One of the stranger aspects of art, apart from the ‘flowerings’ that happen unexpectedly every few hundred years when a plethora of artists all come along at the same time, is the way in which generations follow that imitate but never achieve equality of excellence. And not just in Art there comes a time (usually reached when leaders are younger than you are) when politicians all seem lightweight. Though this is as much to do with geopolitical events as much as with individual character.
But maybe that’s the problem with artists as well because it is talent and character that determines how one pursues one’s art, and if one is influencing others the others are at an immediate disadvantage. Are followers always destined to be less in achievement than the founders of anything? Because if they are then we are all lost because we can never live up to the expectation of the founding fathers and mothers of anything we do.
I do not know if it is because we are following, or because we lack the fire of first finding something or establishing a new way of doing things but whatever the reason it is a severe problem to the peoples of the world. We may find achievement of the whole is shackled by the fact of our limited life-spans and our inability to rekindle the passion in the new because it was yesterday.