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I am moving from the tech world into long form fiction, so I find the intersection of fiction and comments from folks on HN interesting. Definitions matter. To

I am moving from the tech world into long form fiction, so I find the intersection of fiction and comments from folks on HN interesting. Definitions matter. To me, art is emotional impact over time. Good art can impact you emotionally from hundreds of years ago. Bad art doesn't even hold your attention all the way through the presentation. (The impact does not have to be positive or negative; some of the best art can really bum you out) I was watching an interview with an animator a while back. What did he think of all the new cool animation tools? He gushed over the awesome tech and the wonderful talent that's out today. It's amazing and incredible compared to just a few decades ago. Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn't criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way. We have seen this happen to fiction over the last 50-70 years. Even when it's good, it's all kinda the same anymore. It's different and excellent, but in the same ways all fiction is. It's not unusual when experiencing a book or movie to get all hyped up by what you expect the experience to be, to gush while experiencing it how awesome it was, and to have no recollection at all even a month later what was so good about it. If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc. It's all stuff over the past ten years, and it always is. We are in a state of perpetual forgetting and recycling canned emotions. The classics aren't the classics because they're better. They're the classics because they encourage us to create the same level of quality material. Sometimes they do so over our lifetime. This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think most artists see this. But there's a hella lot of denial going on, mostly from folks looking to pump up the next plasticine marketing special effects kabuki dance.

soneca 3y ago
> ” If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc.” I, in general, agree with your perspective, but this example does not follow in my opinion. In particular if you add the expression “the best X of all tine”, then I certainly expected the opposite bias. People will ignore what was done in the past 20 years and go to classics. And if the audience answering the question is people around 20 years old, then I would expect a lot of “I don’t know if all time, but my preferred is…” and then something recent. I.e., I expect humility in the answer and providing an answer from what they know. Which is not, IMO, an effect of marketing or commoditization, but just of the limited time they exist in the Earth.
Frost1x 3y ago
>This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think it's more that the principles of competition in capitalism ultimately tend to lead to converging on one or a very few solutions. In some cases that's good. We want things that are cheap and highly abundant, especially in cases where it works for most the population. Having affordable groceries works very well (let's ignore recent trends of inflation). But I don't think we always want converged solutions, I think there are many cases where as a society we want a lot of diversity, we want a wide selection to choose from, we want that sort of natural redundancy with some variance that occurs. It both helps make life interesting when it comes to things like the arts and in some cases I think having real choice of selection (not the illusion of choice where there are 10 options that are basically identical for all practical purposes) is very useful. There are many cases when things dictated by the mass market aren't what I want/need. I still want an easily swappable battery in a flagship phone as a simple example and expandable memory in the form of SD slots but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with poor alternatives if I want those functions. Or on a more practical note, I'd love to select from various airlines, there's dozens and dozens of them but the fact is I often ride coach and they're all just as crappy and customer hostile as each other. It doesn't matter if you pay just a little more for a ticket, you're out of luck. The tendency for markets to converge on the same price points to remain competitive makes them also converge on the same or similar solutions and that tends to lead to a lack of choice. Maybe consumers need to be willing to not always pay the lowest price for everything but I argue the issue isn't just there, it's systematic because the average consumer is also the average person producing the consumables and the way in which they get resources to consume which dictate to some degree what choices they have and so on and so forth. We seem to just be continuously converging on optimal solutions that don't fit everyone and are slowly fitting a handful of people in power more than anything else.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with.... I keep seeing this phrase again and again on HN. "The market has spoken". Here's the context to which I responded to it earlier [0]. I literally don't think "The Market" exists in the same way that Margaret Thatcher said "There's no such thing as Society". "The Market" has come to represent a conveinient abstraction if you want people to stop thinking and asking deeper questions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048995
nottorp 3y ago
> Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn't criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way. Not only animation. How do you tell tv series from each other? They have like 4 themes with different skins. How do you tell superhero movies from each other? That's what you get when you're happy to 'consume content'.
- DanielBMarkham 3y ago
  When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!" Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings" This was a great feeling! Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it. No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato. And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality. You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity. I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked. My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.
  - 3y ago
cafard 3y ago
The best argument for "over the last 50-70 years" is that we've forgotten the poorer products of 70+ years ago. A recommendation: find a copy of _The Best of S.J. Perelman_ and read the "Cloudland Revisited" pieces, middle-aged re-readings of the movies and popular literature of his youth. Not many of them linger in popular consciousness now.
jncfhnb 3y ago
I hate this argument and thinking. animation today does not all look the same. There’s wider creativity now than ever before. There’s a larger volume of lower quality stuff because it’s cheaper, but art is not defined the median work. Classics are classics because in an era of limited information sharing a much smaller population of works gained recognition and staying power. It’s cool to see that themes are durable. It’s cool and sobering to watch Citizen Kane today and see the frustratingly obvious parallels. But that’s really more of a novelty. If citizen Kane came out today you’d perhaps just roll your eyes at the direct associations to your present day parallels that are now “too obvious”.

soneca 3y ago

> ” If you want to feel sad for art, drop in on a reddit post where somebody asks "What's the best X?" where X can be a book, movie, podcast, etc.” I, in general, agree with your perspective, but this example does not follow in my opinion. In particular if you add the expression “the best X of all tine”, then I certainly expected the opposite bias. People will ignore what was done in the past 20 years and go to classics. And if the audience answering the question is people around 20 years old, then I would expect a lot of “I don’t know if all time, but my preferred is…” and then something recent. I.e., I expect humility in the answer and providing an answer from what they know. Which is not, IMO, an effect of marketing or commoditization, but just of the limited time they exist in the Earth.

Frost1x 3y ago

>This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think it's more that the principles of competition in capitalism ultimately tend to lead to converging on one or a very few solutions. In some cases that's good. We want things that are cheap and highly abundant, especially in cases where it works for most the population. Having affordable groceries works very well (let's ignore recent trends of inflation). But I don't think we always want converged solutions, I think there are many cases where as a society we want a lot of diversity, we want a wide selection to choose from, we want that sort of natural redundancy with some variance that occurs. It both helps make life interesting when it comes to things like the arts and in some cases I think having real choice of selection (not the illusion of choice where there are 10 options that are basically identical for all practical purposes) is very useful. There are many cases when things dictated by the mass market aren't what I want/need. I still want an easily swappable battery in a flagship phone as a simple example and expandable memory in the form of SD slots but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with poor alternatives if I want those functions. Or on a more practical note, I'd love to select from various airlines, there's dozens and dozens of them but the fact is I often ride coach and they're all just as crappy and customer hostile as each other. It doesn't matter if you pay just a little more for a ticket, you're out of luck. The tendency for markets to converge on the same price points to remain competitive makes them also converge on the same or similar solutions and that tends to lead to a lack of choice. Maybe consumers need to be willing to not always pay the lowest price for everything but I argue the issue isn't just there, it's systematic because the average consumer is also the average person producing the consumables and the way in which they get resources to consume which dictate to some degree what choices they have and so on and so forth. We seem to just be continuously converging on optimal solutions that don't fit everyone and are slowly fitting a handful of people in power more than anything else.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
> but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with.... I keep seeing this phrase again and again on HN. "The market has spoken". Here's the context to which I responded to it earlier [0]. I literally don't think "The Market" exists in the same way that Margaret Thatcher said "There's no such thing as Society". "The Market" has come to represent a conveinient abstraction if you want people to stop thinking and asking deeper questions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048995

nottorp 3y ago

> Then he said something very interesting. After making sure folks realized he wasn't criticizing all modern animation, he said that he thought it all kind of looked the same. It was all perfect, and all perfect in the same way. Not only animation. How do you tell tv series from each other? They have like 4 themes with different skins. How do you tell superhero movies from each other? That's what you get when you're happy to 'consume content'.

DanielBMarkham 3y ago
When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!" Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings" This was a great feeling! Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it. No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato. And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality. You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity. I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked. My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.
- 3y ago

cafard 3y ago

The best argument for "over the last 50-70 years" is that we've forgotten the poorer products of 70+ years ago. A recommendation: find a copy of _The Best of S.J. Perelman_ and read the "Cloudland Revisited" pieces, middle-aged re-readings of the movies and popular literature of his youth. Not many of them linger in popular consciousness now.

jncfhnb 3y ago

I hate this argument and thinking. animation today does not all look the same. There’s wider creativity now than ever before. There’s a larger volume of lower quality stuff because it’s cheaper, but art is not defined the median work. Classics are classics because in an era of limited information sharing a much smaller population of works gained recognition and staying power. It’s cool to see that themes are durable. It’s cool and sobering to watch Citizen Kane today and see the frustratingly obvious parallels. But that’s really more of a novelty. If citizen Kane came out today you’d perhaps just roll your eyes at the direct associations to your present day parallels that are now “too obvious”.