If you’ve ever asked yourself, What is wrong with modern ____? — modern art, modern architecture, modern whatever — David Friedman suggests that the problem might be the rising marginal cost of originality:
Suppose you are the two hundred and ninetieth city planner in the history of the world. All the good ideas have been used, all the so-so ideas have been used, and you need something new to make your reputation. You design Canberra. That done, you design the Combs building at ANU, the most ingeniously misdesigned building in my personal experience, where after walking around for a few minutes you not only don’t know where you are, you don’t even know what floor you are on.I call it the theory of the rising marginal cost of originality — formed long ago when I spent a summer visiting at ANU.
It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn’t worth looking at, modern music isn’t worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen’s, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.
Bryan Caplan disagrees, because he enjoys the top 10 percent of popular media — Dexter, Big Love, etc.