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.
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.
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.