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.

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 make it more "natural".)

"composers writing for composers" is a way of describing a participatory culture (which suggests that its use as a derogatory description is pathological).

Well, to the extent that they are indeed engaging in such an activity for the sake of participation, this is certainly true. But it's quite doubtful to me that even the "anti-populist fortress" of academia (as you put it later in your comment) can escape its own sort of consumer culture-ish dynamics. In this case, of course, such dynamics involve, not so much 'compromising' for the sake of mainstream popularity, but precisely the striving for some peak of perceived 'skill' and stardom (as judged e.g. by influential critics, patrons/funders and other outsiders), even when this is to the detriment of the overall interestingness and breadth of the participatory process.[1]

If so, this may be a case where all we can do is pick our place on a deeply uncomfortable tradeoff - since neither of these processes seems to track the values we would prefer! But a combination of the refragmentation you point to later on[2] and an increase in influence from the more self-consciously "low skill" and "DIY" subcultures seems to offer the best hope for improvement. Which is paradoxical indeed if you simply assume that these "DIY" subcultures must be "mass" cultures and thus cannot possibly help further an "elite" tradition.

[1] A further issue compounding this 'Moloch' problem, is that - much like J.S. Bach who thought of the Lutheran God as being his audience - most "academic" composers nowadays seem to be making music to worship Ra. The Lutheran God very possibly does not exist, but everyone has experienced 'Ra' in some form, and I for one don't think of Ra-worship as especially worthwhile, either artistically or in a broader social sense.

[2] (I had actually been taking this process for granted; I agree that the increasingly-consolidated, capital-intensive, "mainstream" music industry is obviously not a force for increased participation!)

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 ap... (read more)

2arundelo9y

For one thing, fetishizing skill is a fairly small component of contemporary popular music culture. For another, that's different from the skill-level hierarchy komponisto is talking about. As a musician (disclosure!), I expect a musician's judgment of another musician's skill level to be more accurate and finer-grained than the judgment of a non-musician.