The creepy artistry sticks with you a while, but in terms of methodological novelty — and I use that term lightly — John Cage’s 4’33″ from 1952 predates it by 16 years.

I don’t like in general this kind of art, the art of nothing, for two reasons. One, because it’s sleazy to take credit for the audience’s own thoughts. Here we have a movie in which a great number of people are narcissistically rating the quality of their own thoughts and not the movie. And two, because leaving things up to the audience to such an extent is not a belief in their intelligence, but a patronizing insult. It says there is nothing the artist can give except a prompt to think, as if the audience is incapable of doing so of its own accord.

Could it be that the objective is to maximize the perturbation to the universe, through some combination of genetics and memetics, in case it doesn’t end? More offsprings, more perturbation through biology; make more “difference” to the world, more perturbation through culture? That would be one secular response in favor of the here-and-now, compared to the alternative, somewhat ascetic objective of seeking inner satisfaction.