Yea exactly, that’s the point I’m trying to get at. It seems like there is a limit to the possibilities of “great” contributions to any field, and if that is so then it makes sense that eventually each field will be completed. Completion is the point where humanity has completed every field and discovered all knowledge (and could be viewed as the biggest goal for humanity in a way).
stephen_s
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Great, thanks for the link. I’ve read a fair amount of his stuff, but I didn’t know he had an article on this topic.
Ok great, yes this is what I’m trying to get at. First of all, I think your definition of art is good.
To your first point, I would say that I believe instincts, language, culture, knowledge, and conditioning are factors in art. But I believe that they are all limited in possibilities as well. So the manifestation of those limited factors into different art would lead to limited possibilities of art.
Let me try and clarify that by addressing your next points. I agree that genres are not real things. Like all language, it is imperfect labeling for a practical purpose. To simplify the problem even more, lets take out the concept of genre. In the creation of music over time, songs share characteristics (instrumentation, sounds, structures, rhythms, etc), and the common characteristics of music shift and change over human history. Certain songs in a realm of shared characteristics appear to have a period of greater creation of significant works before songs with those characteristics eventually decline in quality. What I’m trying to get at is that it doesn’t matter where you draw the lines for genres to determine whether there are limited possibilities in music as a whole.
The individual factors/characteristics of music are limited and therefore manifest into limited workable combinations (songs).
The article I link to “The Big Niche” is a three minute read and tries to explain the concept in totality if you have the time. I’m enjoying this back and forth.
That’s an interesting idea, and yes I’m still thinking through the idea myself. But couldn’t the lack of popularity of a genre could be caused by the slowdown in release of substantial new works? Declining quality leads to less popularity?
I’m thinking of it in terms of the idea that “you can’t reinvent the wheel.” Each song or style is a concept that once created can’t be recreated, and in the case of art it loses its freshness eventually.
I think it works at the level of a single band or artist as well. Take AC/DC for example. They released most of their “classic” material in the 70s and 80s. They continued to release albums through the 90s and 2000s, but the songwriting didn’t seem to be as high of quality to most fans. Is it possible that their specific hard rock / blues rock sound had a limit to how many “great” songs they could write and they exhausted them by the 90s? Could that be a microcosm of music as a whole having a limit of styles and great songs that are eventually completed?
Sure, I didn’t mean to take a narrow view of music, just to narrowly examine “newness” in music, which is a different question. I agree that music serves many purposes besides pop consumption of new songs or works. That is something I would want to explore further at some point.
I was aiming to understand the metaphysical question: is there is a limit to newness in music, and if so what does that imply about our universe? Could examining that question give us greater clarity in understanding the limits of other discovery or creation?
Interesting points, yea you’re getting at the heart of what I’m trying to figure out. I think you’re right, that it’s easy to see how the story possibilities that use the simplest story types (Hero’s Journey, etc) have possibly been ~90% completed.
But what makes you think that more complex story types allow many more possibilities? Along the lines of your point, Game of Thrones is a fantasy epic with a much darker tone that breaks storytelling conventions, but wouldn’t any fantasy epic series with similar attributes in the future seem less groundbreaking than Game of Thrones? I agree that you could apply similar attributes to a Sci Fi epic series, or another type of series, but it seems like that type of story would begin to get old in the near future as well. On the television front, there are so many shows being created that it’s hard to see how they can keep being groundbreaking.
With arty / more complex films like Being John Malkovich or Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine (I’m a fan of those Kaufman movies), does complexity lead to more possibilities of these types of movies or less? There seems to be a slowdown in more arty / complex stories this decade (than compared to the 90′s for example).
With film and television creation being more democratized than ever, I don’t see a reason why the creation of these type of films would slow down apart from the remaining stories requiring more complexity and skill to write than ever. I think we agree on the necessity of higher skill in writing currently. But, it seems to me that a slowdown in the category of non-traditional or unique stories would mean that we are running out of those story possibilities as well.
The reason that I bring up classical and jazz, is that there has been a clear slowdown in meaningful additions to the genres over the past few decades. So, if music genres reach a limit of possibilities, then it seems likely to apply to other areas of art as well.
Yes, I agree that there are more intelligent (or less simple) stories that haven’t been written yet. I’m not sure if you are saying that you agree that there is a limit of possible stories, or that you think there is no limit? If there is a limit, what do you think would be the signs that we are reaching it?
I would agree that it seems from intuition that there are a lot of available stories still left to be written, but what would explain the slowdown in original properties being created or finding an audience currently (than in previous decades)?
Yes, you’re definitely right about reboots reflecting the preference of customers. But what leads to shifts in movie customer preferences?
It seems to me that movie audiences want to see a combination of newer, bigger, and better. A movie that doesn’t seem like a new story, or a similar story but a bigger scale, or a similar story told better, doesn’t seem to interest audiences in general. It’s that feeling of “I’ve seen all of this before.”
Is there a limit to how many new stories we can create, how big in scale the stories are, and how well we can tell the stories? Marvel / Star Wars / Disney are having massive success retelling similar stories but in larger scale and with better CGI and technology than before. How can they keep getting bigger or better indefinitely though?
(This is besides other current market factors like a larger international audience which has its own preference for movies which changes demand for certain types of films. Also I don’t mean that we will every stop making movies, just that it will be clear to us that the most significant films are in the past at some point.)
Are we running out of new music/movies/art from a metaphysical perspective?
There continues to be too large of a magnet for psychological studies to “prove something interesting” so the study can become newsworthy. If that motivation comes into the picture, then there will obviously be some effect on the researcher’s work. Whether the magnitude is as serious as some studies have shown, the replication crisis in psychology is a clear problem. Of course there are many academics not focused on discovering a pop-psych finding, but the pop-psych urge can’t be helping the field as a whole.
Aside from the idea of ego depletion, it is clear that some people are able to include more future-thinking calculation in their decision-making than others, but it’s not clear that someone can improve this attribute.
These are good points. I agree with you that we can view songs within a “song-space”, but I think that specific points (songs) of a certain value or effect on humans are actually very sparse in the song-space. I can strum a few random chords, record it, and call it a song, but that is very different from the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”. If you take all the factors that comprise a song, it is only very specific combinations that turn out to be songs that have a strong effect on people. So the song-space would be large, but the specific points would be limited and sparse.
I think you bring up a good problem that it is hard to make judgments based on observations currently in music—it’s hard to say for sure while new music is still being created. I do think that all music is closer than we think to completion, with the current popular genres of rap, pop, electronic etc being the final genres to be substantially completed. I predict that in the next 5-10 years, it will become more evident that music as a whole has reached a point where all of the most significant songs are in the past. Only time will tell to some extent. Even then I think it won’t be clear to most people until we have experienced decades of lack of musical progress.
Thanks for your thoughts by the way.