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.
When some elements of a piece of Good Art are reused, does that constitute New Art?
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.
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.