Not trying to subtweet anyone, particularly my students, whose papers I’m wading my way through. But I’ve had a lot of occasion today to think about the identification of “great” with “first/inventor”. If some creator/creation is a a great example of something, and maybe the most famous example of a thing, there is a tendency to treat them/it as the first instance of the thing.
e.g.
“Bozo invented the tradition of modern clowning, setting the stage for the great clowns of the late-20th century, like Crusty and It.”
This seems like it’s just a compliment to Bozo. But it actually erases earlier, maybe even more important clowns like Emmett Kelly. Celebration of Y shouldn’t cause the erasure of X.
Not sure where the source of the first=best error lies. It could be from sports culture, where the second person across the finish line is nowhere near as glorious as the first. Or maybe it’s from science/technology, where the second guy to split the atom is not the guy who gets the Nobel Prize.
Those standards are not wrong, but they’re typically not going to apply to the arts. Think of all the misconceived arguments about who “invented” science fiction, as if it were the telephone or the radio.
The opposite error is the myth of progress–that later=better. So novels published in 2025 are marginally better than those published in late 2024, but not as good as those that will appear in 2026. That tendency may be true of computer hardware, but is never going to be true of writing, music, the visual arts, etc.
A still greater error is spending endless hours on social media rather than doing work that has to be done, in the vain hope that elves will come along and do it for me. That’s a mistake.
OR IS IT
