- 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?
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
With all due respect, how would you know? Most people are so thoroughly ignorant of music that they can't possibly be expected to take notice of significant new works. (This is a general problem in many domains.)
As far as I can tell, the phenomenon you're noticing is simply that mass culture is not a process that optimizes for artistic value. But why should anyone have expected it to be?
The only reason that e.g. Beethoven has the mass-cultural prestige that he does is because he was grandfathered in at the beginning of mass culture, when it was seeded by elite culture. But mass culture eventually developed its own products, which have gradually displaced and eroded the prestige of the original "starters' kit" that included Beethoven.
Luckily, technology has made it possible to avoid relying on mass culture for access to culture. Beethoven may not be on TV but he is on YouTube, in abundance. (The name "YouTube" takes on some appropriate significance in this context.)
Bu...
I would argue that you are taking a narrow view of what music is. The fascination with the collection and intellectual understanding of information, as well as an addiction to emotional impact is something that is characteristic of our culture. And of course the music produced by a culture will be a reflection of the mind of its people.
I recommend that you examine carefully the wide variety of functions that music (and art in general) has in traditional cultures. Emotional, medicinal, social, as an aid to memorisation (see the Australian aborigines or vedi...
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?
Neither: revealed preferences of consumers are in favor of reboots so that's what gets made. That's only a "fault" if your preferences differ from that of most consumers.
(Although I've heard someone argue that piracy made independent films less viable: to the extent consumers would be willing to pay were no pirate option available, but lack of such payments causes fewer films to be made, that would be a market failure argument. I don't really have enough knowledge to judge that as an explanation.)
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.
I'm not sure this is a recent thing. For example, I think it's relevant that if you look at the IMDB top 250, you see an awful lot of sequels and adaptations, including 9 out of the top 10. (The exception is Pulp Fiction; in the top 25, we also get Inception, Seven Samurai, Se7en and The Usual Suspects).
I'd say no to both. I don't think any genre has come meaningfully close to completion, though I don't know classic of jazz very well.
Let's talk film. If I take a random movie that I didn't like, I find it very similar to others. If, however, I take one that I really like, I find that frustratingly few movies exist that are even similar.
I consider the possibility space to be a function of creativity/intelligence/competence (let's call it skill) of writing, and one that grows faster-than-linearly. The space of medium-skill writing may be nearing completion (...
Well, if you look at it most stories since prehistory have a similar structure. Guys like Vladimir Propp or Joseph Campbell analyzed old stories and came up with basic elements that almost all of the different stories shared.
George Lucas was actually inspired to create Star Wars by reading Campbell's "A Hero with a Thousand Faces".
This shows that all stories share a common structure, so it is hard to be totally original. However the structure is so versatile that it allows a huge number of different stories to come out and seem fresh and origin...
Unsure about the argument that people today just aren't measuring up to the most acclaimed artists of previous generations. There's probably some survivorship bias there, where only the most extraordinary of each generation survives, meaning our yardsticks from the past were the very very best they had to offer.
So I don't think it's too big of a problem that most people today don't measure up to them.
Interesting points, yea you're getting at the heart of what I'm trying to figure out. I think you're right, that it's easy to see how the story possibilities that use the simplest story types (Hero's Journey, etc) have possibly been ~90% completed.
But what makes you think that more complex story types allow many more possibilities? Along the lines of your point, Game of Thrones is a fantasy epic with a much darker tone that breaks storytelling conventions, but wouldn't any fantasy epic series with similar attributes in the future seem less groundbreaking than Game of Thrones? I agree that you could apply similar attributes to a Sci Fi epic series, or another type of series, but it seems like that type of story would begin to get old in the near future as well. On the television front, there are so many shows being created that it's hard to see how they can keep being groundbreaking.
With arty / more complex films like Being John Malkovich or Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine (I'm a fan of those Kaufman movies), does complexity lead to more possibilities of these types of movies or less? There seems to be a slowdown in more arty / complex stories this decade (than compared to the 90's for example).
With film and television creation being more democratized than ever, I don't see a reason why the creation of these type of films would slow down apart from the remaining stories requiring more complexity and skill to write than ever. I think we agree on the necessity of higher skill in writing currently. But, it seems to me that a slowdown in the category of non-traditional or unique stories would mean that we are running out of those story possibilities as well.
Isn't that an inherent property of complexity? A larger set of elements -> a larger powerset of elements -> more possibilities. In fact the size of the powerset grows at 2^x. I think a second game of thrones would be less groundbreaking, but doesn't have to be worse... and the same goes for the 1000th GoT.
... (read more)