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The Endless BuffetVersion 1.0, © 2008 by Dale Cotton, all rights reserved
F03-014A-05 by Michael Murphy Imagine a huge fair grounds covered with huge tents perhaps a square mile in all and all filled with row after row of tables which in turn are covered with cooked food. Sort of a summer-long ultimate Woodstock of edible delights. The food is organized by region, so somewhere there may be a full acre of Greek cuisine, next to it might be an acre of Turkish cuisine, then an acre of Croatian cuisine, etc. Thousands of people are wandering the aisles of this place, free to help themselves to whatever they want to eat - the ultimate buffet. Of course the vast majority of people will be found in the junk food section. The tables for candy, ice cream, cake, hot dogs, pizzas, etc. will have line-ups; but there will still be plenty of people exploring the rest of the offerings. Let's say Andrea Christianides is a middle-aged Greek mother and housewife whose cooking of traditional family recipes is to die for. Her best cooking is available at one of the thousand tables in the Greek area. Maybe a thousand people per day might go through the Greek area and maybe one or two of them will stop to sample from Andrea's offerings. Of those, maybe once a month there will be someone whose tastes happen to run towards Greek and whose palate is sufficiently educated to actually appreciate just how good Andrea's dishes are. But most of the small percentage of people who would really enjoy her dishes will never chance upon her table, because there is just so much else to explore.
06-L0331 by Dale Cotton Now, Andrea is too self-effacing to complain, but her family is bursting with pride in her cooking. After a few days they might well become increasingly frustrated that so few people are discovering it, and so they might decide to put up big banners: Eat Here! Amazing Gourmet Greek Cuisine! The problem is that soon everyone will have banners above their tables; some banners might be bigger and more blaring than others; but ultimately it won't matter because the banners will be everywhere and will therefore cease to mean anything. Then someone will get the idea of using sound ads to attract attention but the same saturation point will happen for that too. Then one of the consumers will get the idea of creating a critical guide pamphlet to the best of what's being offered, as a public service ... "best" meaning what most agrees with that person's tastes. So consumers will pick up a copy of Joe's Delicious Picks, go to the tables Joe recommends and find out how closely their palate agrees with Joe's palate. If the match is not close, they'll try Jim's Delectable Picks, then Jane's Delightful Picks, etc., until they find one that closely matches their tastes. This would actually be useful, except that soon there are so many thousand consumer guide pamphlets available, that the chances of anyone finding the one that matches his or her personal taste becomes pretty slim. But let's say it's Jessica's pamphlet that caters to those people who would most enjoy Andrea Christianides's cooking. Problem is Jessica, who has already sampled 5,000 different dishes and recommends over 500, may never get around to Andrea's table to try the food there. If she did, Andrea's cooking might have made Jessica's top 50 list, which might have upped the number of people visiting her table from one or two per day to four or five per day.
Reflecting on a Feast by Linda Shedlock What we learn from this little thought experiment is that recognition/popularity, R, is directly proportional to
and inversely proportional to
R = ( C x M ) / ( V x E x P ) ;) The above (hugely tongue-in-cheek) analysis is based on what we might call a “hot” product environment, meaning highly saturated with great variety of content. Just the opposite is the world of handmade classical musical instruments.
Oskar Graf guitar, 1982 I recently had the opportunity to play a 1982 Oskar Graf classical guitar in perfect condition. It is an exact copy of a Herman Hauser (vaguely like the Stradivarius of the guitar world). If the owner wanted to sell it, he could get just about anything he cared to ask, so long as he bought it to the attention of some young guitarist trying to break into the world stage like Segovia and Bream. Ninety-nine percent of all guitarists these days play electric and so would not be in the market. Of those who play classical, ninety-nine percent are casual amateurs who would immediately rule out purchasing a guitar with an asking price in the thousands of dollars. But of the remaining, anyone who has obsessively devoted fifteen or twenty years to learning classical guitar would nearly have a heart attack just from plucking the open strings then would sit down to play, pretending not to be interested, the better to bargain. The difference between the food buffet analogy and the classical guitar analogy – besides great available variety vs. little available variety – is that sound quality for a classical instrument is a fairly objective thing. Anyone who has gone through the necessary rigour of training will have a very similar idea of what the ultimate classical guitar sounds like or the ultimate cello or whatever (yes: there is an Amati sound that identifies it as different from a Strad; I'm saying that what they have in common is much more important).
The Guitar Player by Jan Vermeer van Delft Until a hundred fifty years ago, the world of European fine arts, including painting was closer to the classical guitar model. There were relatively few master artists laboriously producing relatively few creations; and standards of what constituted good vs. bad art were not subject to a great deal of dispute. In painting, for example, realism was taken for granted and it was possible to have such a thing as the French Salon to adjudicate excellence. But now we live in a super-saturated, mega-buffet of visual arts. It's no longer possible to rise to the top by virtue of sheer excellence – since excellence is now abundant and there are no longer agreed-to standards by which to measure excellence. And it is no longer possible to rise to the top by waving the biggest banner or shouting the loudest in self-praise, because of that same super-saturated marketing environment. Achieving Hall of Fame status, like a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh, is no longer an option. The most that can now be achieved is a reasonable financial success, and that is done by either playing the university head trip game and playing to the lah-de-dah gallery crowd or by deliberately pandering to the mass market. There are many of us who pine away for the old days and secretly hope against hope that at least one of our offspring will find a home in the Louvre. But a sea change has reformed the landscape and the Endless Buffet now reigns supreme. There is now no hope of enduring recognition and instead the question becomes (in the immortal words of Charles Dodgson): Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
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