- 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.
Well, there is a provably finite possibility space for stories. You only have so many ways to arrange letters in a script. The question is whether it's meaningful.
To use some completely made-up numbers, I think the current possibility space for movies produced by the bottom 80% of people with the current style may be 90% covered. The space for the top 2%, on the other hand, is probably covered for less than 0.1% (and I resisted putting in more zeros there).
To get more concrete, I'll name some pieces (which I avoided doing in my initial post). Take Game of Thrones. It's a huge deal – why? Well, because there isn't really anything like it, But when you get rid of all the typical story tropes, like main characters with invulnerability, predictable plot progressions, a heroic minority lucking out against an evil majority, typical villains, etc etc, not only does the result get better, the possibility space actually widens. (I'm not saying scripts of this quality don't exist, but it seems to be the only show where a great script and a huge budget and a competent team came together. There could be thousands of shows like this, and there is just one).
Or take the movie Being John Malkovich. Basically, there is one supernatural element placed in an otherwise scientifically operating world, and you have a bunch of character who act like normal humans, meaning largely selfish and emotionally driven, acting over that element. Just thinking about how much you could do following that formula opens up a large area in that seems to be largely untouched.
I think we're shooting at Pluto over and over again while (for the most part) ignoring the rest of the universe. And it still works, because production quality and effects are still improving.
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I always thought it's because of blood and boobs. No?