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).
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).