andrewducker | (no subject)

What's interesting, to me, is that the media we have now will never die.  Every year there are a few more pieces of art that are 'classics'.  And we'll always have those to watch/read/listen to/experience.

I have a season of West Wing, one of Six Feet Under, the complete Reginald Perrin, all of This Life and a whole host of other tv waiting to be watched.  Once the whole backlog of TV is available to us on a demand basis, there's almost no need to make any more.

There's no musical genre that someone somewhere isn't churning more out of.  Once something's been created it never dies.  Once you find your taste tribe(s) you'll never run out of recommendations.

Every year more and more art is produced that's a rehash of a previous style, less and less is produced that's in any way original.  Is this because we've explored most of the phase space of human experience?  Has everything from monobloc simplicity to stories so postmodern they seem to be pure static now been attempted?  Is all that's left finetuning?

Or will some other genre pop up next week that makes everyone wonder how we ever lived without it?

Something to look forward to, I guess.

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There will always be a market for new shows/movies, because existing ones always eventually become noticeably outdated... out of style. Even when they're very good, they eventually reflect a bygone past, and people still want to see shows reflecting aspects of their current world, not only of things gone by. Even the idea of something being "new" sometimes makes it preferable to something "old", even when the old one is a classic, and when the new isn't even good enough to ever become a classic.

For music too, old stuff can be very good, yet in one's mind, just knowing that it is old may make it seem to lack the vibrancy of something which was created recently. It may make one feel that one is wallowing in ancient history, a history which no one can really touch anymore and which can't touch one back... as opposed to touching/hearing/feeling something current, something which has the Power of Now... knowing that the people who created the music are still around, making even newer music... knowing that there will be change...

Yup, what he/she said.

I once loved Butterflies, Poldark, Blakes' Seven, Tom baker era Dr Who to name but a few - but if you see them now they look slow and badly produced and silly with bad hair and awful clothes - good for nostalgia but not much else.

Our cutting edge tv will look the same in, oh, five years tops I expect. This is probably even truer of naturalistic dram a than sf/historical, I suspect.

I am also one of these people who likes to pick up new music as it arises and rarely plays "back catalogue". we're not all compulsive collectors/archivists y'know :-)