The last great blog post

I think Mark Rothko’s Untitled is the last great painting.

Painting was a craft of sorts for centuries, where your skill was measured by how well you could paint reality. Then the camera came around, and the Impressionists really explored what it meant to paint.

As in, if you have a brush and a viscous pigment, how do you interpret reality with the qualities of that medium.

Soon after impressionism came cubism. After Rothko painted a canvas black in 1969, what’s left significant to do in painting?

Sure, you can be a painter and sell paintings today, but can you really do anything original?

How might this apply to other media? Since somewhere around the late 60s or early 70s, the first “great album” was recorded. Recording fidelity reached the point where you could still listen to those albums today, and feel like it could have been recorded yesterday.

Yeah, you can listen to some Charlie Patton from like 1920, but it sounds like it was recorded on a sandstone disc. On the other hand, you can listen to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours from 1977 and it doesn’t sound at all like it was from 50 years ago.

Have we already heard the last great song? By that I mean, have we already heard the last thing that was truly original and at the same time pleasing to the ears. New music is so derivative of the old, it seems the only thing different is the person singing it is currently young and good-looking, rather than being young and good-looking in, say, 1977.

We may have already read the last great blog post. The medium was fresh and original in the 00s. It was the first time a lot of regular people were free to distribute a message widely to everyone they wanted. But now it’s much of the same.

For any medium, there must be a last time it was used significantly. When was the last cutting-edge painting, marble sculpture, or blog post? When will we see the last original video reel?

I read some note by Venkatesh Rao recently that said something to the effect that we may have already encountered the last original thought. As we move into an age of AI, where centuries of thought are being mixed and matched to create the most average and ordinary thoughts, I think he might be right.