Everythingsbeendoneism? Perhaps there is another term I’m not familiar with.
P.S. I don’t personally subscribe to this view, but am just wondering what to call it . . . cultural exhaustion? 🤷♂️
EDIT: I should say that I don’t necessarily subscribe to this view; it kind of depends on what mood I’m in, to what degree I’m projecting my own feelings of old age and fatigue onto the outside world, and so forth.
The older I get, the more things seem to be just new examples of things I’ve seen already. But that’s not to say that those things aren’t worth creating. How many times has the word “the” been used? Doesn’t mean we should stop saying it. Works of art are a form of communication too, and reflect the times and contexts in which they are created.
I don’t really have an answer to your question, I’m commenting because I do subscribe to that belief.
Humanity has been around for thousands of years, more than plenty of time to figure things out and learn and innovate. If we’ve existed as we are for those thousands of years, then wouldn’t it make sense that we’d have figured out all the possible combinations of words and such? There were millions before, but there are billions now; who’s to say not one of those individuals has come up with an entirely new piece of art that’s never been seen, or a sentence that hasn’t been heard before?
Imo it’s a numbers game. Kinda like the infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare.
If I had to coin a term, I’d call it “aesthetic ergodicity”.
As in, a culture that keeps revisiting every combination of aesthetic parameters over and over with no long-term trend.
There’s this, an article from Art in America, which I’m in the process of reading now.
Reductionist?
