I think I was comparing the communists' desire to level everything to the claim that everyone can be creative/talented which is similarly levelling. It's one of those nicey nicey christiany type views such as that everyone is equal.

i can say a few things.
i can see repetition and regression in music, but it is mostly in mainstream shitty bands. and yeh, it's a pain in the arse to the NME or Pitchfork to wank about something saying how innovative they think it is when it's clearly not nor even interesting, but it's their nature.... they pick the bands, they make a big deal about them, they forget about them and write again about another.

still, in the 'underground'(in it's good connotation of this term) scene you can still find pretty interesting shit..

the only problem is that the mainstream music media cant find any interesting bands that sound remotely different to any random myspace music artist... but again that's not the only way to get music.

How can you prove something like that? If anything, with the amount of art being produced at the moment, you can clearly tell that's not the case. Easily.

Also, talent is not the same thing as one's own personal taste, so it's not really diffcult to tell who has it and who doesn't. You might not like Jimi Hendrix's music and find him inferior to other guitarists, but it would be insane to state that he didn't have talent.

I think that Brian Jonestown Massacre are better at playing like the Rolling Stones than the Rolling Stones are.

I can't. It's a belief.

More to the point, how can you prove, or quantify, just how much art is being produced in the world right now?

"creative talent is in everyone" is a pipe dream.

we are all different, with different innate aptitudes.

in the sense that humans are by and large creative animals, then yes, all humans have a creative potential in them, but defined as actual creativity, the ability to create something new, not many humans have that,

What is the purpose of knowing exactly how much of it is produced right now, anyway? It doesn't take a scientist to to tell that there is much more of it than before, or else why do you think discussions of this kind appear on so many forums or printed stuff regularly?

I'm not sure how we went from talking about the original topic of the thread to this but it seems that it's struck a similar rock that effectively halted the 'Jimi Hendrix' thread a year or so ago. The problem is that people are talking about words like talent, art and creativity when none of these terms have any really definable and consistent meaning (at least within the context of what we're talking about here). Until we know what being creative actually is how can we possibly tell whether or not we're all capable of it?

I think time is the ultimate judge in all this, even though a combination of time + exposure is what really defines the legacy of a work of art. In saying that, it's also true that time without exposure puts brilliants works of art in the shade, so stuff that might have had bigger impact remains unseen/unheard.

To get back to the question on the first post, I don't think bands only form with the idea of replicating things from the past, some people are propense to play that way and are succesful at pulling it off because they have sincere motivations and talent to back them up, others do it because the want to get rich on the back of a style of music they see as the prominent revival of the day, therefore an almost guaranteed cash cow, so they end up sounding lame.

Indeed. Although I tend to disagree with things being 'ahead of their time' some things can attain a new kind of relevance (albeit only coincidentally). Look at the way in which, for example, the events of 9/11 have inspired a surge of interest in Islamic art within the Western art establishment. This has nothing to do with any innate quality within the art itself so much as it suddenly seeming more relevant to our time than it did, say, ten years ago - when such exhibitions were far more rare than they are now.

As such, Islamic Art is now being taken seriously (a good thing) in a way that it probably wouldn't have been the case had events not transpired in the way they did (a bad thing).

My point is that the exposure (or not) of different kinds of art is dependent on the contingencies of history far more than it is issues of 'greatness' ... whatever that may be.


I think you can look at that on a more individual level. I think some people feel comforted by the past and quite disturbed by the present. Equally there are people who find the past something they want to flee from and so put a special emphasis on the present. this can often be the result of issues in their private life (a tramp probably has a far rosier view of the past than someone who had a bad childhood, for example - and vice versa). I think it's fair to say that anyone who fetishes either the past or the present ends up compromising the potential scope of their creativity as a result - nostalgia being just as great a crime against the making of art as neophilia (I think).

This thread is making me claustrophobic. Everything is relative, unmeasurable, and pointless. We're all alone and we're all fucked. End of discussion.

Talent, creativity and practice have nothing to do with music. It's all about being sexy and bad-ass. You can't teach someone to have big balls.

You win the thread!

''The diminishment has not, God knows, been quantitative. Never has there been so much product''

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/ar...cott.html?_r=1