can art become cliche?

The power of art is often its power to surprise. When many sources such as authors, editors, and advertisers, display an image of a famous artwork, in the process the famous starts to look ordinary. The result: the surprise is used up too quickly and the images bore us rather than astonish or delight us. It is like having too many people tell us the same joke within a week's time. No matter how good the joke, at some point it ceases to be funny and perhaps even becomes annoying.

The importance of context suggests that results of the test of time are difficult to predict in art. An image can appear powerful in 2006 but by 2030 may be trite. The colors of the French impressionists do not appear dissonant or shocking to the modern viewer; they come across as conservative and pretty. After Led Zeppelin, Gene Vincent no longer sounds like such a hard-rocker. The dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park were a special-effects revelation at the time and they delighted millions of moviegoers. Today they appear amateurish, as if they came out of an underfunded computer game from Eastern Europe.

Alternatively, other images and other cultural outputs gain in power. The fusion, funk, and general chaos of the late recordings of Miles Davis were a mystery to most jazz critics at the time. They could not understand why he would abandon bop or silky trumpet playing for what sounded like noise. Those recordings are now seen as seminal forerunners of jungle, trance, rap, and ambient music.

- Tyler Cowen

Rossini - William Tell Overture

Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsody #2

inversion of status through co-option?