Comment by kakarot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kakarot | Hacker News Reader

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This is a major factor of the "Ratings Problem" where only 4- and 5-star ratings signify quality which people commonly overlook. [0] I'm only interested in critically acclaimed non-fiction books because anything less and I'm down to the quality I might find in a blog post... Which might still great, but there's the time I allocate for blogs, and the time I allocate for books.

There's a part of me which harbors great sadness over the amount of historical art such as music and games which get completely ignored by the public with its ephemeral tastes. So as a natural reaction I've become an amateur art historian, spending lots of time going back and playing old games (not hard because I grew up on retro), listening to old music, watching old films... then spending time to learn about the people and effort behind these works of art. I even took a film history class.

I have books from the 1600's on my reading list. Some of them require learning another language which at some point I will have to set aside the time to do.

So how the hell am I going to have time to appreciate the cornucopia of art being thrust at me today from all directions?

It seems today you have to make the choice of appreciating the here and now vs appreciating the past. If you aren't an archivist or historian chances are you simply won't have the time to go back and explore.

And that's worrisome, because whereas the pace of masterpieces being released throughout history has been quite slow and manageable, presently I feel like I consume several masterpieces a year across several mediums.

All of this amazing content will be lost forever inside the noosphere, and the fantasy of living forever through your art and contributions to society is becoming more and more unattainable.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1098/

While it may seem new, this has been a problem for a very long time. It’s the same thing Seneca was complaining about when he popularized the phrase “ars longa, vita brevis” back in 1st century Rome. And that wasn’t original either, but a translation of Hippocrates.

It's undeniable that the pace of creation of masterpieces has quickened dramatically at an unprecedented level. It's an entirely new age of creativity that is unlike anything before it and that will continue for millennia. We've crossed some kind of threshold.

"Ars longa, vita brevis" is an amazing quote however, and thank you for sharing that with me.

> It's undeniable that the pace of creation of masterpieces has quickened dramatically at an unprecedented level.

Yes and no. As far as I can tell, the pace of content creation and distribution has been exponentially increasing since at least the Renaissance. So, while it is undeniably true that the current pace is unprecedented, it has also been true at any point in the past you care to examine. This means that the feeling of being overwhelmed by a deluge of new information is something of a constant throughout history.

> It has also been true at any point in the past you care to exam

I figured you would say this, which is why I stressed that we have crossed some kind of threshold. The effect of the internet, cheap electronics, free online resources as well as the fact that we now have 8 billion people in this world all culminate to set the stage for an entirely new era of creativity.

We are living in the New Renaissance. People will be discussing this era in history books for a very long time, like we do the Renaissance now. Why do we focus on the Renaissance and not the period of creation between then and now? Because it marked an unprecedentedly different era of creativity. And here we are again. So your mention of the Renaissance really only strengthens my argument.

We talk plenty about 18th and 19th century creators. That's Dickens, Dumas, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Brahms, Chopin, Paganini, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Swift, Defoe, Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carrol, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Doyle, Elliott, Emerson, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kipling, Melville, Nietzsche, Proust, Shelley, R.L.Stevenson, Thoreau, Twain, H.G. Wells, and many more.

Their works are all over 100 years old and regularly read (or performed) today, long predating the internet and most predating the telephone. The internet is still way too new to say how history will remember it, and I don't see any evidence that the creativity explosion that started in the Renaissance ever stopped.

You completely ignored everything I said. Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.

It's amazing you can point to the Renaissance as an obvious point in history where things transitioned but you aren't able to see it happening right now around us.

> Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.

Of course it doesn’t, I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. However, the changes brought by the internet don’t feel categorically different than the ones that came from steamships, telegraphs, radio, film, telephone, railroads, or airplanes. Each of these innovations changed the world as we know it by making it easier for new ideas to spread, and a corresponding increase in the quantity of available content. You may be right that the internet has ushered in a new Renaissance, but history may also decide that the old one never really stopped, or that the seminal invention of this era was one of these earlier ones, or even one that doesn’t get invented for another decade — predicting how history will judge the present is always difficult, and never certain.

It doesn’t increase exponentially all the time. It’s tied in to changes with how information is dispersed.

The printing press, the telegraph, radio, tv, the internet, and most recently the mobile internet are some of the reasons for increases in the firehose of information being thrown in our faces.

Here’s an excellent book on the subject https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-Ourselves-Death-Introduction-...

I don't understand why it's so hard to understand this. The internet and mobile communication have undoubtedly ushered in an entirely new era.

And King Solomon, ~950 BC :)

"But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body."

Eccl 12:12

Give up. There’s too much content, you obviously can’t handle it all.

Just acknowledge this and just enjoy what you can.

A few years ago I thought I could get through my to-read list, then I realized I couldn’t and stopped worrying about it.

I'm not worried about it, and I don't plan to give up.

Becoming an amateur art historian has greatly enriched my day-to-day life and given me much inspiration in my own creative output.

As a multi-disciplinary artist I feel called to recognize and hold important people and their creations in my memory, in order to help them live forever like they wanted.

This reminds me of the Sand Mandalas (1) made by Buddhists, intricate detailed pieces of art that take weeks to make intentionally destroyed to represents their belief of the natural cycle. I can imagine someone having an instagram catalogue of their own work trying to leave their mark through their digital footprint. Even if the data stored to preserve individuals works on these platforms persisted beyond ones life there's no guarantee the service that hosts it will be around that long.

In an age where we have a growing abundance of material to go through and discover, it shows the futility to hold attachment to our own personal marks on this world during this life. There will come a point where even just the relevant amount of material to our own interests will exceed the time one can consume in a single lifetime, perhaps we have already passed that point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala

About 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube per minute. That’s 1800 minutes per minute.

You can look at just the best 0.06% of YouTube, and never touch the back catalog.

The sad thing about this is all of the "less than perfect" artists whose content gets swept up in the storm. Hopefully the rise of the Long Tail will combat this to some degree, but we will have to redefine our concepts of fame and eternal life through art. We have entered the age of globalized niche culture.

[0] https://longtail.typepad.com/about.html

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