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

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.