I would argue that John Williams fits the bill of a modern Beethoven, but he's not much of an innovator. Jacob Collier innovates, but lacks mainstream appeal. Kanye West innovated hip hop quite a bit, but lacks appeal (in general) to a high-brow audience because he doesn't sing well or play any instruments, he's just really good at stitching together samples and surrounding himself with people that can refine his ideas.
I think much of it has to do with the volume of artists and scientists and the increased flow of information - so that one single person is responsible for much less of the progress, because much more information is circulating about what that person is doing among that particular community.
I think as far as academia is concerned you can also consider a sort of bureaucratic weight to things. It's harder to get anything done when you have to spend much of that time applying for grants, doing relatively asinine trainings for the purpose of giving your institution liability shielding and federal government funding, etc.
Another thing is that there's so many relevant people that the towering figures that used to exist are rarer. Many of the most relevant figures before the modern day were aristocrats, whereas today it's much more of an open field in terms of who gets to do what - and so there are a lot of people competing for a relatively small amount of attention. If someone solved the riemann hypothesis tomorrow, I doubt the average person would hear much about it.
I would argue that John Williams fits the bill of a modern Beethoven, but he's not much of an innovator. Jacob Collier innovates, but lacks mainstream appeal. Kanye West innovated hip hop quite a bit, but lacks appeal (in general) to a high-brow audience because he doesn't sing well or play any instruments, he's just really good at stitching together samples and surrounding himself with people that can refine his ideas.
I think much of it has to do with the volume of artists and scientists and the increased flow of information - so that one single person is responsible for much less of the progress, because much more information is circulating about what that person is doing among that particular community.
I think as far as academia is concerned you can also consider a sort of bureaucratic weight to things. It's harder to get anything done when you have to spend much of that time applying for grants, doing relatively asinine trainings for the purpose of giving your institution liability shielding and federal government funding, etc.
Another thing is that there's so many relevant people that the towering figures that used to exist are rarer. Many of the most relevant figures before the modern day were aristocrats, whereas today it's much more of an open field in terms of who gets to do what - and so there are a lot of people competing for a relatively small amount of attention. If someone solved the riemann hypothesis tomorrow, I doubt the average person would hear much about it.
Thoughts?