Why is there so much mediocrity

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Team or Enterprise Premium FT. Pay based on use. Does my organisation subscribe? The result was an Oxford University paper about what they call "kakonomics" - kakos being ancient Greek for bad. Their premise was straightforward: sometimes parties conspire, whether consciously or unconsciously, to achieve either a low-quality or a mediocre outcome.

It appears it has to do with people shunning a perceived tyranny of excellence. It goes some way to explaining Italy's fabled la dolce vita - its famously laidback lifestyle. But if the old adage is that all good things in life are free, then la dolce vita comes at a price and the price is high standards. Take the case of Italian olive oil manufacturer Leornardo Marseglia, who was charged with fraud in the s for selling adulterated oil under the label "extra virgin", something that should denote it is of superior quality, say Origgi and Gambetta.

Even in Italy, extra virgin olive oil is expensive, and when Mr Marseglia was later acquitted he justified himself by arguing that thanks to his adulterated oil many people could afford to buy it with the label "extra virgin" at a reasonable price. Mr Marseglia told The New Yorker magazine that at home, his family used ordinary oil anyway: "For us, the concept of 'good' is enough.

We want to be average folks. But the route to mediocrity isn't always paved with such disingenuity. I like to write but that doesn't mean I'm the greatest writer. I'm just kind of plain. Krista studied for an education degree, dropped out after suffering bouts of anxiety and depression, and is now a certified holistic nutritionist and "joyful living educator".

I feel like that isn't life and I don't want it and I can't even begin to keep up. So many of us just want to get off that hamster wheel and just breathe. But many of us never do. For some, sheer hard work may transform that wheel into a ladder, but what if it doesn't?

What if all that hard work goes to waste? Mark Manson is a popular blogger on personal development issues who gets thousands of emails from readers every year. More recently he noticed that a lot of the advice people were looking for was for issues that weren't really problems at all.

I've been foolishly tricked into thinking that bestseller books are significant; some are but most aren't. Every generation of the elderly in every age no doubt denigrated the present and extolled the good old days.

It's not just old folks who deplore the films the industry delivers today; young film buffs do, too. Art dealers, publishers, and film studios are merchants. Profit making is their primary goal. So, it is understandable that they search out saleable talents to sell; and in their efforts toward this end, if they don't find great talents that are saleable, they swoop down on mediocre talents and elevate them to stars.

Elevated to stardom, lesser talents are sold as something better than their real value. Success in marketing presupposes eager buyers or, rather, it means creating buyers who can be unsuspectingly led to believe sales records as a mark of quiality.

Those who sell the most are touted as the best. Gullible clientele is a boon to marketing. Collectors of art without discerning taste rely on the names that galleries flaunt as today's stars. Then, the mediocre artists begin to delude themselves that they are great artists.

They may be leading artists in terms of revenue but not necessarily artists of significant vision and creativity. The force of the market also accounts for the fashionable revivals in classical music and theater, multiplying interminably the list of forgotten composers, many of whom are better left forgotten, and putting on the stage the long-shelved operas and plays that are best left on the dusty shelf.

Again, the efforts are not entirely futile. There have been treasures fortuitously rediscovered; revival efforts were necessary for these exceptions. But I witness a tendency among those who promote revivals to refuse to admit that many of them are mediocre. The public is led to believe then that whatever is writ large in publicity is a worthy work that merit the qualification to be called noteworthy. The retrospective of Childe Hassam at the Metropolitan Museum of Art did disservice to this artist of limited talent, imitative or otherwise derivative, jaundiced in his sense of palette and uncertain of the art of composition.

The museum, giving a platform to a mediocre artist, gives the public a deceptive message that she or he is an artist to reckon with. Here is a forgotten master; take note we are told.

Museums have a duty to evaluate and judge and be selective and inform the public of the knowledge they possess.