Horizon

"I.e. are there writers who suffer from trying so hard to be original that they leave out essential structural elements and/or make stuff happen in their stories that's just too weird to seem even loosely extrapolated from real life?"

Yes, I think so.

If you examine two things side by side you have the choice, often not consciously taken, of how much to generalize. You have to decide, somehow, how many details, and which details, to consider irrelevant to the comparison, and which essential. The more you generalize, the more everything starts to look the same, and the more obvious everything becomes.

It seems to me that this idea that an artist is judged solely on novelty was an invention of the romantics and that the self-devouring avant garde cycles we've enjoyed since then (in the west, at least) are its shockwaves. In a sense this might be based on extreme generalization, which encourages the abandonment of familiar forms and ideas altogether.

Perhaps artistic communities exhibit the same sort of pattern of stability and revolution that Thomas Kuhn suggested scientific communities go through. In that case a sort of institutionalized avant garde would seem to be a pointless attempt at sustaining a perpetual state of revolution, which would inevitably leave most of the rest of society scratching its chin, unable and maybe unwilling to keep up.

All because of a fear of obviousness stemming in part from a tendency to hyper-generalize? Seems plausible to me, but there is surely more to it than that.

We talked briefly last spring about this thing T.J. Clark said re: cultural shifts in art and the ironic attitude that forms when a group has exchausted one pattern and hasn't yet adopted a new one. Is it kind of what you're saying here?

Sorry, I never finished that Kuhn book. Left it in a taxi and took a bus all the way to the dispatch office to get it back, but then brought it home and never finished it. Worth the effort?

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Jon Carroll had a good take on another kind of obviousness, in his subject matter and the way he talked about it, in a repeated column in today's SF Chron.

I can't tell you, I haven't read the book. I've read a fair amount about the book, though, and think I have his general idea down. Someone who knew Kuhn well could, I'm sure, point out interesting discrepancies in my analogy.

So, for what it's worth, the idea that irony signals the onset of an approaching shift makes sense to me, and it's the sort of thing I had in mind. But I do think that the ideas of art and the artist that have grown from the romantic period have accelerated these shifts to an unnatural pace which, as far as I know, is unprecendented. This isn't entirely a bad thing, but it has consequences, especially because it opens the field for a lot of charlatanism as people do not have the framework to meaningfully evaluate this perpetual cutting edge.

In 1895, as part of what is generally considered the first public film screening by the Lumiere brothers, some people in the audience aparently thought they were about to be run over by the image of a train pulling into a station. Since then film has developed techniques that would probably be unintelligible to that audience. Not so long ago, filmmakers signaled the passing of time with an image of a clock sped up, or of calendar pages wizzing by. Now a passage of narrative time can be communicated to a modern audience with a single jump cut. It takes time for audiences to absorb new ideas and to develop an intuitive framework with which they can understand any work of art. Accellerating the process of innovation by making innovation itself an end of its own necessarily gives rise to a theory subculture which alone has the framework to evaluate this art, but only in a purely intellectual way.

This all comes back to the theme of obviousness because I suppose this emphasis on innovation might be, in part, a consequence of an increased tendency to generalize. I may be completely wrong about this, but it seems to make sense.

I follow you about the changes in perception -- it's like hinterland people who get hurt crossing the street because they haven't learned to judge the speeds of cars -- but, sorry, what do you mean by "tendency to generalize"?

Well, to be brief, it's what got me off on this tangent in the first place. I supposed that one's idea of what is obvious and what isn't is largely based on one's tendency to generalize, because the less detail you see, the more everything looks the same.

From there I got somehow to suggesting that the hugely accelerated pace of artistic innovation in the last century or so could be a side effect of a kind of hyper-generalization that makes everything that isn't aggressively novel seem obvious or trite.