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.

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.)

But people won't be able to properly enjoy this state of affairs unless they recognize that mass culture isn't a process for producing what they actually want (i.e. stop caring that Beethoven isn't on TV, when he is on YouTube).

All this is by way of explaining that, while you say "there's no one like Beethoven around", the idea that even Beethoven is "around" (present in mass culture) is mostly an illusion; and that a fortiori, you would not expect mass culture to have "noticed" his successors.

Sure, the position I'm coming from is that there is a varied and subjective experience of music, but there is clearly a shared consensus of what is good. That we all share common characteristics of auditory and musical experience because we are all human--not that we all experience music the same way or have the same appreciation of individual songs, but that our experience of music has similarities due to our shared human nature.

So if I hit random piano keys with my hands a few times and call it a song, the consensus of music listeners would be that Beet... (read more)

2bogus9y

I just can't figure out what 'mass culture', 'elite culture' and 'artistic value' are supposed to mean in your argument. Taking music as an example, AFAICT, the main way in which our current 'mass culture' music differs 'artistically' from the 'elite music' of centuries past is that the latter was a literate genre, relying on the written medium of 'sheet music' in contrast to audio records. It's also true that music being distributed in recorded form implies a very different mode of consumption; music is no longer seen these days as something that the average person might want to actively engage with, in stark contrast to the past. But even these facts do not seem to fully justify a conflation of "elite" status with "artistic value". For one thing, surely a lot of the "elite" music we now choose to value was consumed passively, e.g. in opera houses or as inoffensive background music to elite social gatherings (the latter spawning the entire subgenre of "chamber music"!), whereas the earliest forms of "mass music" (which in fact were first available in notated form, in contrast to later audio records) would be engaged with actively, mainly through amateur performance by middle- and sometimes lower-class folks. More generally, it often happens that we choose to value "elite" things of the past more, simply because they were associated with a social elite, even though these niche practices aren't actually very significant historically; and some of this seems to be going on here.