|
|
|
|
|
|
by hakfoo
905 days ago
|
|
|
I question the ability of the market to measure quality. Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality. Even though they made bazillions, will students in the high schools of 2523 be reading through scripts of Friends and Breaking Bad the way we slogged through King Lear and Othello? What makes it to market is already a constrained selection. It has to make it through a bunch of commercial filters (investors and publishers who'd rather do a predictably bankable franchise product over a new whole-cloth one), and then you have the issue of only hearing from those who are financially and physically stable enough to create cultural works in the first place. How many potential writers can't start their novel because they're working three jobs, or hiding for their lives in Gaza? Copyright itself also produces a huge filter by discouraging iterative creativity. It silences people whose talent is building on or expanding existing work. See the guy who is being ordered by the courts to destroy his LOTR derivative product. Perhaps there's a chance to make better Tolkein than Tolkein himself, but we won't know for another 50 years or so. I'd rather we tell artists "go crazy, you're guaranteed 70k per year, whether you make the next Iron Man, or something so avant-garde only six people actually get it, and four of them are just claiming they do to fit in." We'll at least get more diverse products, and let history decide what's meritorious. |
|
|
Thanks for giving us your position; I think I'm generally in agreement with you.
Here though it's good to note that [at least] one type of historic importance develops over time.
Die Hard, to take an arbitrary example, might not have been an important film as far as its art or technical quality [I don't know, it's not important to my point] but its enduring nature and position as an icon -- as a sort of mainstream but somehow counter-cultural part of Christmas for those of us of a certain age and certain bent -- makes it important when otherwise it would not be. It's not intrinsic to the artwork but emerges out of the societal response to the work.
In the UK we've been paying for the BBC to make culturally responsive TV for decades, yet somehow it all got tied back up in copyright when really it should be publicly owned and free-libre to anyone who will pay the download costs [and, perhaps, has a "TV License"].