Alan Little says they don't make movies like they did thirty years ago, and asks: do art forms have a life cycle, and are movies at the end of theirs?

Is it just that any art form quickly mines out the worthwhile ideas that are within its reach and then has nothing left to say or do? There’s certainly a strong case for arguing that with, say, western classical music – a couple of hundred years of sheer exuberant wonder from circa 1700 to 1900, then picking over the remains? Or the "literary" novel. And mass communications may make the process faster – jazz lasted, creatively, from the 1920s to at the latest the 1960s. Maybe cinema just managed a decade or so more than that at both ends and is now a zombie art form too. I hope not.

I found myself itemising all the great symphonies written since 1900, in a comment on this at Samizdata a few weeks back, and I amazed myself. The big surprise for me was discovering how many Mahler symphonies date from after 1900, which I had not appreciated until now. Number 4 onwards, I discovered. Until now, all I'd done was listen to these monsters, not read the sleeve notes. So the "picking over the remains" phase can still be amazingly impressive. Gustav Mahler is a fine example to think about, because many contemporaries thought his stuff derivative and decadent and self-consciously knowing and just generally rubbish, in lots of the ways that art is rubbish when it's done by people who know everything that has been said for the last two hundred years and are scraping the barrel for new things to say. What those contemporaries missed, I'd say, was the depth of feeling under all that kitsch and cleverness and which demanded all the kitsch and cleverness in order to express itself.

Also, despite things now seeming so lively to us until 1900 at least, I bet you there were people just as clever as Alan Little saying in 1850 or thenabouts that whatever they called classical music in those days (music?) was already zombified. Come to think of it, didn't Wagner say pretty much exactly this about "Jewish music" of the Meyerbeer, Mendlessohn variety? Mastery of surface forms and formulae. A big nothing where the real depth ought to be. Wasn't that what he said?

Wagner appallingly overdid his protestations that Jewish artists were/are uniquely incapable of depth, but I do think that he had a point. Could it be that as an art "matures", it gets easier to do basically second-rate, formulaic stuff that nevertheless is sufficiently satisfying and well-produced to keep the manufacturers of it in business. Indeed, maybe that's what "maturing" means. People learn what a core audience will tolerate, and how to fake greatness for them, and they then serve it up year after year. Meanwhile there is at least as much truly great stuff still being done, but it is harder to find and takes longer for posterity to dig out and celebrate.

I don't think that this model explains the decline (and I think it was decline) of "classical music" in the late twentieth century. What happened there was more like a recoiling in disgust from the established forms and a conscious refusal to churn out formula stuff and pay the rent. What wouldn't they now give for a Meyerbeer! I'm not sure if Alan is right about art forms getting mined out, but the late twentieth century classical bosses certainly believed this themselves. Sadly, they were unable to find any other forms that were remotely as popular as their old ones. The Pop industrialists (Jazz, then R&R, now … whatever the young people call it these days) were way ahead of them on that, and they still are. (I think "classical" might catch up, but that's a whole different post.)

Getting back to movies, maybe posterity will decide that Steven Spielberg was a basically formulaic hack, a movie Meyebeer, whose work served to create an impression of general movie zombietude in the minds of people like Alan Little (and me also, I rather think, although I was much impressed by Schindler's List), but that other less mechanically done stuff (Wagner before he got noticed, Schumann) was still being produced, under the radar so to speak. In general, I have the feeling that your average Hollywood movie maker now knows, one way (Quentin Tarantino) or another (Mr Average Movie Exec), too much about too many past movies, and spends too much time either "homage"-ing (Tarantino) or churning the formulae (Mr AME).

There's now an interesting little flurry of appreciation in my corner of the blogosphere being stirred up around Whit Stillman 's movie Metropolitan, a flurry provoked by this piece, and to which I have been contributing. This is obviously a movie which thousands now adore, yet it still can't be bought in London on DVD. (Stephen Pollard said in a Samizdata comment: expect it any month now.) Is this perhaps the kind of movie that posterity will dig out and celebrate more?

This posting started off as just a little something to deal with the fact that I'm busy this evening, and need to get my daily duties here out of the way. So I did my little nod to Alan, and the idea was to leave it at that. Nice one Alan. Then it got out of hand, basically when I found myself disagreeing, and in general, you know, thinking about it. Which is just what Alan himself said later in his posting.

Hmm. This started out as something throwaway to write on the train after a weekend of being ill, and is heading towards altogether more mentally strenuous territory of "is the phase space of possible art forms getting mined out too?", and "what is art for anyway?", which I don't propose to even attempt in the remaining ten minutes of my journey to work.

This second little Little quote above makes we want to ramble on some more here about how I also often sit down, as in this case, to do a short post and end up doing a long and profound one instead, and to ruminate upon the goodness and badness of setting yourself the task of doing something every day, and what sort of writers benefit from such rules, and what sort do not, blah blah. But like him, I will cut it short and leave that stuff for another time.