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LM: #313: The last great…
The last great painting was a black canvas.
Painting was really exciting during the Impressionists’ movement, which gave way to cubism, then abstract expressionism. Once Mark Rothko painted a canvas black, everything interesting that could be said with paint on a canvas had been said.
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You can still be a painter today, and even make a living, but you aren’t going to rock the world with a canvas.
There’s been a last great marble sculpture, a last great Catholic cathedral, and a last great radio program.
You can still be a sculptor, a church architect, or a radio host, but the chances you’ll do anything significant in those media are nil.
The time to make your mark in a medium is while there’s still something to be explored within its qualities and constraints.
I wonder what other last greats we’ve already seen. For example, the past sixty-ish years we’ve been recording music with such fidelity it could’ve been recorded yesterday, so why listen to The Weeknd when there’s Michael Jackson? Maybe we’ve heard the last great pop song.
Language, ideas, and human thought at-large seem like such complex systems, it’s hard to imagine a last great idea, or story. But much of what you think could probably be found in the corpus of Aristotle or Buddha, Gilgamesh or Homer. But maybe we have or, through LLMs, soon will encounter those last greats.
This isn’t to say you can’t adapt old ideas to new things and have influence and gain attention. If Robert Johnson were recorded with the same fidelity as Fleetwood Mac, the lyrics would still sound from the 1930s, so there’s still room to sing about being the throat goat or whatever.
But if you really want to have a chance at doing paradigm-shifting work, some places are easier than others.
If you can, stay away from where we’ve already seen a last great.
Aphorism: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify…into every corner of our minds.” —John Maynard Keynes
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Best,
David
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