doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Yeah, and I want to distinguish between two ideas, jumping off from your comment.I am always attracted to novelties but in a subjective way. If I haven't seen a movie, heard a song or read a book before, it is novelty for me even if it was made 100 years ago. That's why I spend vastly more time digging into dusty public libraries for books and music than in shops with big "NEW!" signs in the window.
Generally speaking I hate movie remakes, with occasional exceptions. I'd rather watch the original with a couple of flaws than a "perfect" remake. But on the other hand certain movies based on a famous book or theater play don't bother me in multiple versions, it can feel to me like none is the original and they are all adaptations from another medium, which remains the untouched original. I don't mind if they make another Alice in Wonderland adaptation on screen, but certainly I would object to someone wanting to rewrite the book (not counting translations, comics or children's simplified versions).
I do see merit in derivative art however, the difficulty might be in distinguishing between genuine artistic reason and being a rip-off to gain money or notoriety easily. Thinking about a famous case of Aqua's "Barbie Girl" song in the 90s, if I remember right the band was sued by Mattel. It is obvious that a pop band wants to make money selling their song, but the Barbie is such a worldwide famous toy that had become even part of the language, so IMO it was completely legitimate (and novel!) to use it in a song even without permission.
Personal novelty, which is simply “have I personally seen this before?”
Critical novelty, which is “does this contain significant elements and forms that would surprise a critic who is knowledgeable in the genre and medium of the work?”
Personal novelty can have quite an impact on enjoyment for some people. Critical novelty, i posit, only really matters to critics.
Exactly. I don’t think that how novel/original/unique something is makes a particularly useful measure of how good it is, and I think that culturally there is vastly too great a focus on that supposed metric of quality.Yet it's still 90+% familiar - Robin and Little John are still going to fight at the river crossing, Robin's still going to sneak into town and win the archery contest, King Richard is still going to show up at the end, etc. - and thus it's no more than a re-telling of a familiar story with maybe a few new wrinkles. Yes I already have it. Yes I want it again.
That's a big difference from something being entirely new, which is what the OP seems to be suggesting is an overwrought ideal.
IMO that is tangential to the idea of novelty as necessary to quality. Again, “has literally any new or different element compared to the works it derives from” isn’t, IMO, at all useful as a definition. If we use that, then novelty becomes so inevitable that the term is entirely redundant, and anything but a perfect copy fits, and then we have to use a different term to mean what nearly everyone means when talking about novelty or a novel experience.And that's perfectly fine. The fact that some people can like it, and others find it tedious, shows that doing it different ways matters.
Another way to look at it is, if basically everything that isn’t a direct and complete copy is, to some degree, novel, then novelty isn’t an especially important or even reliable determiner of quality or of how creative or “good” a work is.