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.
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.
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).
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. 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.
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.
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.