The Sovereign Work

Open any portfolio site in a given design scene this year and you will see the same neutral typeface, the same off-white background, the same case studies arranged in the same scrolling cadence. Read the essays being celebrated on a given writing platform and you will find the same opening hook, the same mid-piece personal anecdote, the same closing turn dressed up as insight. Listen to the records coming out of a particular musical scene and you will hear the same drum sound, the same vocal processing, the same harmonic restraint. Walk through the galleries of a given art moment and the palette, the scale, the subject matter all rhyme. The men producing this work are talented. Each of them, working independently, has arrived at the same answer to the same unstated question: what will my peers respect this year?

The pattern repeats wherever creative work is judged by a community of practitioners. Spend long enough inside any such scene and the costume becomes visible. The output converges, slowly, until the work of one man becomes almost interchangeable with the work of another. The differences are cosmetic. The substance has been homogenised. This is not a failure of talent. What has failed is the willingness to make something the scene has not already approved.