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Comment by galdosdi | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of something I noticed: disproportionately, the classics in a given field (ie, the work agreed upon to be particularly important, influential, etc) are disproportionately the ones that were made shortly after a new medium or technique was invented. For example,

It's almost as if we default to tending towards imitation and recycling, and only each time a totally new technology changes what is possible do we really try new things -- but the well of newness is rapidly exhausted and so those artisans who are fortunate to be able to be the first to work with a new medium get to be the ones that create its classics.

The question is why? Does a medium combined with a culture totally determine the kind of work that can be made? Or is the influence of the original classics impossible to escape? In other words, is this situation path dependent?

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That seems just very obviously untrue. Take an example, say literature: Are you saying the classics of literature were produced shortly after the invention of the pen/paper (clearly untrue)? Or maybe after the invention of the printing press? (Also clearly untrue).

It seems like a banal observation to say when there is a technological breakthrough there are new discoveries made. Like say astronomy, every time we invent a new method to see further/measure better we discover new stuff. And equivalently in art as new media and methods are discovered, artists take advantage of them to produce new work. It's obvious both that this is the case and why that should be so.

Otherwise, we are clearly going to evaluate works that have stood the test of time to be "classics" and have difficulty making an objective evaluation in many fields of how new works stack up relative to them. History winnows out the things which aren't that great and then you have a new generation of classics that "by pure coincidence" (not really) are closer to when the new medium or technique than your time of observation.

I'm not sure that's true. Look at the printing press. Sure, Shakespeare is a classic, but most of the rest of what we read as "classics" probably centers around the mid-1800s (at least in English-speaking countries)

Yes, that's exactly some of the time periods I was thinking of. The mid 1800s was a time when literacy was rapidly increasing and new serial magazines became popular. This new medium paved the way for the fame of authors like Dickens and Bronte, the sort you may be thinking of.

This only works if you compress the entire 19th century into a single point. Otherwise you have, eg Sense and Sensibility from 1811 vs Heart of Darkness from 1899.

If anything this claim merely shows the effect of “time compression” in which distant events feel like they happened around the same time.

Not to mention Frankenstein and Journey to the Center of the Earth, both of which are science fiction classics. And then, of course, you leave out the entirety of 20th century science fiction.

You're cherry-picking to establish your conclusion. Lots of classic authors from that period (George Eliot for example) didn't serialise their works in magazines.

Also the 19th century is not by any means considered generally superior to any other period in English literary history. Eg Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are looking sternly in your direction from either side of that timeline for example.

Shakespeare was about a century and a half after Gutenberg.

Or just the earlier works have been forgotten. It tends to surprise people when I mention the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie (one of the first(?) to showcase color and still known for that because of the transition) was an adaptation of just the first book of an older series.

Generations move on.. All familiar things are eaten by time, so it's familiar things in media from youth that provides an anchor. The city you grew up on is gone except for a few landmarks. There are always artist artists who experiment but that's not mainstream taste

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