When I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1968), the year 2001 seemed impossibly far out into the future. Now it’s more than 2 decades in the past—back in the bygone neoliberal era. This recollection got me thinking about the new field of “progress studies”.
It seems to me that human progress is very uneven:
Technology: Very rapid progress
Science: Rapid Progress
Public morals: Slow progress
Sports: Slow progress
Human personalities: No progress
Art: No progress
Ex ante, this is not what one might have expected. The human body doesn’t change much from one generation to the next, but athletes are clearly better today than a few decades ago, and much better than a century ago.
On the other hand, art might have been expected to progress, as artists built on the achievements of their predecessors. And yet, as Tyler Cowen recently pointed out, the golden age of music was during the time of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.
Tyler is much better informed on music than I am, and as you might expect his post contains a number of interesting explanations for historical trends in “classical” music. Nonetheless, I see a big flaw in Tyler’s post. Tyler focuses on explanations specific to music, whereas it seems to me that the evolution of highbrow music is quite similar to the evolution of the other forms of art. I know more about the visual arts, so I’ll focus there.
Just as the best music was created in earlier centuries, the same is true of the best paintings. And that’s despite a huge increase in the global population, and a far greater increase in the number of humans with the economic resources to engage in painting as an art form. Why aren’t there hundreds of great painters today? One response is that there are lots of great painters; it’s just that we don’t see it. After all, artistic taste is subjective.
But that merely pushes the question back one step. Why are composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach widely regarded as the greatest of all time? Why is it that in a 1985 survey of art experts by the Illustrated London News, only 2 of the 20 greatest paintings of all time were from the 20th century, one from the 18th century, and none at all from the 19th century? Yes, it can take a while to appreciate new art, but surely by now we can fully appreciate the art of the 18th century.
It also seems to me that art has changed in similar ways in a wide variety of fields. In some sense, modern art seems simpler and more idea-driven than the classics of the past, whereas older art involves a high level of craftsmanship. Doesn’t Andy Warhol compare to Titian in much the same way that Philip Glass compares to Beethoven?
My preferred theory is that the field of art involves discovery, and those who arrive first have the greatest opportunity to make major discoveries. If Thomas Edison were born today, he’d have trouble inventing so many new home appliances. Instead, he might have gone into software or biotech. A talented young artist born in the 20th century might have decided that painting and photography were exhausted, and gone into filmmaking. (Kubrick is one such example; he started as a photographer.)
Filmmaking is a newer art form, and its golden age in the West and Japan was roughly 1920-1980 (and perhaps 1985-2005 in the rest of Asia.) Even poetry seems to be in decline. In 1820, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Blake were all writing poetry. Are there 5 comparable living British poets?
So what does all of this mean? Are things getting better? I’m sort of agnostic on that question. I’d put about a 40% probability on the hypothesis that utility is rising due to improvements in technology and public morality, and about a 60% probability on the hypothesis that utility is not rising over time because people have the same sort of personality flaws they had 100 years ago or 1000 years ago. I’m frequently surprised by the extent to which people can be depressed despite living conditions that are objectively far superior to those in the past. And I’m also surprised by the extent that (from a psychological perspective), life as portrayed in old novels seems very much like life as experienced today. In my own life, a huge increase in economic wellbeing doesn’t seem to have made me happier than when I was younger. And young people today don’t seem to be happier than I recall young people being in the 1960s.
Nonetheless, because there is a non-trivial probability that progress is making us happier (say 40%), we should continue to strive for improvements in technology and public morals. I recall the pre-novocaine era, and I don’t wish to go back even if hedonic set point considerations prevent the drug from making me happier. I also don’t wish to go back to the pre-civil rights era.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind going back to a time when Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde and Aftermath were all released in a span of 4 months.
PS. Sorry, I don’t have a link for the old art survey from 1985, but it was dominated by the usual suspects (Velazquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, etc.). The two modern paintings were by Picasso, and there was a Watteau from the 18th century. Not surprisingly, Las Meninas topped the survey (by a wide margin), with View of Delft coming in second:
READER COMMENTS
Grant Gould
Jan 1 2022 at 3:06pm
On the arts, surely 80% of this was covered back in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Art is a different thing, and has different purposes, once works of art or their subjects can be duplicated. Painting must become something other than photography plus cost disease; music must become something other than sheet music plus cost disease.
As such, the question of the best art depends entirely on how you draw category boundaries. If you must compare painting, compare it perhaps to cinematography: the artist who would a century ago have been the best painter today is not a painter, because painting today is a different object with different meaning and purpose.
In particular, the properties of art that make a thing beautiful are the most easily duplicated, and so beauty is the most easily supplied, least valuable aspect of art, so much so that in the present era it is nearly an afterthought or even a subject of counter-signaling: If you want beauty, look to art forms that embrace reproducibility and commercialism rather than creating singular “cult” (per Benjamin) experiences. If that means low-culture exhibition media rather than high-culture cult media, embrace that, don’t keep looking at sheet music and paintings.
Or perhaps I’m entirely off the mark. The Titan exhibit at the ISG was absolutely stunning, at least to the few people who got to experience it.
Scott Sumner
Jan 1 2022 at 6:46pm
Good post. I don’t think we even know what the most important art forms are today. Perhaps in 100 years we’ll see that great art was being created in areas that today are not even viewed as an art form, just as film was originally not seen as a serious enough art form to make early films even worth preserving.
I wouldn’t even know how to compare the Beatles or Dylan with the great classical composers. It seems like they are doing something entirely different.
Nonetheless, while you make very good points, I still don’t see progress in the arts, just change.
I would have loved to see the Titian exhibit; he’s one of my favorite painters. BTW, the ISG’s Titian was on the list of the 20 greatest paintings of all time. That painting also appears in the background of a Velasquez painting that perhaps should have made the list.
Mark Z
Jan 1 2022 at 7:46pm
Well, video games are subject to the same debates today as films were a few generations ago. It’ll be interesting to see if the great video games of the early 21st century are regarded as artistic masterpieces in 100 years. That said, some forms of art/entertainment don’t age well. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t really enjoy a film from the 20s or 30s as well as I can enjoy a painting or novel or symphony from 300 years ago.
Jacques René Giguère
Jan 2 2022 at 1:13am
Movies from the 20’s and “30’s operate on different codes. ’20’s were mimes which is why there was a real international cinema outside of linguistic constraints.
The 30’s, audiences had no understanding of the media possibilities. If two people having a phone conversation agreed to a meeting, you must showed them getting their coats, going through the trip and then talk. By 39-40, you could have the characters talking then one recounting to a third one how the meeting went.
When I talked to litterature profs, they often talked about it was difficult for their students to understand ancient tragedies compared to drama. The characters in tragedy don’t have agency, they just follow their fate and the students just react: ” Good Lord, get a grip and do whatever you think is needed.” Remember when Shakespeare invented drama in the english world : “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves”
In french it is the difference between Racine and Corneille. Racine is unreadable today.
Robert
Jan 1 2022 at 8:46pm
“In particular, the properties of art that make a thing beautiful are the most easily duplicated”
This could only be true if the beauty of a work of art exists entirely within the work itself i.e. if beauty is an objective property if an object. But surely the beauty is a function of both the work itself, the prior knowledge and understanding that the viewer brings, and also the process of contemplating the work while and after viewing it.
For older, more famous works that have already be absorbed into the background culture that most viewers bring with them – there is less work for the viewer to do, so it is easier and less effort to see the beauty. For example impressionist paintings were widely misunderstood when they were new, but are now extremely popular.
This hasn’t happened yet for a lot of more modern art, and so the viewer has to both have more esoteric knowledge, and do more work to see the beauty. Most people aren’t motivated to learn the background knowledge or do the contemplative work while viewing an art work, and so they are never going to see any beauty. Of course, it might not be a good work of art, and you also need to do the work to be confident that there is no beauty.
In my view the greatest paintings of the 20th century are Rothko’s Seagram Murals, and I think they are incredibly beautiful and moving, but they’re certainly not easy works of art to appreciate.
I guess that the two Picasso paintings in the 1985 London Illustrated News survey were “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and “Guernica” – neither of these are very easy to appreciate either.
Even older works of art require a lot of work to fully appreciate. Given a selection of old paintings, would an average person select “Las Meninas” or “View of Delft” as the best? I don’t think they would.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 1:27am
Yes, those are the two Picassos that were selected.
Anonymous
Jan 2 2022 at 3:33pm
I always thought Picasso was a sort of fraud or imposter since his art was so bad (to me). But I was interested to discover recently that Picasso was an extraordinarily gifted artist who could actually draw normal things (i.e. not weird cubes) incredibly well. Why did he pivot into (to me) garbage?
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 7:23pm
“Why did he pivot into (to me) garbage?”
Maybe the problem is not with Picasso.
j r
Jan 2 2022 at 8:43pm
By the time Picasso was fifteen, he was painting like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Charity
That pretty much answers the question for me.
Eric MacDonald
Jan 3 2022 at 9:44am
Maybe the problem is not with Picasso. but … maybe it is. Is the decline of the arts partly a result of the fact that, unlike Beethoven, Mozart, Wordsworth, Byron, et. seq., these “classics” were able to attract an audience, because they were meaningful to ordinary people, whereas much modern art is not. Could the fact that there are no longer comparable poets to Pope, Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Byron, etc., because those who have departed from the canons of poetic form just cannot find readers?
Anonymous
Jan 3 2022 at 1:46pm
Is the answer that he was so awesome so early that he got bored of being awesome? I notice that the two paintings voted best were in a “traditional” style and not cubist. So it seems art critics agree with me to some extent (a person who is totally uneducated in art)? Why didn’t Picasso continue making paintings in a traditional style, or did he and if so why is he so well known for cubism? Just because it’s this super weird thing that one of the best painters ever did?
TGGP
Jan 1 2022 at 4:25pm
Progress can be measured rather objectively in an area like sprint times. Art is a different story.
Scott Alexander discussed some of the same things as Grant Gould above in his two posts on modern architecture.
Scott Sumner
Jan 1 2022 at 6:37pm
I did a post on modern architecture, replying to Alexander.
Loxmyth
Jan 1 2022 at 5:43pm
Great art has always been rare (review Sturgeon’s Law), and often not fully recognized in its own time. Great is a very different thing from popular.
And there have never been enough people willing to underwrite it. Great is also a very different thing from commercially successful, especially given the fragmentation into market niches.
I’m honestly not convinced that any statement about the best art of a given time can be made until 50-100 years later. Time needs to be allowed for innovation to emerge from obscurity and for it’s influence to be recognized.
If you want to find the art which may eventually achieve that, you need to step out of your comfort zones.
Matthias
Jan 1 2022 at 6:48pm
Video games are making great strides today. But we also already have some classics that people still appreciate decades later despite their primitive technology.
Tetris is perhaps the starkest example; it was invented on Soviet computers what were already long obsolete, took the world by storm and is still one of the best computer games.
More typical examples are perhaps the early Super Mario games.
Nevertheless, games are still improving. And not just in areas that are clearly driven by technology, but also in eg narrative techniques.
The ‘Return of the Obra Dinn’ is a game from 2018. And one of the first games to implement detective deduction well. Technology wise, it could have been produced in the late 1990s or earlier with no problem.
Surprisingly, board games and card games have improved enormously as well over the last few decades, despite using the same cardboard as ever.
Floccina
Jan 1 2022 at 6:56pm
We are undoubtedly happier while getting our teeth drilled today than we were in the pre novacane era.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 1:28am
Yes, but do painkillers make us less happy when we are not using them? Why are we now more sensitive to pain than in the 1800s?
john hare
Jan 2 2022 at 4:41am
In my job, pain is expected on occasion. Hammers and nails, power tools, ladders, and other hand tools lead to the occasional oops. Deal with it and move on to the extent that we often just ignore things that people in other professions can’t understand. I often have had a question asked when did that (minor injury) happen and can’t remember.
Expectations and consideration of normal have a lot to do with the ability to handle pain. I have a real problem with pain during a slip in the teeth cleaning process. My tolerance is probably not higher overall, just diverted in some areas.
I am much happier with the availability of Novocain and aspirin.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 12:01pm
I am happier when Novocaine is being used. I am less happy when not under Novocaine. Overall, my happiness has not been impacted by Novocaine.
I agree about construction work, it make sone less sensitive to pain. My basic view is that how one lives one’s life has little impact on the subjective pain one experiences.
Mark Z
Jan 1 2022 at 7:53pm
Perhaps modern wealth and the unprecedented ease with which art can be produced and broadcast have led to such a degree of specialization that ‘great art’ – which typically must appeal to broad swaths of the public – is less viable. A Mozart or Rembrandt today would have a harder time competing with the many niche artists that create art perfectly tailored to their small audience. Cinema and music are somewhat exceptional, but even in those, I think people are increasingly consuming niche art.
Aerys
Jan 3 2022 at 10:10am
This feels right to me. In my niche genre (furry art), the list of all-time great artists and artworks is constantly being rewritten as artists take their skills to new heights and software innovations allow creators to break new ground.
David S
Jan 1 2022 at 8:20pm
In addition to video games, I’d argue that automotive design is an art form worthy of consideration. It’s less than 150 years old, and consequently has posed unique design challenges from its inception. We can also chart peaks and valleys in car design, from the early functionalism of Fords to the exuberance of the post-war American sedans. There were some truly ghastly products in the 80’s and 90’s. While some car buffs would claim that the golden age of styling is decades behind us, there are plenty of modern “supercars” that fun to look at—despite being absurdly dysfunctional.
jj
Jan 1 2022 at 8:42pm
Art hasn’t progressed because it is in essence the expression of the human mind, and the form it takes is circumstantial. Unless the human mind progresses, neither will art — though its form will change with technology.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 12:02pm
That’s quite plausible.
Rajat
Jan 1 2022 at 9:20pm
This post discusses both progress and utility, and I’m left a bit unsure as to the point it’s making – whether we are progressing, whether progress raises utility, and/or whether even if we can make progress, it is only worth striving for progress if (or on the chance that) it raises average utility.
Thinking of the areas where you claim there’s been no progress, human temperaments may not have changed in certain core ways, but human behaviour has certainly improved. People in modern liberal societies are far less violent and far more considerate of others’ feelings than they were 100 or even 50 or 20 years ago. There are fewer street fights and at least less physical bullying. You could call all that morals or ethics, but I think that assumes away the progress – human personalities are after all the combination of innate traits and the effects of socialisation.
Re art, I agree that art involves discovery. But then how can there be no progress if new forms of art are emerging, or similarly, if new things (eg ideas) are being expressed in older art forms? Perhaps all you can say is that there’s been no progress in classical styles of painting or in classical music or poetry. But again, this seems to define progress away. None of those old art forms are lost; they are available to anyone today at the click or a button and physical reproduction available at minimal cost. Far more people can even see many paintings in the flesh than in the past. It’s just that now hundreds of other art forms are also available. Maybe the rate of progress has slowed, but it’s surely not nothing.
On the relationship between progress and utility, it may be that there’s no measurable strong relationship. But as you say, dentist visits are less painful than in the past. Hospital treatments (and pandemics) are a lot less risky. And as you’ve said previously, school was a lot more enjoyable for your daughter than it was for you. But do kids today have higher average utility than kids X decades ago when school was boring? And should this determine whether progress is worthwhile? One test has to be the one you apply – revealed (or presumed revealed) preference: you prefer dental visits today over visits in the past; you (or modern kids) would prefer school today than in the past. And many people like to buy paintings or music that doesn’t match the ‘quality’ of the classics, so they must be getting some incremental value they wouldn’t otherwise. And for that reason, progress in whichever form is individually valued will continue unless we introduce controls to stop it happening. So why the hand-wringing, unless stopping it (eg through big tech regulation) is a policy question you’re interested in?
PS. Re your “On the other hand…”, if I had the opportunity and the choice, I would prefer to sit in 1970s Chicago PhD economics classes than in any institution’s classes today. I don’t think that means there’s been no progress in macroeconomics or that (at least some of) the progress hasn’t been worthwhile.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 1:39am
On the personality issue, I was thinking that people seem just as impatient, greedy, envious, selfish, cruel, etc., as they have always been. But those traits get expressed less often in social institutions such as war, slavery, racial discrimination, etc.
On painkillers, see my reply to Floccina.
And why don’t young people today seem happier than young people in previous centuries?
I do see your point about progress in the arts in the sense of more types of art. But within any given genre, art doesn’t seem to be improving. The greater total stock of art seems important, as you suggest, especially since technology for reproducing art is improving.
Macroeconomics? It seems to be regressing. I’m seeing talk of price controls. Or that money doesn’t matter. 🙁
Mike G
Jan 2 2022 at 5:06pm
“And why don’t young people today seem happier than young people in previous centuries?”
I’d settle for a dead heat. It seems like young people are less happy. Some evidence of higher anxiety, et al.
More time online, less socializing, less playing, fewer chores, fewer part-time jobs.
Ted Sizer wrote a book about teaching, Horace’s Compromise. The Compromise: You pretend to teach, I’ll pretend to learn.
Updated: You pretend to parent (so you be on your phone all the day), I’ll pretend to have a good childhood (so I can be on my phone all day).
Jonathan W Siegel
Jan 1 2022 at 11:03pm
I think the discussion of art and classical music here suffers from the same types of flaw as the discussion over at Tyler Cowen’s blog earlier in the week:
What progress would mean in these arts is not defined at all.
Popularity seems to be conflated/confused with quality. Yes, Beethoven and Mozart are probably still the most popular composers. It doesn’t follow that they are better in terms of quality than Stravinsky, Bartok, John Adams or Jennifer Higdon (among others).
As long as we are making analogies to sports, baseball, the sport for which we have the longest statistical record, is not a bad analogy. If you look at the records (whether based on traditional metrics or sabremetrics) folks from a hundred years ago still turn up more than one would expect if the sport was progressing. At an extreme, a poll of baseball writers would probably show Babe Ruth still perceived as the greatest player of all time. Yet given what we know about athletes in general, it is overwhelmingly likely that the current generation of ballplayers is the best ever. Why? Because apart from general nutrition and the like which make them larger, faster, stronger, they have better training and coaching and kids with talents for the game are spotted earlier so get more years of help developing. In addition, more kids are playing the game, especially outside the US, than ever before so the population from which players are drawn has never been larger. So why aren’t today’s players recognized as the greatest of all times by everyone? Because in a world with relatively few players, little or no systematic effort to find them, poor to non-existent training and medical care, great players are a function of pure chance and are black swan events. So they stand out very clearly from the norm. But in today’s world, the great player is much more common–in other worlds we find and make ‘normal’ many more players who are 2-4 standard deviations from the average.
The same thing has happened in music. In Mozart and Beethoven’s time exposure to music was limited to a relatively select few and training, especially in composition was haphazard at best. Today, despite the weakness of musical training in schools, worldwide more kids get exposed to music early on, talent is recognized earlier, on average, and quality specialized training is available earlier and on a more sustained level, all the way through post-graduate training. This means many more great musicians and composers are discovered and reach their potential. Precisely because there are more great musicians, standing out is infinitely harder. And just as in baseball, they ave to compete against their predecessors. Unlike baseball, there is no statistical analysis (or comparison to general athletic trends) to alert us to how problematic this comparison. And in music, the ‘owners’ (e.g., orchestras, opera houses, etc) don’t have the intense competitive incentive to market new compositional talent that say ballclubs do with ballplayers. It is no accident that despite claims of decline in compositional ability, no one makes similar claims about classical performers, where it is likely recognized how high the performance standards have become. Why? Because performers are a highly marketable commodity in today’s world.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 12:04pm
It’s not that current artists aren’t as talented. No one believes that. The problem is that they are not producing such notable works. They are too late.
Phil H
Jan 2 2022 at 1:22am
The repugnant conclusion happening before our eyes? If you’re right, it’s worth thinking about. I might have to go back and read Parfit again (not the easiest read!) to recall what he said about it. If he’s right in terms of utility, and money has some vague connection to utility, then does economic growth commit us to the repugnant conclusion?
Andre
Jan 2 2022 at 8:26am
I’m frequently surprised by the extent to which people can be depressed despite living conditions that are objectively far superior to those in the past.
We’re humans. Our happiness beyond subsistence is influenced largely by our relative status, not by our absolute status.
Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski
Jan 2 2022 at 8:45am
One striking observation concerns European cinema. The 1950s and 1960s in France and Italy alone represented a real boom. There was a great accumulation of talent, both in terms of directors and actors. In Italy, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, de Sica, Pasolini and such actors as Mastroianni, Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale and so on. It is even more impressive when you look at the French film industry. Here the flourishing is extraordinary: among the directors we have Louis Malle, Truffaut, Godard, Melville, Bresson and many others. We no longer find actors with such technique and ability to create atmosphere as Maurice Ronet or Alain Delon.
It is puzzling that cinema has declined so much. It seems to me that the same thing happened as in other fields: the avant-gardes and their influence flowing into the culture made them neglect the craft. The disregard for craft leads to the forgetting of techniques and to the romantic belief that an individual in a fit of inspiration can accomplish anything.
Disregard for craft and technique – even in literature, where it is a very subtle issue – leads to Fogbank-style problems in art (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/fogbank-america-forgot-how-make-nuclear-bombs/). Very few art graduates know how to paint with the techniques that were used in centuries past. Similarly, almost no modern writer is able to produce a novel comparable to the great works.
Narcissism and ideological pressure are the enemies of art.
Alan Goldhammer
Jan 2 2022 at 8:55am
the music examples cited by Tyler Cowen and echoed in this post are misleading (as are the art ones to some extent). Bach did not rely on patronage but was a church employed musician who regularly composed pieces for various festivals. Mozart and Beethoven both relied on patronage to make a living though Mozart’s life was short. Using only these three as examples ignores the evolutionary change from the classical approach (and let’s not forget how much Haydn contributed) to the romantic with giants such as Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. Schubert composed over 500 songs including three cycles that still stand at the pinnacle of vocal composition. The romantic era saw the first of the great improvisors in the solo piano works of Franz Liszt (who can forget Ken Russell’s great send up of the Liszt legend with Peter Daltrey playing the piano virtuoso).
I dislike the classification of music by genre as I have seldom found a particular type that does not appeal to me. Classical composers have often adopted folk tunes in to major symphonic, chamber and vocal compositions. Music is constantly evolving and with globalization, musical ideas and instrumentation are commonly adopted in other genres (Ravi Shankar’s sitar and the Beatles to cite one example).
Pop standards of the 1920s and 30s, originally composed for Broadway made their way into jazz improvisations. Jazz itself evolved into bebop and then progressed into the spiritualism of John Coltrane. Kieth Jarrett turned the solo piano into something that even Liszt would have envied (listen to the Cologne Concert recording that was the subject of a great Tim Harford Podcast).
The arts are not static and to single out any era (or artist) as the greatest is fraught with peril.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 12:07pm
I’m a big fan of the Cologne Concert.
T. Clark Durant
Jan 2 2022 at 9:07am
Hey Scott.
Long-time listener, first-time caller. 🙂
A couple thoughts on sports and human personality.
On sports, there’s been a massive amount of progress in *extreme sports* in the last 30 years. Rock climbing, skiing, skateboarding, big-wave surfing, sky diving, free diving, cliff diving. People doing much harder things in less time at younger ages. And then there’s the invention of new sports: foiling (a variation on surfing), base-jumping (a variation on sky-diving), wing-suit flying (a variation on sky-diving), etc. Steven Kottler’s book, “The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance,” is where I’ve seen this best documented and discussed.
On human personality, there are two major shifts underway, the explosion in the systematic use of (1) mindfulness and (2) psychedelics to heal trauma, reduce stress, find flow, create meaning, etc. Both of these had their initial moment in the 1960s and 70s, but the spread at that time was a little more *wild*, more sensationalist, more limited to this or that subculture, less systematic, less cultivated. That was the first generation. The next generation of these things is – on the margin – more grounded, more accessible to more people, more circumspect. A good place to start on psychedelics would be Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.” I don’t know what the best book would be on how mindfulness is evolving in the West, but you can find a number of different threads discussed in Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.
My two cents.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 12:08pm
Yes, I read the Michael Pollan book—it’s quite good.
Kaleberg
Jan 4 2022 at 12:35pm
Basically, stuff that was considered impossible is now merely considered merely extreme. (There’s also the technological side with new materials offering lower friction rollers, lighter gear, more resilient footwear and so on.)
Chris
Jan 2 2022 at 1:08pm
If this representation of the Top 10 is accurate, Monet also had a 20th century painting on that list.
https://www.pinterest.com/betsy4262/top-10-best-paintings-of-all-time-class-lecture-ba/
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 7:31pm
The first 13 on that list are the same, but after that the list you provided diverges. The Monet was not on the original list.
Bryan Willman
Jan 2 2022 at 3:22pm
re: Art – well one thing might be a saturation effect. In say the ’80s and ’90s people (including me) still struggled to make really interesting photographs, and to find the ones made by others. Now, any focused web search will turn up a literally ovewhelming volume of outstanding photographs. And I do mean literally overwhelming. To the point one just stops looking and wanders off to something else. So perhaps when something is as common as air, it becomes impossible for it to be great or important, even though it’s wonderful.
re: Happiness – I suggest that this analysis (and many others) miss the point of “happiness” – that natural selection has evolved us to only be happy in certain life circumstances, and to otherwise be always yearning. That is, we are *evolved* to “always want more” and to be unhappy/insecure/etc if we don’t think we’re getting it. That my life circumstances are vastly better than 100 years ago, or indeed, in my own life 40 years ago, doesn’ t keep me from yearning for better.
re: Old novels, and modern novels set in past times – with rather rare exceptions they are about special people and events, and not the mundane. The overwhelming rise in well being is in the mundane (fresh water, reliable electricity, and so forth.)
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 7:38pm
You said: “I suggest that this analysis (and many others) miss the point of “happiness” – that natural selection has evolved us to only be happy in certain life circumstances, and to otherwise be always yearning. ”
I didn’t miss that point at all—it’s exactly why I don’t believe that happiness is increasing over time.
MarkW
Jan 2 2022 at 5:12pm
I’d say that greatness requires both quality and general acclaim, and the latter is nearly impossible now. There are too many niches, too much fragmentation and disintermediation. Acclaim probably needed respected, powerful cultural critics as champions promoters. Those are gone (or a shadow of their former selves). Few people care or notice if Rolling Stone (yes I believe it still exists) gives an album four stars or if a famous literary critic (are there any genuinely famous literary critics?) praises a new novel in the TLS or NYRB. The audience for award shows (Oscars, Grammys, etc) has gotten very small. There no longer seems to be any pathway for a new album, symphony, painting, novel, poem, etc to become generally acknowledged as ‘great’. But I’m fine with that — I am vastly better entertained and informed than in the pre-Internet days when I was young.
Scott Sumner
Jan 2 2022 at 7:35pm
You said: “I suggest that this analysis (and many others) miss the point of “happiness” – that natural selection has evolved us to only be happy in certain life circumstances, and to otherwise be always yearning. ”
I didn’t miss that point at all—it’s exactly why I don’t believe that happiness is increasing over time.
Weir
Jan 2 2022 at 10:35pm
Progress is real and you can watch it happen. You just have to be specific. You could work backwards from a fresh twig or start with the sturdy trunk of the tree but either way you can trace the development of an idea, and what you witness isn’t always a falling off from a golden age to decadence.
So Rex Harrison makes The Ghost and Mrs Muir in 1947. Four decades later, Michael Keaton makes Beetlejuice. Three decades after that, Fred Armisen’s in a TV show called Forever. And these are more than just points on a timeline. You can trace a development and see genuine progress. Each one builds on the last and is more intelligent than the last.
Even a movie like The Scary of Sixty-First, which isn’t meant to be a landmark or a major work of architectural significance, is nonetheless more than just a shack built off to the side of Eyes Wide Shut. One time I argued that Atom Egoyan’s Chloe was an improvement on Eyes Wide Shut, but that genre films get overlooked if they don’t announce themselves as grander constructions.
And even though Andy Samberg is just an epigone of Bill Murray, he’s also not that. You could argue either way, because Palm Springs builds on Groundhog Day even if nothing ever builds on Palm Springs. What looks like decadence and exhaustion might look like something more impressive as time goes on and the tree keeps growing.
Scott Sumner
Jan 3 2022 at 12:21pm
The fact that modern art is more intelligent (something I don’t deny) doesn’t make it better.
Amolosh
Jan 3 2022 at 5:46am
Interesting piece! I would argue that the decline in great art correlates with the rise in egalitarianism. Art is an elite phenomenon, and great artists are elitists. The artist knows in her heart that she is better than the others, because in what counts for her, she is. Hence “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is bad news for great art. Remember that crack in The Third Man about the Renaissance versus Switzerland’s placid centuries that produced the cuckoo clock?
Michael Karman
Jan 3 2022 at 7:38am
To put it as simply (as reductionist) as possible, “progress” is simply the wrong term to apply to this situation.
Scott Sumner
Jan 3 2022 at 12:22pm
Agree, because it is ambiguous as to whether progress means “change” or “better”.
Steve Reilly
Jan 3 2022 at 9:06am
One reason that technology progresses while art doesn’t is that no one complains if tech is derivative, but we do with art. If I made a phone that was a lot like an iPhone but with new features, we’d consider that an improvement. If I rewrote War and Peace and made the plot a bit better, no one would thank me for my service to literature.
Art can copy the past to some degree, but it still has to go out of its way to seem new. So you can only build on the past so much. Tech can obviously copy the past and still be an improvement with some tweaks.
derek
Jan 3 2022 at 9:52am
Agreed. I would not really agree that 1820s England was peak poetry (I find only Keats from Sumner’s list truly impressive over time, with apologies to Shelley), but later poets, even those who clearly surpassed Wordsworth, struggled mightily with the anxiety of saying something new. Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, the latter of whom faced an even greater burden in following Whitman, would be the prime examples here. Of course, overcoming these anxieties probably led both Whitman and Stevens to their greatness (Whitman’s astounding insistence on his voice, Stevens’ analytical triumph), but the task of saying something new is even taller.
Real question since I want to know about them: is there a new transcendentalist (maybe what Harold Bloom would call “Emersonian”) poet who is perceived by critics as taking the next steps beyond Stevens?
Steve Macdonald
Jan 3 2022 at 11:49am
Great article! I’m always impressed by the intellectual horsepower in the economics world (I’m from the engineering world). I’ve derived great pleasure savoring the insights from popularizers like the Freakonomics guys. Nevertheless I’m always somewhat amazed at the massive scotoma in evidence whenever economists write about matters such as high art. They write as though the (arguably) deepest and most profound of human experiences — the spiritual, the sacred, apprehension of the Divine (call it what you will) is either a minor irrelevancy or simply doesn’t exist at all. Very strange. Some things cannot be captured on Excel.
Don Phillipson
Jan 3 2022 at 3:51pm
Author Sumner would be wise to learn that one’s own surprise is seldom a reliable indicator that something is important (or even unusual.) But he is to be commended for his honesty in showing how it oriented this inquiry.
John V Linton
Jan 3 2022 at 5:53pm
This elides en passant on what I think is the most likely explanation for the excellence of (more generally) classical music for a couple of centuries and in particular as concentrated in the three eminences of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven:Namely, there is a deep permutational problem of thematic exhaustion, where the Western tonal space and its possible harmonic continuations was conceivably exhausted by most original thematic exploitations having been made. (This is a depressing and somewhat controversial premise however, and should be more deeply debated.) I believe Stephen Jay Gould asked and posited this first in the 1980s.There is something else afoot however that might render that explanation insufficient. I.e. that there is a tendency to “every age has its genre” and composers constantly being obsessed with finding the “new style of their age”. IMHO this has been overdone in practice, and leads to a thinning of plausibly decent music of sufficient complexity and arresting harmonic sequence etc. Today’s pop music has died down to dumb drones sustained over 3-note sets. (Not all of today’s music, obviously, which explodes into 1,000,000 niches.)I would much rather see the great composers of today try to write more in the style of J.S. Bach or the Baroque and stop toying with this notion that they have to out-glass Phillip Glass, a tedious exercise in solipsism.Schoenberg once remarked that a great deal of fine music was yet to be written in the Key of C, and I take his point.IMHO thematic exhaustion remains both fascinating as a thesis and most likely lazy. Write more fugues with longer subjects, and write better counterpoint! Save us by innovating more inwardly instead of laterally with a constant searching after new forms. Except more finite limits and excel within said space!
Luis Martinez
Jan 3 2022 at 8:05pm
Excelente ArticuloSolo deseo en mi opinión, seguir creyendo que el arte irá cambiando al igual que otras disciplinas, pero sostengo que la época que marcó por ejemplo el BARROCO por mencionar dicha época, fue única en la historia de la humanidad, aunque hoy se tienen muchas herramientas ya sea del saber humano, como tecnológicas, la misma era digital en mi opinión, a dejado de un lado aquello que hace que el ser humano DESARROLLE CON MAS REFLEXION, que a mi criterio marcó esas épocas de oro de la humanidad, por ejemplo BACH mencionó en toda su vida que su música era para ese ser espiritual que como firme luterano el creía. En nuestro siglo XXI gran parte de esa concepción espiritual se ha perdió. Spinoza cuando hablaba del concepto de infinito hacia ver la existencia de un orden superior detrás de estos grandes conceptos. Pienso que esa medida de “espiritualidad ” hizo de esas generaciones que llegarán a escribir, esas grandes obras en las distintas disciplinas.
JWG
Jan 3 2022 at 8:28pm
‘Nothing’s as good as it used to be but everything seems to be a little better’ – –
– Can’t remember who quoted that.
Art doesn’t seem to be a priority in this present day just now. Yet it’s everywhere you look. Western civilization appears to be in this period of rapid change largely due to the internet revolution and a number of other reasons. We are a duplicitous animals. We carry violence and war and yet there is Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. We are living in a world now where, no matter who you are, you can voice opinions, make ourselves known. We write, paint, sing and have it seen and heard all over the globe. It’s a very powerful medium and I’m not sure we humans have quite come to terms with it; hence the uproarious state of Europe and America in 2022. We are inundated with art today. Any ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ can post novels, play music, present art. People who in the past were never seen or heard. It’s all very different today than it was just thirty years ago. Perhaps it will all settle down in the next fifty years. Art is part of being human, it just has a whole new dynamic.
Good article.
T. Brooks Shepard
Jan 3 2022 at 10:41pm
There’s not enough space to delineate how unbelievably wrong Scott Summer is about music. Let’s just call it “one man’s opinion “. Mine is that 20th century “world” music far surpasses the music in the narrow confines of the European time frame of which Summer is so enamored.
Scott Sumner
Jan 4 2022 at 7:27pm
I also prefer 20th century music.
Amy Willis
Jan 4 2022 at 9:20am
I came across this old story again today, and thought it might be relevant: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html
How much does context and perception matter?
Scott Sumner
Jan 4 2022 at 7:27pm
“How much does context and perception matter?”
A lot!
Kaleberg
Jan 4 2022 at 12:56pm
The sensory arts are surprisingly technological. The great classical composers date from an era of mathematical exploration of music. Logarithms were invented around the same time as the modern western musical scale. The great classical artists date from an era of new pigments and solvents, the mathematical exploration of perspective and shading and increasing emphasis on secular themes. The impressionists were driven by the same forces that developed mechanical printing technology and photography.
You can look at modern innovations with the electric guitar changing popular music, and remember that what we call classical music was once popular music. Electronic sound manipulation technology is an important component of modern music with its sampling and overlays.
Interestingly, artists are sometimes a bit ahead of new technologies. A lot of visual art from the 1960s seemed, even at the time, to be a response to computerization with its combination of mass production and mass customization. (I used to haunt the MoMa back then. It was free for students.) By the time computer graphics was developed, the avant garde had moved on. I remember feeling a profound sense of deja vu when I explored the SIGGRAPH galleries of the 80s and 90s.
The narrative arts are more driven by societal and political changes. The plays of ancient Greece were driven by the rise of Athens as a city of refugees and its political power. The plays of Shakespeare, the great Tudor apologist, were driven by rising urban life and political stability. Novels took over when plays were censored and literacy increased further. While narrative computer games require modern technologies, they and modern board games, are based on ideas developed in response to modern wars of industrial attrition. The Settlers of Catan came from the back rooms at the war production board. (Interestingly, modern board games are often less abstract than older ones.)
P.S. There’s a lot to the argument that happiness has to be measured relatively. It’s a subjective phenomenon, and the human brain hasn’t changed all that much over the centuries.
Scott Sumner
Jan 4 2022 at 7:34pm
I suspect that improvements in technology led to greater quality in painting up until about the 1500s. After that, technology didn’t improve very much. In contrast, technology led to improvements in music for a long period of time, well into the 1800s. After that, technology continued improving, but it wasn’t enough to offset stagnation resulting from other factors. The technology available to Beethoven was “good enough”.
Andy D.
Jan 4 2022 at 2:57pm
Surprised to see only passing reference to jazz in the comments here. For my money, jazz is truly a tradition that pushed music forward in a new way. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is an album that I think stands as an exemplar of the medium’s possibility, as well as a pillar of twentieth centenary art.
hoi polloi
Jan 4 2022 at 4:28pm
I often find myself wondering what the experience of hearing music must have been like when it was only available as live performance. Was there an equivalent amount of incidental music in the form of everyday “amateur” singing as there is, say, elevator music today? Outside rarefied elite environments, how common would it have been to hear “high-quality” performances?
David Oberman
Jan 4 2022 at 9:45pm
It must be differences (not improvements) in personality from generation to generation that explain the modern idealization of the past. (We may be repeating our own Renaissance when we idealize the distant achievements of a classical past.) Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach are as beloved as ever, anyone can see. I do not dismiss their work when I say that, had they never existed, the modern world would have pushed three (the number is arbitrary) others to the top of the highest of cultural pedestals. We need gods and demigods in the arts. So we fashion gods and demigods (often, thank goodness, from deserving raw material). The collective and individual urge to look back in time and see some things as peerless for all time is nostalgia, and it is so very different from a largely modern phenomenon: nostalgie de la boue. The modern fashion is not to make great claims for the past but to drag most of the contemporary into the mud, perhaps as a liberating sensation. If Beethoven were alive today, society would in equal parts praise him and trod all over him; we would make a god human-all-too-human.
Incidentally, the trajectory of Beethoven’s own career in his lifetime was a counterintuitive one: he reached his greatest popular success with his mid-period works, roughly from the Eroica Symphony to the his Op. 112 setting of Goethe. A surprising number of works from his final ten years or so confused and alienated the public and frustrated critics and fellow composers. Decades needed to pass before many of these late-period works were reconsidered as masterpieces of music.
Diana Austin
Jan 5 2022 at 6:01pm
Have to wait a couple hundred years to see how present-day artists affect upcoming musicians, painters, etc., and then judge how relevant they are in relation to artists of previous centuries.
Ferry
Jan 10 2022 at 8:24am
Read some intriguing answers to those questions in Maarten Doorman’s Art in Progress: https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/35115/340231.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
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