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McLuhan, Shirky, Postman, or someone(s) like that, wrote about how original ideas catch on and get endlessly repeated, transmuting the sublime into the banal. I

McLuhan, Shirky, Postman, or someone(s) like that, wrote about how original ideas catch on and get endlessly repeated, transmuting the sublime into the banal. It's inevitable. (Just like all accusations of "selling out".) Examples given were the Mona Lisa painting and the yin-yang symbol. IIRC, I read a bunch of this media criticism (alarmism) stuff during dial-up era (post PC, pre Web). Their warning was that digital reproduction would accelerate the process, up-end our notions of intellectual property, swap all the gatekeepers for a new set of goons, etc. I'm ambivalent. The more things change, the samer they get. For my part, I sort of adapted, adopting a pseudo Beginner's Mind viewpoint, to accept and sometimes embrace a creative work both for what is and what it was. One example. I try to remain ignorant before viewing art and then back filling the context afterwards. I was totally unimpressed by Rothko. Then got into a (friendly) debate that revealed my puerile closed-mindedness. Then binged on his ideas and works. Now I think he was and remains brilliant. Also, I don't think the replication banality apocalypse actually happened. Just the opposite. Contemporary music (for one) has never been more exciting to me. Today's artists are creating works my generation only fantasized about. Sure, Sturgeon's Law is timeless. But today's best works are just as good or better than ever. And we somehow both lowered the barriers to entry and raised the ceiling. (There's probably a bigger lesson in there somewhere.... Hmmm.) Any way. Thanks for reading this far. TLDR: Arguments about culture are unending. Just roll with it.

noirbot 3y ago
I'm not even thinking about it as a matter of arguments over if the book is good or such, just the interesting phenomenon of different sorts of art. I find some works to be singular in ways where even if they're emulated, the original still has distinct power. Rothko's chapel in Houston is a good example of one where there's a specificity to the original that would be hard to emulate. Same with many great works of architecture. What I'm thinking of is more like records in athletics. It's hard to appreciate how good a sprinter was in 1950 when their world record time wouldn't even qualify for a college track meet these days. Even if you mentally understand how good they were, and how what got them to that level set the groundwork for what's making people so much faster now, it still looks like someone running fairly slowly. In some ways, it's a sort of artistic Eternal September.

noirbot 3y ago

I'm not even thinking about it as a matter of arguments over if the book is good or such, just the interesting phenomenon of different sorts of art. I find some works to be singular in ways where even if they're emulated, the original still has distinct power. Rothko's chapel in Houston is a good example of one where there's a specificity to the original that would be hard to emulate. Same with many great works of architecture. What I'm thinking of is more like records in athletics. It's hard to appreciate how good a sprinter was in 1950 when their world record time wouldn't even qualify for a college track meet these days. Even if you mentally understand how good they were, and how what got them to that level set the groundwork for what's making people so much faster now, it still looks like someone running fairly slowly. In some ways, it's a sort of artistic Eternal September.