Yes, I think I agree that some degree of novelty is required. (Reductio ad absurdum: A robot that generates copies of Beethoven's symphonies -- by some fancy process that doesn't explicitly involve copying them, but is none the less guaranteed never to generate anything Beethoven didn't already write -- is generating first-rate music but is also absolutely useless and would not be regarded as any kind of artist.)
But I suggest that the degree of novelty required is fairly small. How valuable would it be to the world if someone were able to write another nine symphonies just as good as Beethoven's but that don't enlarge our understanding of music any more than if, say, Beethoven had been able to work twice as fast and lived slightly longer, and had written them as his numbers 1.5, 2.5, ..., 9.5? Pretty damn valuable, I think. If someone found the manuscripts of nine other symphonies Beethoven actually did write but for some reason never released to the world, it would be very exciting and I bet there'd be no shortage of performances and audiences. Or: Pick one of Haydn's 104 symphonies. It probably doesn't really enlarge the world of music much beyond the other 103, but the world would definitely be poorer for its absence.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story called "The Quixote of Pierre Menard", about a man who rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word. But because he writes it from a modern perspective, it has a different meaning, and is a different work of art. :)
It seems unreasonable to me to suppose that there aren't already people writing Beethoven-style symphonies as well as Beethoven did. We probably have many times as many composers as talented and as well-trained as Beethoven was. Composers today have recorded music, easy access to scores, synthesizers, all sorts o...
I'm interested in how people form valuations of the opinions of others. One domain to study is art. We have a long historic record of how the elite arbiters of taste have decided what artists and what artworks were great.
This is more relevant to 21st century American thought than many of you probably think. The defaults we assume, the stories that are told on television and in our movies, the things taught in our colleges, were partly determined by assertions made by continental philosophers and psychologists of the 18th through 20th centuries, most of which they just made up. [1]
The process by which philosophers eventually get their views accepted into the Western canon looks the same to me as the process by which musicians or painters are accepted into or cast out of the Western canon. Neither has much to do with the quality of the product.
For centuries, artists have been judged not so much by the quality of their work as by its novelty, and by its ability to raise questions while resisting any definitive answers. As one art critic wrote, "Probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the Mona Lisa of literature."
Ironically, that was T. S. Eliot, just a few years before writing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and writing rave reviews of James Joyce's Ulysses.
I think novelty was the main criterion for artistic greatness by the middle of the 19th century. It was almost the only criterion, in all of the fine arts, by 1925.
But there is one artist who sticks out among the desperate attention-seeking artistes like an ordinary thumb: Brahms. Brahms accomplished something that, AFAIK, no one else had in any fine art, in all of European history going back to the Middle Ages. He made art in a style that had gone out of fashion before he was born, not ironically, not nostalgically, but because he liked it. As I understand it, Brahms was still writing symphonies in the style of Beethoven after Chopin and Liszt were dead. And his work became both popular, and accepted by the elite arbiters of taste into the canon, not for introducing any new style, but simply for being enjoyable. Or, as an unsophisticated ignoramus might say, good.
That would be analogous to a philosopher's ideas being accepted just for being correct!
Is that a fair representation? If so, why was he accepted into the canon, when anyone else who tried to just make good stuff would, I imagine, be laughed at or ignored? [2]
[1] Analytic philosophers were more rigorous, so nobody liked listening to them. There seems to be a Gresham's Law effect: The presence of bad philosophers who claim to have reached exciting conclusions without any nasty logic or math, makes it impossible for more rigorous work to get a hearing within society and the arts.
[2] I'm open to the idea that Robert Frost may be another exception, though I'm not aware of poems written in 1870 that could be mistaken for Robert Frost poems. I'll also note that people tried to stamp out appreciation for his poems because he wouldn't get with the Modernist program.