No new ideas in the house and every book has been read
The above is from a U2 song written about 20 years ago if that gives you any measure of how much more culturally bankrupt we are by now.
Ten or 20 years ago, the nastiest thing you could call an artist was derivative (and that insult was doled out with such frequency it became a limp critical trope). These days, the rubric of novelty is rarely employed, and "Is this doing something new?" isn’t a de facto critical question. Artists are judged, instead, by how successfully they integrate the past, either by fusing it with something else, or dismantling it to the point that it’s nearly (but not entirely) unrecognizable. Regurgitating one’s predecessors isn’t a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, but now that artists have access to everything all the time, it’s become an awful lot easier to pilfer at will. As Reynolds writes, "It can become a real struggle to recall that pop hasn’t always repeated itself and that in the not-so-distant past it has produced, repeatedly, something new under the sun."
The obvious counter to this argument, of course, is that pop culture has always been essentially a commercial celebration of self-involved bullshit regardless of medium. Perhaps the fact that we've run out of new ways to dress up our repackaging of crap year after year can be considered an advance.
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