I’m often asked how it happened that academic historian wound up doing a show about the arts. It’s a fair question. One of my answers (beyond just loving art) is that how we interact with art is similar to how we interact with history itself. It’s a similarity that helps us process both what we think of art and what we think of as traditional history—if we let it. In both, you have a past and a present that you have to deal with. And you really can’t understand the present without understanding the past. History, whether in art or politics, is what gets us to this point. It’s how we got to what we see and hear and try to understand in the present.
The proper relationship of the present to the past is one of the great questions with which we as a culture wrestle. Most of the time in today’s America the present not only wins, but runs the past entirely off the field. I mentioned to you earlier this year how it always mildly annoys me that every time I log onto Hulu to watch something it gives me the message “Please wait while we gather what’s new.” My reply is always “But I’m not here for what’s new.”
At least superficially, mainstream culture, as it’s so heavily influenced by marketing—since everything now is something to buy—highlights the New because you can’t possibly have bought it yet. Theres such a dismissive attitude toward the past that many people today are totally unfamiliar with things like movies that were made before they were born. And more broadly it seems like a near total public ignorance of the past, particularly its complexities, is assumed to be not one little bit harmful to our society. Gore Vidal (there’s a name that’s certainly a casualty of this attitude) would occasionally refer to the country as the “United States of Amnesia” where if something didn’t happen this morning you can’t convince some people that it really happened at all.
This corrosive interaction affects how we experience art too, in even more complex and sometimes contradictory ways. It sort of depends on the art form. It some avenues it can often take the form of being an unbalanced focus on the new. But just as easily, and maybe more often in this field unlike much of the rest of culture, it can become a prejudice against the new.
Let’s get together and unpack this a little more next week.
