I haven't slept properly and feel like I've had a lobotomy. To add some thoughts -
if the self awareness you're talking about is strictly limited within the genre, scene, 'rules' or whatever, yeah it's a death knell. That's 'RULES WHICH MUST BE OBEYED.' e.g. the rules of what makes something 'Eski' or 'Jazz', and then just 'referencing' those as a kind of obedience.
However I think that self-awareness in a more broad sense - when you take 'self' to mean your culture or history or things that what you are doing relates to, that is actually rocket fuel for invention.
sampling was executed in the early days with a kind of self awareness, Chuck D was intellectual about the process, though it was conducted in a wild manner. self awareness in the sense of black music generally, not strictly limited to 'the rules of rap' or whatever
also music theory to an extent - certain chords, for instance, weird 9th chords - these are 'jazz chords', learned by boring jazz musicians in institutions, self-referential in a dead way.
however certain musicians (e.g. Nile Rodgers) put them in songs with a totally new context (Bowie / Let's Dance). Those chord stabs and other jazz orchestration totally make the song, and also drove a lot of disco / funk, although the general public don't realise the connection on a theoretical level, the really pioneering musicians do.
yeah the old art forms tend to die when they become self aware of their limitations and rules, and the new things that come up tend to look quite shocking and unfamiliar to most of the old heads whose soul is oriented by those rules.
novels might be somewhat dead but literature writing ideas history abounds in other places now with different technologies involved, and William Gibson also is an alright novelist isnt' he