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.

By the same token though, we can certainly consider an activity that does strive to 'seed' mass culture to be more worthwhile than a very similar activity that doesn't

Why should we, unless we're confident that mass culture tracks our values? The original seeding didn't occur because of any such "striving"; it just occurred because there wasn't anything else better-optimized already lying around for mass culture to operate on. That is no longer the case now, and indeed we're no longer in an era where "seeding" is possible, since mass culture already has its own material to work with.

To put it another way, Mozart didn't have to "compromise" much if at all in order to write a Singspiel, in comparison to the degree that a contemporary serious composer would have to in order to write a Broadway musical (or even, frankly, anything that achieves any renown at all in the 2010s "mainstream" milieu, i.e. the space from which your earlier examples of contemporary music were drawn). This is true even if, from the inside, it felt to Mozart like he was making a large compromise (which is doubtful).

I definitely agree about the importance of active participation as opposed to passive consumption. In fact, I suspect this may be the ultimate root of the distinctions between elite culture and mass culture that I actually care about; when I talk about "mass culture", I am really talking about consumer culture.

Two observations leap to the fore: (1) a participatory culture makes the notion of a skill-level hierarchy more apparent and well-defined, and (2) "composers writing for composers" is a way of describing a participatory culture (which suggests that its use as a derogatory description is pathological).

There is a certain human quality that will seek out active participation in the face of the apparent option of passive consumption. This is the quality necessary to the continuation of the art-music tradition, and is the quality I am seeking to cultivate.

(One might think here of Glenn Gould's vision of recording technology allowing people to interact with a work and "recreate" it similarly to how a performer would.)

BTW, you say that my view is a "standard academic" one but Adorno that this is really the case

I can't tell whether there is a missing verb here or whether this is some kind of amusing pun on "I don't know". I'm fairly confident that Adorno (who seems to have had an aesthetic sense akin to mine, though mine is probably wider) was no fan of mass culture, and would have recognized the distinctions I have been pointing to.

In any case, "standard academic view" was insufficiently precise; "contemporary academic trend" would have been better. The traditional idea of an elite canon no doubt still persists (conceivably to the point of domination) through institutional inertia, but the rhetoric is quite different these days, and I think in this case the rhetoric reflects the trend. This is to be expected ("Cthulu always swims away from interestingness"), because universities aren't actually the anti-populist fortresses that Milton Babbitt envisioned them as, but are rather political institutions that are expected to be "relevant" to "society".

Luckily, we seem to be in a refragmentation, wherein niche cultures will supplant mass culture in people's psychology, and more of them will feel allowed to be interesting.

a participatory culture makes the notion of a skill-level hierarchy more apparent and well-defined

Not so. Fetishizing extreme 'skill', virtuosity, stardom etc. is a marker of a consumer culture, not a participatory one. One needs only look at what may be the earliest comprehensively-documented instance of a mostly- or entirely-passive musical culture, namely the elite dramma per musica a.k.a. opera seria, to be sure that this is the case! (This is something that people were keenly aware of at the time - which is why opera was eventually reformed to mak... (read more)