Friday, February 15, 2013

It’s 2013: I think we’ve come to grips with the fact that it’s damn near impossible to come up with anything new. I’ll be unabashedly clear that a lot of what I do is reconfigurations of older ideas put together into a more modern framework, but beyond all that, it’s really just about pleasing myself”--25-year-old producer Phil Canty, aka Morri$ - interviewed at FACT

I'm always startled when an actual young person comes right out and says something like this. Because I'm not sure even I believe that "it's damn near impossible to come up with anything new", I'm more concerned that a bunch of conditions and megatrends have converged to make that occurrence less likely, a situation made worse by intellectual fashions ("combinatorial creativity") that erode the will to do anything new, while assuaging any anxiety or guilt about recycling and parasitism.  So when an actual young person says something like that (c.f. the Amanda Brown quotes about post-creation) and without any handwringing or tone of despair, just more or less "that's how it is, that's how we be"  ...   wow.

But if there's anything that history shows, it's that all phases are temporary.... epistemes fade away or crumble quickly, they're displaced by emerging formations of sensibility....  This long moment of archivally saturated paralysis will break, surely...  It will, won't it?

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