Are art and business mutually exclusive? | #6
Everything is a remix. Seriously. And the difference between novelty and nuance.
(Art by me! no relation to the content, just wanted to include it because I think it’s neat!)
In this 6th issue of The Pole:
Why everything is a remix - ain't nobody got time to make all these decisions
Where does business end and art begin? often when sophistication increases
The difference between novelty and nuance
If everyone copies everyone, we all suffer
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Everything is a remix
There's no such thing as an original idea. Creative work involves making a lot of decisions. Too many decisions for any individual. So we outsource a lot of them.
This is more obvious in some creative fields, but less obvious in others.
Writing is a less obvious example. Any book, essay, newsletter (hi!), and so on, reduces to deciding:
What will the first word be?
What will the second word be?
and so on, until the last word.
If the book is 50,000 words, then that's at least 50,000 decisions to make.
If that sounds like a lot, you're right. Which is why we don't make them.
As I write this sentence, I'm not deciding what word will come next. It flows from my unconscious. From phrases I've heard before. From ideas, meanings, and themes I tucked away, like loose change.
Us humans like to make a handful of creative, impactful decisions.
We don't generally like making
lots of decisions
hard decisions
uninteresting decisions
inconsequential decisions
Which is why we take shortcuts. If we have
a lot of similar decisions to make, we take our choice for one decision and apply it to the rest
a hard decision to make, we copy what someone we respect would do in that situation
an uninteresting decision to make, we use the standard solution our community endorses
an inconsequential decision to make, we pick whatever option our feelings tell us to
It doesn't matter which shortcut we use. We are borrowing that decision from somewhere else, which makes it a remix.
No creative work is 100% original.
Where does business end and art begin?
A common quest for an artist is to make money doing what (s)he loves.
This is a difficult thing to do. Most people end up compromising. They do enough uninspiring but lucrative work to pay the bills, then do whatever they want.
Why is it so difficult? One reason: you're ahead of your audience.
To understand why, let's dig into an example: pop songs
An artist release a new single or a new album.
Their fans love it. It's hip, it's new.
But not everyone loves it. The critics say it sounds like some other artist. Or that (s)he's a sell-out.
Who's right? Everyone!
For the audience, it gets the job done. It makes them feel things. It's a conduit to connect with the artist. It doesn't sound like anything they've heard before. It works!
But, it's true that (s)he uses the same chord progressions most pop songs use. It's true that the lyrics sound like another song from 2 years ago. It's true that if you do a little research, the artist seems to be following a formula.
Why? Because it works!
Most people don't have sophisticated music tastes. Most people don't know music theory.
Take a Bach piece and a Rachmaninoff piece for example. The average person can't articulate the difference between the two.
Side-by-side, they can tell they're different. But they don't have the vocabulary to describe how they're different. Or how they're the same.
They can't identify the patterns. It seems random, thus it's uninteresting to them.
This has a sad implication for you as an artist:
If you deviate too far from The Formula, your audience isn't going to get it.
Thus, they're not going to want to pay for it.
If you ask popular bands how they feel about their hit songs, a lot of the bands will tell you they hate them.
Smells Like Teen Spirit, Stairway to Heaven, and Sweet Child O' Mine are all despised by their creators.
Kurt Cobain: I can barely get through ‘Teen Spirit.’ I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away.
These bands, like you, want to push the envelope.
But every concert, they must play their popular songs. At some point, it stops being an artistic expression and starts becoming a job.
If no one sophisticates, it weakens the whole system
As an artist, the call to sophisticate is strong, but as a business, the temptation to keep the status quo is high.
We humans love order, but up to a certain point. Past that point, we like chaos. At its best, chaos is mystery, serendipity, a pleasant surprise.
Businesses are all in on order. The more certainty, the more it makes sense to use leverage, the more profit.
Given the choice between selling
a high-risk, high-reward product or
a low-risk, low-reward product,
they will often go with (2), even if the average profit is lower.
Low risk, in the case of selling art, means following the crowd closer. Less “artistic vision” and more “if the crowd wants us to play our popular songs, we’ll do it.”
Which is fine for individual companies, but it hurts the ecosystem when everyone does it.
Everyone copies everyone. Everything starts looking the same, sounding the same, feeling the same.
The difference between novelty and nuance
Too much sophistication is hard to market.
But not enough means you have no competitive advantage. Nobody has a reason to pick you over the competitor you copied.
So you need to do something new. What's the difference between what "the average Joe" and "experts" consider new?
Here's my take. Imagine you have a code for.. something:
1 3 9 2 3 9 7
And then someone invents a new code:
1 3 9 4 3 9 5
The old and new code are pretty similar. Everything is the same except the middle and last numbers. Those two parts are "new" - and they're differences anyone could notice. That's novelty.
Now imagine someone invents a third code:
2 2 8 3 4 9 6
Let's look at the old code and the third code:
1 3 9 2 3 9 7
2 2 8 3 4 9 6
A layman might say they're completely different.
In fact, there is a similarity, but it's not obvious. Like Bach and Rachmaninoff.
The similarity is that the numbers in both codes add up to 34.
That's nuance.
Novelty is about obvious differences from the status quo.
Nuance is about non-obvious similarities.
To quote Friendly Ambitious Nerd by
:For the beginner, interestingness is about novelty. For the expert, interestingness is about nuance.
There's a time and place for both. It depends at what part of the path you're on!
This was great! Feels like you were really flowing in this one.