by Lee Barry

Created on: June 26, 2010   Last Updated: June 28, 2010

'Peak Art' and the Power of Limitation

Does the world already contain every idea anyone has ever had? If we have ideas, should we even bother to pursue them? How can we be inventive when nothing can be new?

Economic and social conditions as well as technological advances have always been major forces in shaping artistic behavior. We might have never thought of creative ideas as being a finite resource, but like the dwindling supply of easily accessible oil, accessible or viable ideas are more difficult to refine from the crude ideas. They've been used up or partially used and discarded. Certainly many great ideas for inventions, processes, businesses, songs, artwork have been relegated to the wasteheaps of history, or simply recycled into various other art forms.

Perhaps the Internet has made it too easy to be creative, and less relevant as a result. Once a resource is abundant, we tend to use more of it, sometimes to the point of depletion. (Jevons Paradox).

Jevons Paradox is the theory that the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase the rate of consumption. As we had with cheap oil, we have cheap bandwidth (for now). If net neutrality is not realized, bandwidth will come at a premium. It will slow the pace of the amount of content coming online, but may ultimately increase the profitability for those that survive the culling.

For a filmmaker that relies on bandwidth, this constraint will affect the art form itself, or the visibility or marketability of the work. Perhaps the solution (albeit a counter-intuitive one) is to make bandwidth more expensive, which may have the effect of making the industry more profitable for established independent filmmakers, and less accessible to the public at large. In any case, an equilibrium will have to be reached between user-generated content (which has often proven to be more popular) and the industry standard. Anything cheap and plentiful will always trump the standard.

The Internet is probably overdue for constraints. Lately many writers have been ruminating about the insidious effect the Internet is having on us. The effect in fact may be real, as no boundaries or limitations have ever been imposed on it beyond what China, and perhaps a few other countries have done. Such boundaries or lack thereof shape the content within it, and what might be possible. Whatever form the Internet takes in the future will affect creative output accordingly.

Boundary Conditions

Recently I received an email from a friend

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