Revolutions

Every now and then, something comes out that is revolutionary. It completely changes the current world, creating something that never existed before. As soon as the revolutionary work is released, the imitators will come. They will make countless clones of the same work, different enough to be given a new name, but obviously a rehashing of the original idea.

I've been thinking about this phenomenon and I realized that it is often oversimplified. Every created work has two qualities to it: concept and execution. Each of them have a spectral scale and they can occur in any combination.

A revolutionary work generally has a peak level of concept, but a less-than-stellar execution. These works are still very widely received, but are not without their criticisms.

The clones that follow a revolutionary idea have a much lower level of concept, since they are simply copying an existing idea, but they will have a much better execution. They will generally never have the acclaim of the original, but they are generally better works. They are what the original would have been if it was touched up.

Every now and then, a work comes out that is revolutionary in concept and perfect in execution. This is a masterpiece. I'm not sure we get those anymore, but it's not impossible.

And finally, there is the last combination, the work with crappy concept and terrible execution. You might want to void these like the plague.