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Novelty has a very shady reputation, redolent of dime stores, corny songs, and practical jokes. What does it mean, that the most common terms for the new are so hard to use? How does the quality that makes a new shirt or a new friend such a positive experience turn into something almost sinister in the abstract? That quality, of being different from what has gone before, is clearly of great importance to us, though we find it difficult and even embarrassing to give it a name. But the linguistic awkwardness in finding a good descriptive term for the new is almost certainly the effect of a deeper difficulty in coming up with a definition of it. Perhaps there would be a better noun than novelty, one above suspicion, if English speakers were more certain about what they mean when they call something new. Right now, at a time when most first-run movies seem to be either remakes or sequels, when the popular new singers are all expert mimics of some vocal style of the past, when period nostalgia progresses through the decades faster than time itself and threatens to catch up with the present, the status of novelty as a value would not seem to be particularly high. Indeed, a consumer marketing firm determined as long ago as 1991 that “newness used to have a cachet all by itself. It doesn’t anymore.”’ In the art world, indifference to the new has been a popular pose at least since the 1960s, when Robert Smithson decreed, “Nothing is new, neither is anything old.” In fact, the whole distinction between modernist art and that which followed in the 1960s, a distinction that once seemed so epochal, was based on an apparent disagreement about the very possibility of the new and about the desirability of associated qualities such as originality and autonomy. All of these were blown away like so much dust, it seemed, when Andy Warhol promoted some Campbell’s Soup cans from the supermarket to the art gallery.
Desire for the new, however, seems to be a fairly durable human quality, and interest in it persists even now, after its role in the worlds of art and fashion has been exposed and debunked. The computer and consumer electronics industries, before all others, keep the topic of innovation current and popular, even as the movie industry tears through its old comic books looking for heroes, and a considerable amount of academic research is