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 The Magazine’s Culture Issue
 
   • Jesmyn Ward’s Literary South
   • The Heart of Swiftiedom
   • Culture at a Standstill
   • Can Usher Save R&B?
   • Sparring With Errol Morris
 
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 [13]
 
 The Magazine’s Culture Issue
 
   • [14]Jesmyn Ward’s Literary South
   • [15]The Heart of Swiftiedom
   • [16]Culture at a Standstill
   • [17]Can Usher Save R&B?
   • [18]Sparring With Errol Morris
 
 An illustration of various people all bunched together.
 Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
 [19]Skip to content[20]Skip to site index
 [21]
 
 Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill
 
 A Times critic argues that ours is the least innovative century for the arts in
 500 years. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
 
 Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
 
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 [27]Jason Farago
 
 By [28]Jason Farago
 
   • Oct. 10, 2023
 
 At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its fall blockbuster show, [29]“Manet/
 Degas,” is a painting from 1866 of a woman in the latest fashion. Victorine
 Meurent, Manet’s favorite model, stands in an empty room, accompanied only by a
 parrot on a bird stand. Her trademark red hair is tied back with a blue ribbon.
 Her head is slightly bowed as she smells a nosegay in her right hand: probably
 a gift from an absent admirer, just like the gentleman’s monocle in her left.
 She’s wearing a silk peignoir, which Manet has rendered in buttery strokes of
 pink and white. This is a full-length image, more than six feet tall, but
 Victorine hasn’t even put on her best clothes. She’s in a dressing gown, and
 the gown is amorphous. The gown is only paint.
 
 Listen to This Article
 
 [30]
 
 Open this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.
 
 Manet called this painting “Young Lady in 1866,” and the title is the briefest
 manifesto I know. After ages in which artists aimed for timelessness, Manet
 pictured a woman living in 1866, in the Paris of 1866, wearing clothes from
 1866. The painting was a radical eruption of temporal specificity. An art for
 this year, in this place, in a form possible only now.
 
 Image“Young Lady in 1866”
 “Young Lady in 1866,” by Edouard Manet.Credit...Metropolitan Museum of Art
 
 Most artists and audiences at the time did not think this was such a virtue.
 “Young Lady in 1866” got bad press at the Salon, the annual exhibition of
 France’s official art academy, where artists aspired to eternal beauty and
 eternal values, expressed through classicized motifs and highly finished
 surfaces. Thomas Couture, Manet’s own teacher, specialized in bloated but very
 technically proficient tableaux of nymphs and heroes. Only a few Parisians
 could see, in the thick pallor of Victorine’s face and the impetuous brushiness
 of her peignoir, the mark of a new cultural dispensation. Baudelaire, Manet’s
 great friend, articulated it in “The Flowers of Evil”:
 
     O Death, old captain, it’s time! Lift anchor!
     We’re sick of this country, Death! Let us sail ...
     To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!
 
 To find something new! That was the imperative of modernism, not only in
 painting but also in poetry, in theater, in music, in architecture and
 eventually in the cinema. Your job as an artist was no longer to glorify the
 king or the church, nor to imitate as faithfully as possible the appearance of
 the outside world. It was to solder the next link in a cultural chain —
 fashioning a novel utterance that took novel shape even as it manifested its
 place in a larger history. “You have to be absolutely modern,” Rimbaud
 declared; “Make it new,” Ezra Pound instructed. To speak to your time, we once
 believed, required much more than new “content.” It required a commitment to
 new modes of narration, new styles of expression, that could bear witness to
 sea changes in society.
 
 Manet, classically trained, figured out quickly that if he painted scenes of
 Parisian prostitutes in the same manner as his teacher painted Roman orgiasts,
 that wouldn’t cut it; he would have to invent a new kind of painting — flatter,
 franker — if he wanted to capture modern life. From then on, the creators who
 most decisively marked the history of art, again and again, described their
 work as a search for a new language, a new style, a new way of being. “I have
 transformed myself in the zero of form,” Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, and in
 his black square he found “the face of the new art.” Le Corbusier insisted that
 his open floor plans, enabled by reinforced floating columns, were not just an
 architectural aesthetic but an age: “Nothing is left to us of the architecture
 of past epochs, just as we can no longer derive any benefit from the literary
 and historical teaching given in schools.” Aimé Césaire, who would
 revolutionize French poetry in the 20th century as Baudelaire did in the 19th,
 understood that a modern Black expression required “a new language, capable of
 expressing an African heritage.” “In other words,” he said, “French was for me
 an instrument that I wanted to twist into a new way of speaking.”
 
 For 160 years, we spoke about culture as something active, something with
 velocity, something in continuous forward motion. What happens to a culture
 when it loses that velocity, or even slows to a halt? Walking through the other
 galleries of the Met after my third visit to “Manet/Degas,” I started doing
 that thing all the Salon visitors used to do in Paris in 1866: ignoring the
 paintings and scoping out the other spectators’ clothes. I saw visitors in the
 skinny jeans that defined the 2000s and in the roomy, high-waisted jeans that
 were popular in the 1990s; neither style looked particularly au courant or
 dated. Manet was a fashion maven, and I’d been marveling anew at the gauzy
 white-striped gown with flared sleeves that Berthe Morisot wears in [31]“The
 Balcony” to signal that she is a contemporary woman — that she is alive right
 now. What piece of clothing or accessory could you give a model to mark her as
 “Young Lady in 2023”? A titanium-cased iPhone is all that comes to mind, and
 even that hasn’t changed its appearance much in a decade.
 
 To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural birthright.
 Susan Sontag could write in 1965, with breezy confidence, that new styles of
 art, cinema, music and dance “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give
 their audiences no breathing space to prepare.” Today culture remains capable
 of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. Intellectual
 property has swallowed the cinema; the Hollywood studios that once proposed a
 slate of big, medium and small pictures have hedged their bets, and even
 independent directors have stuck with narrative and visual techniques born in
 the 1960s. Have you tried to furnish an apartment lately? Whether you are at
 Restoration Hardware or on Alibaba, what you are probably buying are replicas
 of European antiques: “contemporary” designs first seen in Milan in the 1970s
 or Weimar in the 1920s. Harry Styles is rocking in the ’80s; Silk Sonic is
 jamming in the ’70s; somehow “Frasier” has been revived and they barely had to
 update the wardrobes.
 
 If the present state of culture feels directionless — it does to me, and
 sussing out its direction is literally my job — that is principally because we
 are still inculcated, so unconsciously we never even bother to spell it out, in
 what the modernists believed: that good art is good because it is innovative,
 and that an ambitious writer, composer, director or choreographer should not
 make things too much like what others have made before. But our culture has not
 been able to deliver step changes for quite some time. When you walk through
 your local museum’s modern wing, starting with Impressionism and following a
 succession of avant-gardes through the development of Cubism, Dada, Pop,
 minimalism, in the 1990s you arrive in a forest called “the contemporary,” and
 after more than 30 years no path forward has been revealed. On your drive home,
 you can turn on the decade-by-decade stations of Sirius XM: the ’50s, ’60s,
 ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will each sound distinct, but all the millennial nostalgia
 of the 2000s station cannot disguise that “We Belong Together” and
 “Irreplaceable” do not yet sound retro. When I was younger, I looked at
 cultural works as if they were posts on a timeline, moving forward from Manet
 year by year. Now I find myself adrift in an eddy of cultural signs, where
 everything just floats, and I can only tell time on my phone.
 
 Image
 Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
 
 We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in
 history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century
 for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of
 course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of
 production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences;
 there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV
 detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years
 in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful
 of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that
 are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences
 accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some
 glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere
 to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live
 in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
 
 To any claim that cultural progress is “over,” there is an easy and not
 inaccurate retort: Well, what about X? And sure enough, our time has indeed
 brought forth wonderful, meaningful cultural endeavors. I find the sculptures
 of [32]Nairy Baghramian, the [33]videos of Stan Douglas and the [34]
 environments of Pierre Huyghe to be artistic achievements of the highest
 caliber; I think [35]Ali Smith is writing novels of tremendous immediacy; I
 believe [36]“Transit” and [37]“Drive My Car” reaffirm the vitality of cinema; I
 love [38]South African amapiano and [39]Korean soap operas and [40]Ukrainian
 electronic music. My own cultural life is very rich, and this is not some rant
 that once everyone was so creative and now they’re all poseurs. I am asking a
 different and peskier question: why cultural production no longer progresses in
 time as it once did.
 
 I have a few theories, but one to start with is that the modernist cultural
 explosion might very well have been like the growth of the economy more
 generally: not the perpetual forward march we were promised in the 20th
 century, but a one-time-only rocket blast followed by a long, slow,
 disappointing glide. As the economist Robert Gordon has shown, the
 transformative growth of the period between 1870 and 1970 — the “special
 century,” he calls it — was an anomalous superevent fueled by unique and
 unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation, the combustion engine) whose
 successors (above all information technology) have not had the same economic
 impact. In the United States, the 2010s had the slowest productivity growth of
 any decade in recorded history; if you believe you are living in the future, I
 am guessing you have not recently been on United Airlines. In this
 macroeconomic reading, a culture that no longer delivers expected stylistic
 innovations might just be part and parcel of a more generally underachieving
 century, and not to be tutted at in isolation.
 
 But more than the economics, the key factor can only be what happened to us at
 the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an
 infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic
 recommendation engines and the surveillance that powers them. The digital tools
 we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced
 such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense. “It’s still
 one Earth,” the novelist Stacey D’Erasmo wrote in 2014, “but it is now
 subtended by a layer of highly elastic non-time, wild time, that is akin to a
 global collective unconscious wherein past, present and future occupy one
 unmediated plane.” In this dark wood, today and yesterday become hard to
 distinguish. The years are only time stamps. Objects lose their dimensions.
 Everything is recorded, nothing is remembered; culture is a thing to nibble at,
 to graze on.
 
 If there is one cultural work that epitomizes this shift, where you can see our
 new epoch coming into view, I want to say it’s [41]“Back to Black,” by Amy
 Winehouse. The album dates to October 2006 — seven months after Twitter was
 founded, three months before the iPhone debuted — and it seems, listening again
 now, to be closing the door on the cultural system that Manet and Baudelaire
 established a century and a half previously. As the millennium dawned, there
 had been various efforts to write the symphony of the future (the last of which
 was probably Missy Elliott’s “Da Real World,” a “Matrix”-inspired album from
 1999 that promised to sound like “not the year 2G but the year 3G”). There had
 also been various retroprojections, trying to inaugurate a new century with
 pre-Woodstock throwbacks (waxed mustaches, speakeasies; perhaps you recall an
 embarrassing circa-2000 vogue for swing dancing).
 
 Image
 Amy Winehouse at the Highline Ballroom in New York in 2007.Credit...Michael
 Nagle for The New York Times
 
 “Back to Black” was the first major cultural work of the 21st century that was
 neither new nor retro — but rather contented itself to float in time, to sound
 as if it came from no particular era. Winehouse wore her hair in a beehive, her
 band wore fedoras, but she was not performing a tribute act of any kind. Her
 production drew from the Great American Songbook, ’60s girl groups, also reggae
 and ska, but it never felt anachronistic or like a “postmodern” pastiche.
 Listen again to the title track and its percussive piano line: a stationary,
 metronomic cycle of D minor, G minor, B-flat major, and A7. The bass line of
 the piano overlays the chords with a syncopated swing, while a tambourine slaps
 and jangles with joyless regularity. We are back to Phil Spector’s Wall of
 Sound, we are waiting for the Shangri-Las or the Ronettes to come in, but
 instead Winehouse delivers a much more ragged and minor-keyed performance, with
 a vulgarity in the song’s second line that Martha Reeves would never pronounce.
 There is a discrepancy between vocals and instrumentation that is never
 resolved, and the artistry is all in that irresolution.
 
     Who cares if it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful?
 
 What Winehouse prefigured was a culture of an eternal present: a digitally
 informed sense of placelessness and atemporality that has left so many of us
 disoriented from our earlier cultural signposts. Each song on “Back to Black”
 seemed to be “borrowing from all the last century’s music history at once,” as
 the media scholar Moira Weigel once observed, though there was something
 contemporary about that timelessness too. Extracted from the past into
 lightweight MP3s, all the girl-group and jazz prefigurations began to seem just
 as immediate as Winehouse’s North London present.
 
 As early as 2006, well before the reverse chronology of blogs and the early
 Facebook gave way to the algorithmic soup of Instagram, Spotify and TikTok,
 Winehouse sensed that the real digital revolution in culture would not be in
 production, in the machines that artists used to make music or movies or books.
 It would be in reception: on the screens where they (where we) encountered
 culture, on which past and present are equidistant from each other. One upshot
 of this digital equation of past and present has been a greater disposability
 of culture: an infinite scroll and nothing to read, an infinite Netflix library
 with nothing to watch. Though pop music still throws up new stars now and then
 (I do really like [42]Ice Spice), the market for new music fell behind older
 music in the middle of the last decade, and even the records that sell, or
 stream, cannot be said to have wide cultural impact. (The most popular single
 of 2022 in the United States was [43]“Heat Waves,” a TikTok tune by a British
 alternative-pop group with little public profile called Glass Animals; and
 what’s weirdest is that it was recorded in 2020.)
 
 Outside of time there can be no progress, only the perpetual trying-on of
 styles and forms. Here years become vibes — or “eras,” as Taylor Swift likes to
 call them. And if culture is just a series of trends, then it is pointless to
 worry about their contemporaneity. There was a charming freakout last year when
 Kate Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” went to the top of the charts
 after its deployment on yet another nostalgic television show, and veterans of
 the big-hair decade were horrified to see it appear on some 2022 playlists
 alongside Dua Lipa and the like. If you think the song belongs to 1985 in the
 way “Young Lady in 1866” belonged to 1866, the joke is now officially on you.
 
 Down at the baseline where cultural innovation used to happen, in the forms
 that artists once put together to show us something new — in the sounds of the
 recording studio, the shapes on the canvas, the movements of the dancers, the
 arrangements of the verse — something has stopped, or at least slowed to such a
 lethargic pace as to feel stopped. Such a claim may sound familiar if you were
 around for the postmodernism debates of the 1980s. The philosopher Arthur Danto
 averred that art ended with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, while the literary
 critic Fredric Jameson declared in 1984 that the whole of modernity was “spent
 and exhausted,” that there was no more style, indeed no more self, and that
 “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation
 of dead styles.” As for the influence of digital media, as early as 1989 the
 cultural theorist Paul Virilio identified a “polar inertia” — a static pileup
 of images and words with no particular place to go — as the inevitable endpoint
 for culture on a “weightless planet” constituted of ones and zeros.
 
 And yet looking back now, the “postmodern” turn of the later 20th century looks
 much more like a continuation of the modernist commitment to novelty than a
 repudiation of it. John Cage’s noteless composition “4'33"” was no last music,
 but flowered into the impostures of Fluxus and the ambient experiments of Brian
 Eno. The buildings of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid did look like nothing that
 came before, thanks in part to new rendering and fabrication technologies (CAD
 software, laser cutting machines). The digitally produced music of Massive
 Attack and even, I hate to say it, Moby did sound different from what was on
 the radio 10 years before. No one style could be called the true vanguard
 anymore, sure — but that did not preclude the perpetual discovery of new ones.
 The forecast at the end of the 20th century was a plurality of new images and
 sounds and words, powered perhaps by new, heavy desktop production machines.
 
 Since the start of the 21st century, despite all recent digital accelerations
 of discovery and transmission, no stylistic innovations of equivalent scale
 have taken place. The closest thing we can point to has been in rap, where the
 staccato nihilism of drill, deeply conversant with YouTube and SoundCloud,
 would sound legitimately foreign to a listener from 2000. (When the teenage
 Chief Keef was rapping in his grandmother’s Chicago apartment, he was following
 in the tradition of Joyce and Woolf and Pound.) In fact, the sampling
 techniques pioneered in hip-hop and, later, electronic dance music — once done
 with piles of records, now with folders of WAV files — have trickled down into
 photography, painting, literature and lower forms like memes, all of which now
 present a hyperreferentialism that sets them slightly apart from the last
 century’s efforts. In the 2010s, hip-hop alone seemed to be taking the
 challenge of digital progress seriously, though it, too, has calcified since;
 having switched from linear writing and recording of verses to improvising
 hundreds of one-verse digital takes, rappers now seem to be converging on a
 single, ProTools-produced flow.
 
 There have also been a few movies of limited influence (and very limited
 box-office success) that have introduced new cinematographic techniques: Ang
 Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2016) was the first film shot at an
 eerily lifelike 120 frames per second, while at the other extreme, Steven
 Soderbergh shot all of “Unsane” (2018) with an iPhone 7 Plus. Michael Bay’s
 “Ambulance” (2022) included first-person-view drone shots, flying the viewer
 through the windows of exploding cars the way your dad shot your last
 beach-vacation memory reel. But by and large the technologies that have changed
 filmmaking since 2000 have stayed in the postproduction studio:
 computer-graphics engines, digital tools for color grading and sound editing.
 They have had vanishingly little influence on the grammar of the moving image,
 in the way that lightweight cameras did for the Nouvelle Vague or digital kits
 did for American indie cinema. Really, the kind of image that distinguishes
 this century is less the spectacular Hollywood image than what the German
 artist Hito Steyerl has called the “poor image” — low-res compressed pictures
 like memes, thumbnails, screenshots — whose meaning arises from being
 circulated and modified.
 
 It may just be that the lexical possibilities of many traditional media are
 exhausted, and there’s no shame in that. Maybe Griffith and Eisenstein and
 Godard and Akerman did it all already, and it’s foolish to expect a new kind of
 cinema. Certainly that exhaustion came long ago to abstract painting, where
 every possible move can only be understood as a quotation or reboot. (Kerstin
 Brätsch, one of the smartest abstract painters working today, has acknowledged
 that any mark she makes is “not empty anymore but loaded with historical
 reference.”) Consider last year’s hit “Creepin’,” by The Weeknd: a 2022
 rejigger of the 2004 Mario Winans song “I Don’t Wanna Know” with no meaningful
 change in instrumentation in the nearly two intervening decades. It was hardly
 the only recent chart-topper to employ a clangingly obvious sample, but it’s
 not like the endeavors of the 1990s, when Puffy and family were rapping over
 “Every Breath You Take.” Back then the critic Greg Tate could still celebrate
 such sampling as a motor of cultural progress; by “collapsing all eras of Black
 music onto a chip,” a new generation had new tools to write a new chapter of
 sound. Twenty-five years later, the citation and rearrangement have become so
 automatic as to seem automated — as our recent fears about artificial
 intelligence and large language models suggest we already know.
 
 Trapped on a modernist game board where there are no more moves to make, a
 growing number of young artists essentially pivoted to political activism —
 plant a tree and call it a sculpture — while others leaned hard into absurdity
 to try to express the sense of digital disorientation. You saw this Dadaist
 strategy in the hyperpop of 100 gecs, in the crashed-and-burned “post-internet”
 art of the collective Dis, and above all in the satirical fashion of Virgil
 Abloh. (Abloh, who died in 2021, was outspoken about how comedy functioned as a
 coping mechanism for a generation lost in a digital fog: “It’s not a
 coincidence that things have gravitated toward this invented language of
 humor,” he said in 2018. “But then I often wonder: Is streetwear hollow?”)
 
 It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just own our static position; who cares if
 it’s novel as long as it’s beautiful, or meaningful? But that pesky modernist
 conviction remains in us: A work of art demonstrates its value through its
 freshness. So we have shifted our expectations from new forms to new subject
 matter — new stories, told in the same old languages as before. In the 20th
 century we were taught that cleaving “style” from “content” was a fallacy, but
 in the 21st century content (that word!) has had its ultimate vengeance, as the
 sole component of culture that our machines can fully understand, transmit and
 monetize. What cannot be categorized cannot be streamed; to pass through the
 pipes art must become information. So, sure, there are new songs about texting
 and ghosting; sure, there are superhero movies about trauma and comedies about
 climate change. But in privileging the parts of culture that can be summarized
 and shared — the narratives, the characters, the lyrics, the lessons — digital
 media have bulldozed an autonomous sphere of culture into a moral terrain that
 Aristotle would find familiar: We again want our “content” to authentically
 reflect the world (mimesis) and produce healthy feelings in its consumers
 (catharsis).
 
 Very unfortunately, this evangelical turn in the arts in the 21st century has
 been conflated with the long-overdue admission of women, people of color and
 out sexual minorities into the culture industry — conflated, not least, by its
 P.R. departments. A gay rom-com is trotted out as “the first”; a Black Little
 Mermaid is a “breakthrough”; our museums, studios and publishing houses can
 bring nothing new to market except the very people they once systematically
 excluded. If resisting such market essentialism was once a primordial task of
 the artist — “I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism,” Césaire made
 clear in 1956 as he forged a French poetry that could span the Black Atlantic —
 today identities keep being diminished, brutally, into a series of searchable
 tags.
 
 This institutional hunger for novelty combined with digital requirements for
 communicability may help explain why so much recently celebrated American
 culture has taken such conservative, traditionalist forms: oil portraiture,
 Iowa-vintage coming-of-age novels, biopics, operettas barely distinguishable
 from musical theater. “It scandalizes progressive sensibility to think that
 things were so much more complex in this domain a generation ago than they are
 now, but there you have it,” said Darby English, the art historian and author
 of “How To See a Work of Art in Total Darkness,” when asked in 2021 about the
 recent efflorescence of Black American art in museums and the market. “Because
 the core project is communication,” English said, “anything that resists the
 art-communications apparatus fails to leave a mark. Form has become
 increasingly irrelevant during these 20 years.”
 
 Image
 Credit...Illustration by Tim Enthoven
 
 There is no inherent reason — no reason; this point needs to be clear — that a
 recession of novelty has to mean a recession of cultural worth. On the
 contrary, non-novel excellence has been the state of things for a vast majority
 of art history. Roman art and literature provides a centuries-long tradition of
 emulation, appropriating and adapting Greek, Etruscan and on occasion Asian
 examples into a culture in which the idea of copying was alien. Medieval icons
 were never understood to be “of their time,” but looked back to the time of the
 Incarnation, forward to eternity or out of time entirely into a realm beyond
 human life. Even beyond the halfway point of the last millennium, European
 artists regularly emended, updated or substituted pre-existing artworks at
 will, integrating present and past into a more spiritually efficacious whole.
 
 Consider also the long and bountiful history of Chinese painting, in which,
 from the 13th century to the early 20th, scholar-artists frequently
 demonstrated their erudition by painting in explicit homage to masters from the
 past. For these literati painters, what mattered more than technical skill or
 aesthetic progression was an artist’s spontaneous creativity as channeled
 through previous masterpieces. There’s a painting I love in the Palace Museum
 in Beijing by Zhao Mengfu, a prince and scholar working during the Yuan
 dynasty, that dates to around 1310 but incorporates styles from several other
 periods. Spartan trees, whose branches hook like crab claws, derive from Song
 examples a few centuries earlier. A clump of bamboo in the corner coheres
 through strict, tight brushwork pioneered by the Han dynasty a thousand years
 before. Alongside the trees and rocks the artist added an inscription:
 
     The rocks are like flying-white, the trees are like seal script,
     The writing of bamboo draws upon the bafen method.
     Only when one masters this secret
     Will he understand that calligraphy and painting have always been one.
 
 In other words: Use one style of brushwork for one element, another for
 another, just as a calligrapher uses different styles for different purposes.
 But beyond the simple equation of writing and painting, Zhao was doing
 something much more important: He was sublimating styles, some from the recent
 past and some of great antiquity, into a series of recombinatory elements that
 an artist of his time could deploy in concert. The literati painters learned
 from the old masters (important during the Yuan dynasty, to safeguard the place
 of Han culture under Mongol rule), but theirs was no simple classicism. It was
 a practice of aesthetic self-fulfillment that channeled itself through
 pre-existing gestures. Without ever worrying about novelty, you could still
 speak directly to your time. You could express your tenderest feelings, or face
 up to the upheavals of your age, in the overlapping styles of artists long
 dead.
 
 Image
 “Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees,” by Zhao Mengfu, circa 1310.Credit...Palace
 Museum, Beijing
 
 Someone foresaw, profoundly, that this century was going to require something
 similar: that when forward motion became impossible, ambitious culture was
 going to have to take another shape. Winehouse, as producers and collaborators
 have reminded us since her death, was an inveterate collector and compiler of
 musical clips. (The drummer and music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as
 Questlove, remembered: “She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s:
 ‘Listen to this, listen to this. ... ’”) She was living through, and channeling
 into “Back to Black,” the initial dissolution of history into streams of
 digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further from the
 present than a Google prompt. She freely recombined those fragments but never
 indulged in nostalgia; she was disappointed by the present but knew there was
 no going back. And at enormous personal cost, she created something enduring
 out of it, showing how much harder it would be to leave a real mark amid
 fathomless data — to transcend mere recombination, sampling, pastiche.
 
 If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe that they
 can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they can constitute a
 Geistgeschichte, or “history of spirit,” as the German idealists used to say.
 This was entirely possible before modernism, and it is possible after. The most
 ambitious abstract painters working today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von
 Heyl, are doing something akin to Winehouse’s free articulation: drawing from
 diverse and even contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have
 effects. Olga Tokarczuk structured her 2007 book, “Flights,” as a constellation
 of barely connected characters and styles, more fugitive than the last
 century’s novels in fragments; to read her is less like looking at a mosaic
 than toggling among tabs. Bad Bunny, working at the crossroads of trap,
 reggaeton, bachata and rock, is crafting pick-and-mix aggregations of small
 pieces, like “Back to Black,” that are digital in every way that matters. All
 of them are speaking out of parts of the past in a language that is their own.
 
 We have every ability to live in a culture of beauty, insight, surprise, if we
 could just accept that we are no longer modern, and have not been for a while;
 that somewhere in the push and pull of digital homogeneity and political stasis
 we entered a new phase of history. We have been evading our predicament with
 coping mechanisms and marketing scams, which have left all of us disappointedly
 asking, What’s new? Surely it would be healthier — and who knows what might
 flower — if we accepted and even embraced the end of stylistic progress, and at
 last took seriously the digital present we are disavowing. And the perpetuity
 of “Back to Black,” still playing in the background of avocado-toast
 dispensaries in East London and West Hollywood after 17 years, suggests to me
 that we have not lost our ability to identify voices of our time, even if they
 are fated to speak a language yoked to the past. Culture is stuck? Progress is
 dead? I died a hundred times, a poet once said, and kept singing.
 
 [44]Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture
 in the U.S. and abroad. [45]More about Jason Farago
 
 A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 38 of the Sunday Magazine
 with the headline: Out of Time. [46]Order Reprints | [47]Today’s Paper | [48]
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