Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective? (updated)
(This is an updated question I asked 7 years ago here. I wanted to see if any users have additional thoughts.)
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).
It seems there is limited distinctness (in art) that is relevant or compelling to people. By that I mean there could be infinite slightly different pieces of music, but those slight variations wouldn’t be compelling to someone to listen to ongoing.
I wrote brief articles called Limitism and The Big Niche to try and explain this concept.
The relevant questions seemto 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. Also I wrote about other implications of this idea (if true) on the blog if anyone wants to add their implications (if they presume the idea is true).
Previous post from 7 years ago:
I’ve noticed the “genres getting full/completed” thing, but I attribute it to how we define the genres.
A friend once lamented how they’re not making good prog any more, and not knowing what prog was at the time, I responded with a volley of questions about what constitutes good prog and what happened to the people who used to make it and what we call music that’s sufficiently novel relative to prog. Turns out that what he called “good prog” was defined in a way that set up the category to get full: Sufficiently distinct new music wasn’t “really prog” because it was other genres, and new music sufficiently similar to existing prog wasn’t “good” because it lacked an element of novelty.
My takeaway there was “well duh, if you go around defining genres like that, after awhile there won’t be room for quality novel stuff in them”.
Mathematically, the amount of possible sequences of stimuli that a human can experience in a finite lifetime is huge but finite. Most of those subsets of stimuli won’t be experienced as “good art”, and the goalpost for what does qualify as “good art” also moves over time as a function of culture and individual experience.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near exhausting the available spectrum of “good art”, though, considering that we’re still early in the game of inventing new ways to control what stimuli others experience. One excellent example is the pairing of music with altered mental states: we haven’t even found all the chemicals yet for safely, reliably, and desirably altering mental states. So a bunch of “good art” has never yet been experienced by humans (consider listening to a good album released this year, under the influence of each best intoxicant that will be released each year for the next several decades, as that many novel promising potential art experiences). I think it’s way too early about worrying about having had each potential “good art” experience enough times for it to get boring—and that doesn’t even start on the hypothesis that some experiences cannot even be fully and accurately remembered because of neurological limitations, and will thus feel novel each time they’re revisited.
With all that said, though, as I grow older it feels like “good art” is becoming harder to find. My personal hypothesis on this is that part of what makes art into a personal favorite is related to the amount of novelty, or rate of personal change, associated with my circumstances when I first encountered it. I find that I can game that system by trying new music, shows, etc at times when I am particularly receptive to change—while traveling, exploring, experiencing major shifts in interpersonal relationships, etc.
Adolescence is kind of a cheat code for attaching to and identifying with art in a way that keeps it enjoyable, because it’s a time of extreme change for pretty much everybody.
tl;dr I think genres get full in general because of how we define them, but we keep making new art, and we keep making new ways to make and experience art. I think many people have a personal experience of “good art getting harder to find” because factors associated with different life stages impact our receptivity to exploring new art and forming new favorites.
I experience that, but I think it’s not just a novelty thing, it’s a raising the bar thing. If you compare everything against, say, the top 1% of everything you’ve experienced, that will inevitably become a harder and harder bar to clear. This is definitely something I do feel with movies.
With music, I have a different process—I’m cycling. I discovered heavy metal back when I was in college, then prog rock, then I had a musical theater phase, now I’m really into rap. I don’t dislike any of those old genres I went through either, I like them all, but I shift my focus and then when I’m sort of done with one genre I put it on the backburner and move to something else.
Something that also happens is that as we age we lose energies, including mental energies, and so maybe we’re less willing to invest into getting into something that doesn’t immediately click with us. With literature, I have to admit that from an “objective” level the quality of what I read has probably gone down since my childhood. I used to read lots of different things, now I only find enough energy to read stuff that is either very easy or that I really specifically enjoy. Haven’t managed to consistently stick with something like a great classic for years (last one I picked up was War and Peace. It’s not bad by any means, but I just quickly end up finding something else and then I put it on pause and then I forget about it).
This. Happens everywhere, even on LW.
For example, after reading hundreds of amazingly well written essays it’s natural to then treat the vast majority of writing you subsequently encounter as noise.
Really interesting thoughts, thanks for contributing. It seems like you think it’s possible we could “exhaust” good art, even if not anytime soon. My other blog posts (you don’t need to read them) are about if this concept applies to everything in human development (that it will be substantially “completed” one day) then what would be the implications of that and how would people live and how should society be set up. Do you have any thoughts on any of that? (it’s ok if you don’t, you just gave a really thorough good reply above so I thought you might)
yeah! I super briefly alluded to it with “and the goalpost for what does qualify as “good art” also moves over time as a function of culture and individual experience.” above—that reply didn’t feel like the place to go into detail on the potential for exhaustion.
Thinking it through now, I think I may have found a stronger justifiable claim than I was aware of at the time of the initial comment, as well.
Modern use of the term “art” is inexorably linked with the concept of recording. Listening to the same recording of a song, or the same cut of a movie, at different times, is easy to conflate into being “the same” experience, because the differences in the experience are subtle enough to be treated as unimportant.
Decouple “art” from “recording”, and there’s a lot more hope that we’ll never “run out” in a meaningful way. It’s pretty plausible that someday we’ll discover all of the very “best” recordings under a certain length, by the standards of all creatures recognizable as human—at that point, having a limited number of senses and a limited number of consecutive hours to consume media in a sitting become entwined with the definition of what we recognize as “people like us”. Some future descendant of our species who possesses a dozen senses that they cannot explain to us, for instance, would not really be “like us” as a connoisseur or consumer of art.
So, I’d say maybe we can find all the best recordings, but so what? Have you ever been part of a group of humans that sings “the same” song repeatedly, year after year, decade after decade, or even century after century? I think this is most common in churches, but it also shows up in some social gatherings, reenactment events, etc. Is the experience of it really the same for you each time, in the way that listening to a single recording over and over would be, even if the words and tune remain consistent? Each time a song is re-sung, you can hear subtle differences—peoples’ moods and health impact their tone; the composition of the group might add or remove voices.
Part of what gives art its value is the relationship between it, the person experiencing or producing it, and the broader social context. No individual will ever exhaust all of those combinations—you can never hear a different final slow song at the last school dance you ever attended as a teen, for instance. You might have lots of different last school dances in various games or simulations, with different last songs, but those just form you into someone who’s played those games or lived through those simulations in addition to what you’ve done and experienced in person.
So from the useful, applicable, selfish angle, each person gets to experience a finite amount of art. Almost everyone gets a different set of art… but if someone else happened to somehow have had all the same experiences with all the same art as you, would that diminish the value that the art had to you in some way?
Whatever it is that we “complete”, it’s obviously going to be a whole lot bigger than a single lifetime’s worth of material. We’ll each get to traverse that corpus differently, just as we each differently traverse the corpous of possible art to experience now. If different individuals happen to take identical paths through it somehow (if that’s even possible), that harms no-one. In the most interesting case, individuals who’ve had otherwise identical experiences might encounter one another, and then their experiences would immediately differ forever more, because the laws of physics would constrain them to literally have different perspectives on their meeting.
Also, thank you for inquiring gently, and thank you for the care you took to avoid conferring an obligation to read your other posts. I look forward to reading and thinking about them at some time when my brain is acting differently from how it is today.
Really interesting thoughts to add to the discussion, I’ll be thinking over these ideas for sure. Thanks again for being so thorough / contributing!
Continuing to ponder it, I’ve stumbled onto a few areas that seem like key points in refining the underlying question about what “running out of new art” might mean:
Covers of songs. When some elements of a piece of Good Art are reused, does that constitute New Art?
Sampling. Consider the situation when a song samples an iconic soundbyte from a movie—the order in which one encounters the song and movie will change one’s experience of both. My personal example is having known the guns n roses song Civil War for many years before eventually seeing Cool Hand Luke, so my movie experience was “hey, it’s the thing from that song!”, whereas someone who met them in the other order would have heard the song and gone “hey, it’s the thing from that movie!”.
Movie adaptations of books and remakes of movies. Consider the difference between fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm versus their Disney adaptations, or the impact of Shakespeare on much of modern western media. Is a retelling of Hamlet technically “new art” if it’s an old story?
I think that although we can technically exhaust the space of recordings, there’s probably a decent argument to be made that we cannot meaningfully exhaust the space of retellings. Each retelling differs from the original story due to the context in which it’s told. Each context for storytelling differs from prior contexts in part due to what prior retellings have happened in it. Therefore, each new retelling is meaningfully distinct from prior retellings.
In a certain sense, I think we are forced to answer yes. No matter what copyright law says, New Art is never created 100% from scratch by someone who can claim full intellectual property over every aspect of the work.
Carnatic music is a form of Indian classical music that’s existed for thousands of years. In the mid-twentieth century Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar came up with a new format for concerts called Ragam-Tanam-Pallavi. In this section musicians would elaborate on a chosen raga (which is kind of like a Western classical scale of notes) and set the foundation of what would follow. What comes next is a rhythmic improvisation (tanam), and a complex rhythmic composition similar to a refrain in Western music. I bring this up because Carnatic music isn’t that well-known outside of South India and certain cirlces in the U.S. (SF, Cleveland, NJ), yet it’s continued to innovate despite having 2000 years to cover virtually every mathematical combination of notes.
Most musicians would agree that it’s not mutually exclusive to acknowledge there is limited distinctness in art, while also acknowledging that we are no where near approaching that state yet, and even if we did it wouldn’t be significant. Most stories follow the heroes journey. Most pop hits use the same chord progression. I’ve studied Indian and Western classical and one thing I find fascinating is how both systems arrived at 7 fundamental notes, with sharper and flatter variations. Ultimately distinctiveness doesn’t contribute to (or at the very least determine) artistic value. I think this becomes apparent when you look at literature. Most writers would agree with the Infinite monkey theorem and there is a limit on how divergent a new story can be from previous literature. However, people still watch Star Wars and people still read Harry Potter. (Both involve a chosen one, raised by relatives, amongst other similarities).
Also, I think it’s worth noting that there have been people who have been quite divergent in classical and jazz music in recent years. You have John Cage who angered a lot of folks with “4′33” and Kamasi Washington with “The Epic” or John Mayer with reviving SRV-like blues popularity amongst young folks.
I think the reason we appear to be reaching a limit in terms of mainstream music and film is because we’re undergoing a shift in how we consume these forms of media: streaming platforms and shortform content that can make or break emerging artists. This has probably forced studios to focus on creating movies that gets people back in theaters regardless of artistic depth, and forced producers to make music that’ll create viral 15-second soundbites. At the same time however, the internet has democratized that ability to share art and I think the younger generation can leverage these technologies to share authentic art and find common ground others. The next generations of art will involve syncretizing techniques to create new forms of art.
I think a great example of what this looks like is Ravi Shankar and the Beatles or John McLaughlin and Shakthi.
P.S. my first comment on here, so apologies if the formatting is wrong!
I don’t think there really are finite possibilities, but obviously there aren’t infinite possibilities that make sense, and I don’t mean just in terms of being coherent, but in terms of just having a core story or theme or concept that feels like it means something rather than being just Stuff That Happens.
I feel like what for example holds back mainstream movie creativity right now is hyper-optimization. Big companies create movies by committee, trying to appeal to as much of the audience as possible enough that they will pay for them. This doesn’t always work, but even when it does, it will tend to produce stuff that is a consistent 7⁄10 for everyone than stuff that is a 10⁄10 with some and a 3⁄10 with everyone else. Weird and unique art is often niche. If you make everything into a global scale business, you can’t help but be forced to do this in order to keep the scale economy going. And that’s how you get… pretty much anything Disney has churned out in the last 15 years, for example.
On the other hand, some fields suffer from a pathological obsession with originality and shock value, which is its own problem. Feels to me like the visual arts (I mean the sort that go into exhibitions and museums) are an example here. These fields end up suffering instead from a paradoxical effect in which they’re predictably unpredictable; the main thing the new artist seeks is to do something that will seem surprising and revolutionary, and damn any other value. Hence things that are understood and appreciated only by a closed circle and look simply weird, cryptic and off-putting to most everyone else.
I don’t think any art can be ever done, nor that originality per se is the only value—sometimes executing a classic concept well is all you need. But it requires the right condition, social and material, for that to happen, and we certainly have a lot of toxic feedback loops that sometimes strangle entire forms of creativity.
Yea, what you’re talking about that a story has to “mean something” is what I’m getting at, that there isn’t an infinite amount of those theoretically. So if there aren’t infinite possibilities that “make sense” (like you said) then won’t we eventually run out of them (even if you think it would be far into the future)?
And if we will run out of possibilities that “make sense”, then isn’t it just a question of when?
Well, but you also have to consider that the kind of “sense” we’re interested in changes with culture, so in a way this might be more a sign of cultural stagnation (art managed to run out of big things to say since the last time there was a shift large enough to change the themes of most interest).
Yes, they’re completed, but only if you don’t care about them. I don’t much care about pop country, and so I know a few big names and new progress won’t change that. And yet it’s still capable of supporting a subculture of people who do care, and for whom new things are happening.
anecdote about that: I, too, identify as someone who doesn’t care about / like / listen to pop country. However, one time on a solo road trip I was listening to whatever radio station happened to have the best reception, which was one at a time in that area. Those unusual circumstances caused me to tolerate a bunch of songs that I found mildly annoying, and among them, I discovered that there were some pop country songs that I actually enjoyed quite a lot.
If I’d been going about my normal adult life, I never would have discovered the handful of songs I liked, because I would have changed the station or put on music stored to my phone. When I shared my excitement about the “new art” of the couple songs I like with a friend who’s more familiar with the genre, they didn’t consider it “new art” at all—the songs I liked had been high on the charts for several weeks, perhaps in part due to their general palatability to broader audiences, and were not only “old” to a genre fan but less exemplary of “art” than the songs I found annoying.
However, this seems to imply the opposite of what I’m hearing from your comment: I’m hearing you say that advances in pop country will look like new good art to genre fans, but not to you. The lesson I’d draw from my own moment with it is that it’s far easier to find the low-hanging fruit of subjectively “new good art” in the middle of areas where one hasn’t personally looked much, versus on the edges of a well-explored space.
Classical music expert here. I don’t think that classical music has been “completed” in any meaningful sense. Imagine a previously unknown piece by Beethoven being discovered tomorrow in some old German trove. I definitely don’t expect the public reaction to be “Meh, classical music is already completed, there’s no reason to perform this one”.
Of course, you could argue that Beethoven has achieved near-mythical status, and works by more obscure composers would be left in the trove. But I still don’t think that’s accurate. Obscure composers remain obscure only as long as no one care enough to publicize their work (e.g. Vivaldi, who was definitely obscure before 1920), and I can ensure you that the niche of classical performers is currently doing its best to resurrect a lot of old works. This is particularly true in the case of operas, where a lot of the work is done by the on stage representation itself, and we currently do this kind of things much better than 1700 people did. One of my favorite examples here is this excerpt from Les Indes galantes by Rameau, were they did an amazing job keeping the spirit of the original play.
What about living people writing classical music? Well, they exist too, and they usually don’t try to fully imitate the works of old masters. Classical music is just a set of (very precise) rules, that can be employed in unexpected ways. One of my favorite is the Lady Gaga fugue, which could not have been written by Bach himself for obvious reasons.
I don’t know about classical, but there’s a a genre actually called Nu Jazz. I’m finding it hard to keep up with the output ATM.
OTOH: Daniels.
I hope this is not considered off-topic, but I’m more interested in the possibility of running out of perceptions.
Can I experience anything just as I did when I was 5 years old? That magical feeling? I think it’s unlikely. Whatever valence remains in music for me is something like how my internal noise and tempo interacts with the symmetry of the music. Positive associations, feelings, experiencing the music (e.g. as a story) aren’t a big part of my music experience anymore. But this is a problem with me, rather than the music, no?
If I require strong stimuli, it’s likely because of impatience and frequent overstimulation. If music doesn’t speak to me it’s because I’m jaded. If genres are too “silly” it’s because I take myself too seriously, basically closing off my perception. Depending on my mental state, the amount of things I can perceive and enjoy differs by a lot, perhaps even by multiple magnitudes.
To answer the post, I don’t think we’re running out just yet. I still have many things on my playlists which are unique. I can’t find anything remotely similar to them nor can I put words on them. I think there’s many more combinations which are just difficult to find. Sort of like how a lot of Game of Life configurations were hidden for many years.
But I’m not overly concerned, since the amount of art should still exceed that which any person can consume in their life time. So from that perspective, we’ll never run out even if humanity manages to map out “art-space” or “perception-space”. As to how big this space is, and whenever it has the same dangers as superstimuli, are questions I will leave to more knowledgeable people.
A category in which you may be able to get more direct questions is in ASMR. There’s a limited amount of triggers, and it should be possible to research how fast the novelty wears off and how preferences change over time. At the same time we could research the hedonic threadmill of sound and ways to migrate the negative effects.
I think that the reason why art is slowing down is because imitation is becoming more popular. The exploration-exploitation ratio is tending towards exploitations for reasons I will attribute to less abundant states of mind in society. It takes a certain amount of good health to experiment and create new things rather than just mindlessly consume.
Definitely interesting ideas about perception and this topic. Also, I’m not overly aware of ASMR but I’ll have to look into that that there’s a limited amount of triggers (and like you said, the hedonic treadmill of how our brain habituates to sound). Thanks for the thoughts!
No, we are nowhere near exhausting what’s possible. There are just large numbers of unoriginal works and it’s easy to get lost among them.
It’s harder and harder to make good art in a way: there more there is, the less likely you are to be able to do it better or create something truly new. However it’s not approaching impossible, because there’s always new life happening to make art about. And there are usually new technologies coming along to make it with
To an extent, the more tumultuous and fecund the world becomes the more possible it becomes to produce good art again. Apocalypse or economic devastation is bad for art because it depletes the resources and free time needed to make it. However if there is a possibility of a bounce back you have both the fuel and the resources to make works of genius. This is a solace of (quite) bad news.
I really love movies. This year I’ve gone to more re-releases and anniversary showings than new releases. I chalk that up to formulaic thinking behind newer movies. So we’re not running out of art but rather existing niches are being filled faster and in more clever ways and arguably faster than new niches emerge.
It could also have to do with the nature of film production. If a movie takes five years to make the design and production team is predicting what viewers will want 5 years in the future. The result can be stale overly commercialized type movies.
The “Limitism” link is broken.
Thanks for letting me know! I didn’t realize it. Should be fixed now