This is useless

This post on J's Indie/Rock Mayhem site (yes, from several weeks ago--what? is there a time limit?) more or less inspired the following glib mind-dump on the topic. That does not make him liable in a court of law, however.

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Artists create art. Critics and art historians give that art names and categorize them into movements.

Whether the "movement" is still "moving" is up to the critics, but an artist who seeks to satisfy the critics is ceasing to produce art. It may receive accolades and may even be commercially viable, and it's perfectly acceptable to do that (everybody's gotta eat); however, the best that output can achieve is approximating art.

Or at least that's what thinking in lofty, ethereal terms about art affords me the opportunity to believe.

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It has been alleged that the public doesn't want true innovation in its entertainment; they want the same thing they're comfortable with, the same thing they've seen/heard/read before. And thinking in terms of "entertainment" only, that's probably true to at least a certain degree, or at least in certain cases. I don't think it's quite that simplistic, but upon analysis little is as simplistic as pithy generalizations would make it out to be. (That's what pithy generalizations seek to do, but it should be tacitly understood that they almost always fail.)

Anyway…

A distinction must be made between entertainment and art. Art may be entertaining, and some entertainment may be artistic, but that's only a subset of the two that happens to coincide.

And as that statement is a pithy generalization, it is not necessarily true. However, it is not false.

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I'd argue that entertainment requires at least a modicum of innovation. It's not that people want a lot of innovation—they don't—but at least a tweak on the familiar is necessary to keep it interesting. The appearance of the familiar is necessary, to be certain, but even the casual fan will eventually grow weary of the identical.

Eventually.

Or at least I choose to believe so. On occasion.