music a lot more than I do; but my lack of enjoyment does not particularly result from a lack of understanding of what is going on in the music.

(2) I enjoy modernist art-music a lot more than you do; and some degree of comprehension failure is implicated in your lack of enjoyment.

I believe both of these, but am more confident in (1), which is informed directly by your comments (including under a possible alias elsewhere), than (2), where priors are doing most of the work.

Here you have once again done something that you have done a number of times before, which is to "round off" my meaning to something completely different from what I intended.

That sort of misunderstanding is a risk in any discussion, of course. I have no quibble against either the appreciation of 'ordinary skill', or "the increased ability ... to appreciate someone else doing something as the result of having tried yourself". Both are normal dynamics in a participatory culture. But AIUI it would be wrong to state that 'sensationalist... (read more)