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Sometimes it's so alluring to get into details but at some point, there are diminishing returns. It's sometimes difficult to find where that ends. When I make art I always have an eye towards its resolution. When I find the resolution it's usually correct. When I look at it again in a month I know that I made the right decisions; I know that I don't want to change anything. Once a painting is done you're not changing the painting (although I heard that Yves Klein used to make edits to his abstract paintings, such that if a large spontaneous stroke looked wrong he would tweak it).
I've noticed over the past few years--especially on YouTube--a plethora of DIY mini-documentaries that people are making, especially in music, and are obsessed with factoids. At some level, you have to question everything because things might get lost in the hunt for the facts (not Facts). You can get overly focused on finding all the details and tying up the loose ends that you then have entered a room of mirrors. A lot of the content out there, not only on YouTube, has this room-of-mirrors quality to it. It's only sometimes readily apparent--that's the problem. Perhaps some of it is veracious and very interesting, but since you're so absorbed into consuming you're not stopping to think whether it might not be factually sound.
A while back, I posed the hypothetical that in 2050 a filmmaker wanted to make a film about life in the 1970s. But at that time there might have been a global inflection point of some kind and all the servers were damaged or destroyed and data was lost across all backups, so you wouldn't have much content to draw from and would have to confabulate it or simply use standard myths. The people that had solid memories of the 1970s would be quite old and their memories might be more fuzzy or inconsistent. What you'd be working off of would be very provisional. In 2150 some stuff might still be around and you'd think that that is the truth but it isn't. In 2250 people would be using what was established as truth in 2150, 2250 in 2350, and so on. It would be facts based on a foundation of endless edits.
