The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality or What is Wrong with Modern____
27th May 2009
David Friedman finds the key to modern culture.
It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn’t worth looking at, modern music isn’t worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen’s, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.
Of course, there might be a reason nobody else has used it.