But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Art history almost never works that way. In fact, it often seems like our collective ability to recognize electrifying genius as it occurs paradoxically limits the likelihood of future populations certifying that genius as timeless. “What ages [poorly], it seems, are ideas that trend to the clever, the new, or the merely personal,” Saunders continues. “What gets dated, somehow, is that which is too ego inflected—that hasn’t been held up against the old wisdom, maybe, or just against some innate sense of truth, and rigorously, with a kind of self-abnegating fervor. Again and again some yahoo from 1863 can be heard to be strenuously saying the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal thing—and that crap rings so hollow when read against Lincoln or Douglass. It gives me real fear about all of the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal things I’ve been saying all my life.”