Do you feel like it's possible for media that were great in their time to be replaced by new art that copied its innovations? (The example that came to mind today was Ocarina of Time.)
In the popular consciousness, or as a possible entertainment recommendation for a specific audience? Definitely. But this comes down to a larger "role of art" question, and in that light, an influential piece of art can't really be replaced. The history of any artistic medium isn't a series of isolated works, it's a conversation - a certain trend or way of depicting "truth" will come into prominence, be articulated on and interpreted and modified by a variety of creators, and then something will arise either in opposition to or somehow otherwise counter to that existing trend and the conversation will expand to include and comment on that. This doesn't happen in a simplistic "rocks beats scissors" progression of artistic trends and countertrends, but that sometimes /does/ happen (like with surrealism self-consciously forming a break from prior trends), and either way it means that you can't really remove blocks from an artistic canon, since it's all part of a living whole.
This can actually get pretty awkward in the more storied and self-reflective mediums. That whole cliche of modern art just being a bunch of garbled nonsense is reflective of the disconnect between a general audience looking to appreciate things with a given standard of what is "beautiful" and an insider audience that is acting in the assumption of familiarity with a long-standing conversation that gives context for a given piece. It's the same with writing - there are obviously general rules of narrative craft that make a work emotionally coherent and accessible, but there are also works that break every one of those rules in service of provoking some alternate reaction based on a given context. Personally, I had serious trouble getting into a variety of modernist authors back in college, because their work was so insular and so dependent on familiarity with a vast array of specific cultural and artistic touchstones that you essentially had to translate it out of its own language. Let me know if you get much out of The Waste Land, because I sure didn't.
But we're getting a little off-topic. As I said at the beginning, in terms of what a work means to its audience, in a very general way, things can be "replaced." But obviously most works have a million minor details that separate them from others, and influential works always exist as living pieces of a conversation anyway, so most art is roughly as immortal as the culture that creates it. And hey, Ocarina of Time is still my favorite Zelda game, so clearly it's got some value left in it.
This can actually get pretty awkward in the more storied and self-reflective mediums. That whole cliche of modern art just being a bunch of garbled nonsense is reflective of the disconnect between a general audience looking to appreciate things with a given standard of what is "beautiful" and an insider audience that is acting in the assumption of familiarity with a long-standing conversation that gives context for a given piece. It's the same with writing - there are obviously general rules of narrative craft that make a work emotionally coherent and accessible, but there are also works that break every one of those rules in service of provoking some alternate reaction based on a given context. Personally, I had serious trouble getting into a variety of modernist authors back in college, because their work was so insular and so dependent on familiarity with a vast array of specific cultural and artistic touchstones that you essentially had to translate it out of its own language. Let me know if you get much out of The Waste Land, because I sure didn't.
But we're getting a little off-topic. As I said at the beginning, in terms of what a work means to its audience, in a very general way, things can be "replaced." But obviously most works have a million minor details that separate them from others, and influential works always exist as living pieces of a conversation anyway, so most art is roughly as immortal as the culture that creates it. And hey, Ocarina of Time is still my favorite Zelda game, so clearly it's got some value left in it.
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