Asklemmy

Stupid, I guess?

Art and culture are dependent on technology and social norms.

We sure as shit haven't explored all possible cultural norms and, absent a climate apocalypse, have not reached the height of technology.

Like, imagine if we could move stars, for an extremely sci-fi example. Imagine if we had a war with xenomorphs? What would the fear of being used by a parasitic species generate art-wise? What kind of celebrations would be created when/if we won?

Art and culture are expressions of human emotion and experiences. We sure haven't experienced everything, nor felt everything it is possible to feel.

Not quite a direct answer, but I feel like this world view is linked to seeing art primarily as a commodity rather than a way to express emotions.

With expressive art, it doesn't particularly matter whether you write the millionth poem in a standard rhyme scheme and meter, so long as what you express comes across.
But commodity art is explicitly 'clean', it does not carry a message or at least not a particularly complex/interesting message.

And then, yeah, suddenly you ask yourself why would someone look at this particular drawing of a dragon, when there's been a million drawings of dragons before.

Postmodernism. Or perhaps more specifically, Cultural Exhaustion.

Reductionist?

The older I get, the more things seem to be just new examples of things I've seen already. But that's not to say that those things aren't worth creating. How many times has the word "the" been used? Doesn't mean we should stop saying it. Works of art are a form of communication too, and reflect the times and contexts in which they are created.

I don't really have an answer to your question, I'm commenting because I do subscribe to that belief.

Humanity has been around for thousands of years, more than plenty of time to figure things out and learn and innovate. If we've existed as we are for those thousands of years, then wouldn't it make sense that we'd have figured out all the possible combinations of words and such? There were millions before, but there are billions now; who's to say not one of those individuals has come up with an entirely new piece of art that's never been seen, or a sentence that hasn't been heard before?

Imo it's a numbers game. Kinda like the infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare.

Art is based on what came before it - even if it's created explicitly to break with the tradition, it can still be described as the opposite of something that already exists. Since we as humans can only think in terms of what we already know, then of course the cultural vocabulary will eventually be exhausted - whatever innovation can be obtained is derived solely on how do we combine the colors and sounds and words we have.

There's this, an article from Art in America, which I'm in the process of reading now.

If I had to coin a term, I’d call it “aesthetic ergodicity”.