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in popular culture, it is expected that a hit song may be at the top of the charts for weeks; that a book may stay on the bestseller list for months; that a successful sitcom may hang on for years. but all of these things return, in some form or other, indefinitely. books return as movies, which use 20-year-old songs to establish the atmosphere of the past, in which the actors are wearing clothes perhaps not so different from the ones young people are wearing today because they're enjoying a new vogue. in popular culture, one doesn't fret about the passing of things, because although most everything is ephemeral by one standard, it is also endlessly recycled.
in the so-called high arts, the past decades have brought a new understanding of how even things that fade can yet persist, healthy if marginal, in our society. classical music is dead, yet it endures, on the margins, creatively moribund but still vibrant in a museum sort of way. painting is dead, of course, but it's still very popular. the arts teach one to be very cautious about simple-minded gloom. they also inculcate a sense of succession and return, as styles go in and out of fashion, and recur (sometimes as farce) in a parade of neo-this and post-that. locally, on the timeline, these changes provoke lamentation or rejoicing; but a walk through any decent city art museum is a lesson in calm forbearance, an understanding of the broader sweep and the inevitability of change.
- philip kennicott, "what will last?" washington post january 4, 2004
posted January 09, 2004 in art, music, print