- 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.
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 Beethoven's Fur Elise is a better song. I'm saying that it seems evident to me that there is something objectively different about those two "songs" that in tandem with human nature makes Fur Elise appeal as the better song to the general consensus of human music listeners. (of course outliers could enjoy my random chords more).
So where we might be conflicting, is that I see something objective behind what makes a "good" song by the consensus of human nature. I agree that there are many cultural factors at play as to what is popular according to mass culture. But if song quality is related to something objective, and the general consensus is that the best classical artists are from over 50-100 years ago, why would the rate of "great" classical songs have declined while there is as much or more opportunity to compose classical music as ever? Through the internet, we also have the quickest dissemination of music ever (so it seems unlikely that classical music fans would be unaware of current composers who are performing as great of works as Beethoven or Mozart).
More simply, I'm viewing songs as concepts. So like "you can't reinvent the wheel", you can't reinvent Fur Elise. So it's not that there are not skilled composers currently, but that there is very few remaining concepts (songs) for them to invent. Just like you could reinvent the lightbulb, but you wouldn't get acclaim for that because Thomas Edison already did that.
I agree with you that this is a difficult idea to prove, because what I am claiming are self-evident propositions--upon examination--are very complex. But I done't see a way to break the observation down further into simpler if/then arguments.
First of all, Beethoven's "Für Elise" isn't a song, it's a bagatelle; let's get the genre right. (The previous sentence also demonstrates the proper use of the word "genre", by the way.)
The rest of your comment is just a reaffirmation of your confusion of mass culture and culture tout court. I (might) agree that mass-culture's greatness-producing capacities have plateaued, but I don't look to mass culture as a source of artistic greatness, so I don't really care.
If you studied music in sufficient depth, you'd see the possibilities for ... (read more)