> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.
I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?
This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is.
Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?
And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't blame the books, it's just what captures my particular interest. Given that, I have never really used "the classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I may receive, whether they be old books or new.
I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick: chug the book. You were probably trained to really analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory experience instead.
I read both twice, once in high school and again a few years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the ultimate lesson.
Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today, stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem.
Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.
I visit libraries wherever I go and that's not true anymore, outside of university libraries. The average municipal/county library is almost entirely books published in the past 15 years. Most classics have to be procured through ILL, if they're even available then.
> That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way.
As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.
I would love to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play the classical music in "What's Opera, Doc?" and other Looney Tunes classics. Saw them do that with The Godfather and a couple other full-length films which was great.
>This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
> This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written.
It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).
Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No.
Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music.
I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
I’d add to that that classical music was made at a time recording and listening whatever you want, whenever and wherever, wasn’t a thing.
Many pieces were intended as a whole, and optimised for specific settings.
I’ve long thought I wasn’t an opera person. I listened to pieces of some on my iPod, or on the tv in music class in school. Then, years later, some friend told me he had extra tickets for the opera.
It hit very, very differently. It is likely the experiences I had gone through since school helped the opera’s theme and songs resonate with me. But I’m pretty sure listening and witnessing it, from beginning to end, in a room carefully crafted for this specific purpose and left little room for distractions contributed immensely.
I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list.
All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable. This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they have plenty, but they register as little more than noise to my brain; to which i prefer silence...
That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also missed this point:
> compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most complex pieces of art ever made.
I guess anything is arguable, but I think it would be pretty difficult to make a very good argument that GTA V is one of the most complex pieces of art ever made. I mean, first we’d have to define a piece of art, then we’d have to define what it “complexity” means in that context…
Eh, he’s right though. You could get sidetracked quibbling about the edges of the definitions, or you could just use their centers and see that there obviously are some modern works of art that are immense team efforts and substantially justify the label of “one of the most complex pieces of art ever”.
Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical for different reasons
But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western music.
That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
Counterpoint is cool, but a lot of the time is carries the emotional weight of listening to someone solve sudoku.
Objectively, Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling you get when you drink too much and get kicked out of the party (a foundational principal of Country Western music)
> Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling
For a wide range of such feelings, some can regard as "lonely", as they develop, achieve a triumph, a catharsis, and finally a recapitulation and a comforting, secure resolution -- communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, i.e., art.
Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure that most serious listeners will venture to music from all kind of eras and cultures.
I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music".
She's a good pop musician. No need to be snarky just because she might not be your thing. Comments on HM tend to put down popular music / art / whatever for the sole reason of having some kind of pop sensibility
So, with the definition of art as the
"communication, interpretation of human
experience, emotion" what I saw in those
two pieces was that they were intended for
some teen girls and young women -- single,
lonely, generally afraid of their
circumstances, don't understand what they
see of reality, eager for sex but afraid
of it, lost, i.e., missing any good
cultural, social, or intellectual
foundation for understanding reality or
facing life, ....
So in the music, the costumes and stage
shows are rapidly changing, outrageous,
meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e., are
communication, interpretation of those
women's experience, emotions, rapidly
changing, outrageous ....
In simple terms, those women have
circumstances that yield strong emotions
that the music communicates.
"Communicates"? Why? As common, to the
audience comfortingly confirms that they
are not alone and instead like many
others.
How could this be? In the past the women
lived in a culture based on strong social,
practical, economic, religious, parenting
forces. Now (1) for millions of those
women the culture is weak or gone and (2)
the Internet permits getting confirming,
reinforcing communication, interpretation
of their scary circumstances from the loss
of the culture.
In short, the music really is
communication, interpretation of the
experience and emotions of those women.
To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much
the same, i.e., similar audience, but
Chappell Roan is stronger, louder, more
outrageous for an audience with stronger
emotions.
As a young man, the teen girls I knew,
right, had the anxieties from their
circumstances but much more constrained
and less scary than now.
The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the
sets, costumes, dancing, and words and
take just the background music (a lot of
drum beating) and the singing. In places,
the singing is pretty good, i.e.,
expressive, but really the singing, as
art, is all nearly the same, that is, the
same vocal content for the same
communication, interpretation of
experience and emotion.
I expect that even the current devoted
audience will soon, a year or so, give up
on the current Chappell Roan -- for a
cruel joke, "A one trick pony.".
From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven
and Brahms ... Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ...,
Barber there is a lot of effective
communication, interpretation of a wide
range of experiences, emotions, that is,
really good art.
For level 101, a major key is glad and a
minor key, sad. Then changing keys,
selected chords within keys, pitch,
volume, variety of sounds from the variety
of instruments, combinations, ..., give a
lot more tools for expression than used by
Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a lot more
music, art.
Next, the tools were just means, and Bach,
Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good
in the artistic content, that is, again,
communication, interpretation of human
experience emotion.
Yeah this is ridiculous. One of the songs you posted has a key change so if you're saying a key change is fundamental for expression you're clearly not listening hard enough. You also didn't do a great job trying to explain the appeal of it, likely because you don't like it, as you will never be able to capture the fire like someone who does, so it just comes across as condescending. As well, likening her to "Taylor Swift but Louder" further shows your lack of knowledge about pop theory and history.
The rapidly moving pace of the music and performances in those two performances (2 of her hits, of course they're intense) is because she believes those were the more interesting/economical choices at the time. any inferences you make about the women who listen to it are purely based on your personal idea of what you decide women are thinking about on a given day.
Taylor Swift did well understanding the emotions of teen girls, so well that lots of teen girls, not just in the US, begged their fathers and got ~$1000 for a ticket to a Swift concert, and Swift ended up worth ~$1 billion.
It also helped that with good makeup and a good photographer, she had one of the prettiest faces of any human female. She also had a near perfect figure. So, her audience could identify with those. Likely even more important, were her stories of love gained/lost.
I'm a man and so don't much like Swift's art, but the ~$1 billion got me to try to explain her success.
For any men here slow to figure this out and take it seriously, a lot of teen girls and young women have some strong emotions, and art that communicates and interprets those emotions to those teens/women can be very welcome, so welcome to generate ~$1 billion.
I did spend enough time with teen girls and young women to understand a little about their strong emotions.
On key changes in music, the Bach piece in the URL I gave starts in D minor, has central section on D major, and has the final third a lot like the first section and also in D minor.
When I was playing it on violin, I liked the D major section the best. There are some triplets, and I played them insistently, maybe not the best interpretation -- the URL doesn't do that. Maybe I tried the interpretation from a Heifetz performance.
The piece is also sometimes played on guitar. Waiting for a concert to start, a guitarist sat next to composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and said "The Bach Chaconne sure is difficult to play." The composer, a man of few words, said nothing until the end of the concert and then replied "The Bach Chaconne is the greatest piece of music ever written."
Oh, the URL I gave is a full orchestra arrangement of the Chaconne.
If pop music is that good, I'll be glad to listen to it!
> Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.”
Actually, no! It's more of “relevance to the state of the world as it was right then, and as it is right now, and that teaches you that we are not living in bizarre times, but then we just don't know enough about ourselves as a society and we keep committing the same errors.”
The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime.
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and feather the conductor.
I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two pieces suck?
(I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.)
I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric.
A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains.
Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
There is no two octaves below a regular bass guitar. On a 5 string bass, the lowest string is B0 in standard tuning, coming in at 30hz. You can get a long scale length bass and put really chonky strings on it and drop that down as low as E0, which is 20hz, but past that point most people just can't hear the notes anymore.
> he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele.
As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are:
* length
* mass/length
* tension
There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension.
But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
Life is the ultimate test. We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others. There may be nothing more humbling than being confronted with our own ignorance, except when we have an audience.
I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can’t vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable string beyond the last point of contact with the strings, and that contact could be released to increase the string length?.
You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two different string gauges. The top four could be heavier gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate gauges and silence the strings? I don’t know much about playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not be such a big deal if he’s the only one playing it, but if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
It might also be possible to teach him how to build simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in post-processing once you know how the parts fit conceptually together.
Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a good post for HN if you can find the time.
Get him a multiscale/fanned fret 5 string bass and just size up the gauges. A 37" scale bass trying to hit E0 will need about 0.18ga on the low string to be playable, which will definitely require a nut modification, but is doable.
There was once a company making a bass ukulele with inch-thick polymer strings. Playing them was kind of hilarious, and would be fun to see it scaled up to the size of an actual bass guitar... Probably someone has done it...
I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
It had to be removed from the fair early because it was drawing dangerously large crowds. [1] If art moves people, Comedian was an undeniably literal success.
Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant.
Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
> If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that
I didn't.
> what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus
If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning?
Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens of art towards technical and political measurements. When a work is incomparable in the way in which it achieves verisimilitude it is escaping this system.
You are basically talking about the part where the system is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good automatically.
There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's the measure that matters most in your unique and finite life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your time on, objectivity be damned.
Is there an article (so you don't have to write an essay) that explains what you mean here? I don't think I'm familiar with the short hand point you're making here. I understand the terms rent seeking and familiar with the argument made in the quote fwiw.
Are you honestly tell me that you would let someone correct you on a matter of taste? That an authority could tell you, "no, you're wrong for enjoying this piece of art. It's bad and you ought to dislike it," and you would obey?
If so, you're a dupe. Trust your own taste. That's the first step to connoisseurship.
> I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.
For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the "new thing".
Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
To note, books have a different networks: they can get movie/TV/game adaptions and get pushed to the news forefront, their author can also play the SNS game.
There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how tougher than other media it is.
I heard a joke that you don't write a political book for people to read, you write it so you can go on all the talk shows to be interviewed about your book.
That is of course not a joke at all depending on the field. It's kinda like being published in prestigious papers.
While specialists and enthusiasts will enjoy and peek at the content, being recognized as someone who writes about the subject and can be presented as an expert of the field can absolutely be the main impact for the author.
I don't think that's true at all, plenty of my friends has some kind of aversion to "old" music because they could not "get" the aesthetic.
Plus I'm sure most people are sick of Fur Elise.
More “evergreen” genres like classical, jazz, soundtracks, and also stuff by established artists? Surely!
But pop music recordings get “too dated” quite fast for the mainstream and mainstream audiences. This kinda keeps Spotify and Radio charts fresh and newer artists make some money. IMO of course!
EDIT: Wait! One thing however where you’re right and I’m wrong is with live concerts. Today older legacy acts compete and often surpass attendance of newer acts.
Yeah I would say books got it worse, there's a strong tradition of re-arranging old classics in new music, e.g.: kamasi washington remaking clair de lune. so listening to old pieces are not only rewarding, it's even necessary.
And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably available for free from the library's DVD collection?
I feel a reader or a music lover is more likely to delve into the past than a gamer or movie watcher. I cant remember meeting anyone that was put off by the age of a book or a song, but have recommended games and movies to hardcore gamers and self labelled cinephiles and they were written off immediately due to age.
eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
> What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI?
That's a tough question? Going to college and taking on debt no longer looks like a good choice. What to learn that won't be heavily devalued in four years?
and the author of course is only sampling a very tiny dataset of the works pushed by the algorithm. Many authors like me will never get on their radar.
The authors of those works (Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov) were greatly influenced by Greek classics, Milton, Shakespeare, or their contemporaries (such as Charles Dickens) who were also shaped by some of those same sources.
> At this moment, there are not even any famous literary fiction writers (much less geniuses) in the United States of America under the age of 65.
> Literary fiction peaked on the charts in the 1950s and 1960s and was quite present before then. There was a sustained decline from the 1970s onward.
Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary environment. How could we expect them to compete with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded or read?
> Authors under the age of 65 grew up in an impoverished literary environment. How could we expect them to compete with those whose imaginations were formed when culture was more uniformly attuned to what has been considered great throughout the centuries? What books did Austen, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky grow up with, or learn in school, that are no longer widely regarded or read?
You are operating under the asumption that the issue is authors. I think the issue is the readership. Great books are still being written. They are just not widely read anymore.
The problem is that it's easier to mindlessly scroll through Instagram or watch meaningless YouTube videos than take the time to read a book. There are large teams dedicated to ensuring this stays so and that these products are as addictive as they can be.
We, as a society, have apparently decided that it's acceptable to turn a large part of the population into idiots to sell more detergents. It's sad but at least we are selfdestructing through global warming so the problem will have an end.
That is the hypothesis that the author debunks in the second half of the article - that there are no readers any more because smartphones.
And they debunk it by pointing out that classic literary fiction is still being read, it's just contemporary literary fiction that isn't being read (and then they go on to hypothesise that it's this very attitude that is killing contemporary literary fiction readership).
I find it ironic that your comment laments the inability of readers to actually read, while failing to actually read the article that you're commenting on.
> And they debunk it by pointing out that classic literary fiction is still being read
Not at all.
Classic fiction is still far out of the most sold books nowadays which is entirely non fiction. That’s in the first half of the article by the way so I might not be the one with reading comprehension issue. I can somehow excuse you because the article author constantly confuses fiction and non fiction readership and fails to comprehend what should be seen in absolute numbers and when proportion actually matters for most of the article.
To address specifically the unconvincingly point that classic sell in absolute numbers, this should be unsurprising to anyone who has gone to school: contrary to modern fiction classics are actually studied and are part of various curriculum.
The other points against the influence of internet (and television before) are equally empty and hinge on a confusion between absolute number of readers (stable) and actual readers of serious fiction (vanishing).
I have little interest in actually commenting the virtues of the article to be frank - it’s garbage. The author opinion that postmodern authors are somehow written for critics is laughable. It’s so devoid of substance. It ignores both the actual critical consensus around those books when they were written (far from universal praise) and what they contain. The rest of the arguments are barely better sadly. And let’s not talk about what the article entirely fails to address: the rise of YA, book tok, the modern fiction bestsellers from Crichton to Dan Brown, the impact of movie adaptation (ever heard of Harry Potter, yes me too).
Anyway, I was merely replying to the comment above mine.
I had to look it up but mark Z Danielewski (author of House of Leaves) is 59 years old, doesn't push back the age very far though. For a 55-year-old they'd be 10 in 1985, I imagine they'd be more influenced by Star Wars, Brazil, and The Breakfast Club, than Her or We and go on to write Severance, Fleabag, or Atlanta than Heart of Darkness or 1984.
This might prove too much, particularly for the case of literature. There were people writing commercially successful and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes, plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think there’s books published in the last 50 years that deserves a place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don’t think it has much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being published at that time.
This reason doesn’t seem to be correct. Why do we have so many YouTube videos published that still garner views? Why TV shows? We still make culturally relevant movies every year. Why?
Books don’t need to compete with all previous books but just have to be culturally relevant now.
I agree. I've often thought about this via a thought experiment : How much money would it take for you to agree not to consume any new instance of a particular media type? In other words, you're offered fifty thousand dollars (or some other non-trivial but not outrageous amount of money) and in agreement you won't read a book released after June 2025.
Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new technology will result in some new classics in the coming years - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.
This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of an issue.
There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now.
Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.
Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and chances are high that it is all old stuff.
It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a Mario game really top Super Mario World? Not to say some later games aren't fun, but Persona 6 could only really top Persona 5 by being something really different, and if it was different it wouldn't be Persona 6.
Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any 16-bit or earlier game.
Video games are stagnating hard. I've basically quit gaming for like the past 5 years, playing maybe two graphically undemanding games to completion per year, and what I'm seeing is that it's the same old games that have remained popular. From my perspective as someone coming back, it's as if time had stood still. In fact, one of the games I played was initially released 10 years ago in early access.
Bethesda even decided to just remake Oblivion rather than show off more of TES 6.
That might be true about the time period from the SNES to the present but it's not clear to me that we're really getting better games post the PS3.
I have Persona 5 Royal on my mind because I am playing through it now maybe a decade after I played Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art, but the music isn't up there with P4G (how can you beat Reach out or Make history?) and I think it's a disappointment as a game.
Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with the characters and raise your social stats but practically you're not required to make hard choices because you have enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough which stretches out the game even longer.
It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.
Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can make a storefront in Horizon Worlds but you need to have a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one person.
We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the industry has become incredibly risk-averse and realized there's more profit to be made releasing sequels and remakes than producing something innovative. That being said, that's not a sustainable strategy and we are seeing the limits of that.
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
I think that's more a function of the games you are playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona, whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music, it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily comparable.
>Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games.
Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to funding something that really pushes the line due to the sheer risk involved.
There will always be exceptions to any trends, but I wouldn't say the deluge of generic roguelike platformers with 16 bit art has been paticularly flattering to the indie industry. Have things really progressed in 2024 since 2012 in the same way that 2012 was abjectly different from 2002? Not really, you could release Slay the Spire in 2012 or 2024 and it wouldn't look out of place.
They mostly seem interested in JRPG anime slop, and even then Expedition 33 was released just this year and is probably the best example of that genre from the last 20 years? That's also by a relatively small studio though..
I would agree that big AAA studios are basically entirely creatively bankrupt at this point, but that's not exclusive to games, the same trend is apparent with movies (remakes of Disney movies, Star Wars sequels, etc.).
>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.
You can try Etrian Odyssey series by Atlus. It's all about status ailments, binds, buffs and debuffs.
> Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction" since the beginning
Hard disagree. Dialogue is a strength of interactive fiction. Dialogue trees are unique to the medium. Titles like Firewatch,Night in the Woods, and Disco Elysium are all-time great examples of dialogue writing. I'd love to see interactive fiction that put more emphasis on internality instead; in that dimension, Disco Elysium really stands alone.
> maybe LLMs will change that
LLM-generated dialogue is only ever going to waste your time. Good dialogue is expressive and clever and characteristic and dense, none of which describe anything I've seen from an LLM. You'd be better-off just reading the prompt.
To be fair, Persona 5 is my least favorite out of 3/4/5. Most fans of the series agree it's embarrassingly easy. Persona 3 (Portable is best, or FES if you're a masochist, but not Reloaded) offers a perfect challenge on the hardest difficulty, and Persona 4 was pretty well-tuned also. It wouldn't surprise me if P6 was closer to P4 or P3 than P5.
There are mods for Skyrim that hook into LLMs for dialogue and voice, some people seem to like it but from the videos I've seen I'd call it more of a curiosity or an experience than an engaging system.
I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).
While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.
I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of creating more of what exists already.
Video Games were immune for a while because technology was changing so fast, but in the last decade or so its become really clear players don't care nearly as much about graphics as they used to.
People will quite happily pickup and play games from many years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made before they were born.
Oblivion is nearly 20 years old now and looked terrible at the time. (compared to other games that shipped at the time) Oblivion is a _big_ game not a polished game.
update: I found this screenshot and I think I was remembering Morrowinds characters.
Morrowind had very janky animations, but it wasn't too bad for 2002 otherwise. Definitely not top notch, but, well, look at faces in Deus Ex for another example from this period...
Oblivion had those weird faces but was otherwise pretty good actually, especially the lush outdoor environments.
There's a cave in France where somebody started painting a horse and 10,000 years later (but still tens of thousands of years ago) somebody finished it in the exact same style and technique. Novelty isn't required in art though it's currently prized.
Putting aside the issues with manipulated IMDB ratings, look at the volume of Marvel movies ranked equal or better than classics like "Vertigo" or "Lawrence of Arabia".
Film lovers (or perhaps snobs?) feel jaded about recent output. Pop culture dictates that superhero movies are more accessible. The coarsening of culture is a continual, evergreen observation.
> Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
There is a lot of supply, but language change makes existing books impossible to read over time. You're always limited to whatever's been made in the last X years.
The consumption of media is exponential, if you read something good and you expect more from a genre, the number of consumable works quickly dwindles down to the point that you often end up waiting for new works. In the same way, as people get a better understanding of their own preferences, entire subgenres will become less relevant.
That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
Music is a lot easier than visual media or books though. You can listen to new songs daily and have a good knowledge of the last century's music. It's also easy to listen and concentrate while doing something else, like walking or driving. You don't need light either.
Films are a 1-2 hour commitment. A TV series could be anywhere from 10-100 hours. A novella might be a couple of hours, but most people would take at least a day to read a novel. And these need close to 100% attention. Reading all the Hugo winners at a book a week would take 1.5 years, and you've not touched the nominees or books in series.
It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc
You point out the exact reason why I am so blasé about the potential for AI art and (back in the Bush years) rampant piracy to destroy creative fields. Who cares? We already have multiple lifetimes of quality work to enjoy.
This exactly why I push back to people such as Sam Altman making the claim that AI will allow us to create more art, which people want. Do people truly want or need that?
Turns out that most people enjoy the process of creating art themselves, with any tools that are available. It's a nearly universal method of human expression.
This is completely orthogonal to whether anyone else likes that art or finds it valuable.
I've wondered about this with children's books. Classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows are still wildly popular. I can't believe nobody has been able to write anything better since those days. It must exist but I've never managed to find them in the library or know how to find them among the tidal wave of slop. Most of them are very similar and, to me, low quality fluff with no nuanced characters, no rich fantasy worlds, no serious human interactions. 80% of what I can find is just stories about kids playing in their house or dealing with some basic child problems like losing a toy. The other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into children's books. Why do authors crank out so much low-quality crap instead of masterpieces?
IMO, a large part of the appeal of classics is that you know others have also read the book so there will be opportunities to quote from it and share the experience, perhaps for decades to come. In contrast, most recent best sellers disappear off the radar so quickly that the reader knows the opportunity to share them will be ephemeral. This if you can't enjoy the reading experience of a recent work all by yourself, without sharing it with others, then your only hope to share it socially is to join a book club that reads it.
For adult books maybe, but my child often chooses classic stories like those over piles of modern books that we also have. She doesn't know they're popular yet.
I assure you there are more interesting books for children. At least judged by the "do kids actually want to read it" factor. I do not know "The Wind in the Willows", but Alice in Wonderland is not all that interesting. I mean, the philosophy parts were good, but the storyline something to be skipped.
> 80% of what I can find is just stories about kids playing in their house or dealing with some basic child problems like losing a toy.
You are talking about books for very small kids here. At that age, they were not understanding Alice in Wonderland. But, the small ones actually liked those losing a toy books.
> The other 20% is adult political issues shoe-horned into children's books.
Kids books and entertainment was always vehicle for teaching kids rights and wrongs. You have that in Narnia, you have that in Thomas the Tank Engine, you have that in pretty much any Christian kids books. The moralizing ethical aspect is especially clear when you look at older books, because distance makes it all that more apparent.
Even Alice in Wonderland is meant to teach you philosophy first rather then be just a story.
I agree right and wrong is good when it's fundamental enough to bet it'll last their lifetime and isn't simple preaching. But also complex human emotions and interactions are useful and interesting to them. The politics I'm complaining about is far more specific than that and I don't think 3-5 year olds either need it or can understand it - like environmental pollution, punishing capitalists, which ancient battle some holiday commemorates, life story of a specific politician, endangered species, cultural headgear, etc.
My kid seems to prefer choosing classic stories over the piles of modern books we also have.
> A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing
Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
Also there is this factor of new films being able to incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's
another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to make theirs heard.
I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies watering things down. Either way someone is doing it intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain a significant following.
I've found I've stopped watching TV or movies or reading written fiction, but it's because fiction in general has ceased to do something for me. It's as if there's a willing suspension of disbelief needed that I can no longer muster. Fiction comes across to me as inherently false. This seems to transcend the particular political position taken, if any.
> It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack London :)
I think it's due to a general decline into literalness.
I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are basically completely absent from any modern piece of mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and subtlety.
>That may say something about the declining quality of writing.
It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
I know how business and money works. I can say for sure there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group didn't understand this, make the message POP more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are willing to cut a check.
At this point I honestly feel the same about those books as I did later in life when I did that IMDb top 250 in college. I wish I would have read "different" books when growing up. But I guess that's how you go to somewhere — gradually. It's a bit like how I read a lot and if it were not for those not so-literary pulp fiction books and cheap action comics, I would have never picked up reading.
A lot has to do with language in those books. They read as kind of "foundational" and well structured (and I am speaking exclusively about English and Hindi classics, two languages I can read and write in). This gradually takes you on a journey of not only enjoying the language but also learning it. From there, different people branch off in various literary directions, and majority just drops off from the literary journey altogether.
I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.
Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?